digg

27. 0. Obviously the amount of common sense Guy has when launching such a simple "Web 2.0" site.

$12k to launch this piece of *****, wow! He could have had it all coded and designed for well under $1k (probably even under $500) using sites like elance.com, rentacoder.com etc etc. You've gotta hate it when rich people waste so much money launching crappy businesses... while other entrepreneurs struggle with funding for far greater concepts.

And 55 ***** domains! OMG Guy, you retard... that is not how it works these days. You don't buy out every single domain. At the very most you buy the .com, .net and .org

And legal fees??! Why the hell did you need to spend $4k on legal fees?

Tell you what. Though it seems to make some want to cuss, I always enjoy Guy's writing. It always makes me feel, "Yes! I can do this." He makes it all sound so common-sense. And the proof is in the results - I usually get alot of productive things done after a Guy-moment.

I am sure he learned a lot from his experience in starting Truemors. The comments and general feedback on his blog will just point out his mistakes further and make him realize even more how he could have done it for less. It's all relative to how much money you have...a broke college student will try very hard to find the least expensive ways to produce the site. An entrepreneur with a lot more money will just go to larger companies to produce the coding, logo, etc to save time.

"I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not)."

Should be renamed how to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon w/o thinking things through

$15k is too much.

Teach me how on a $10 budget.

ValleyWag has their own set of numbers for Truemors:
"5 catch phrases. The 5 buzzworthy phrases of the industry are: Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, and Social Media. Their use may yield some sympathy within the community."
"3 hours to be hacked. Hackers are more "impressive" than the developers who cost $4,500 and took 7.5 weeks to develop your site."
"218/405. A great batting average; a horrible spam to "legitimate" truemor post ratio."
etc.
http://valleywag.com/tech/guy-kawasaki/by-the-numbers-265701.php

How long do you think it will take for a $12,000 site to fail due to the digg effect? I have a feeling that we will soon find out.

LOL! it seems we've crashed his $12K site!

server down..haahah...should have spent more on the server

Well that took all of four minutes.

Why people are digging this up is beyond me. The guy is just trying to get free advertising for a really gay site. I can't believe he paid 12k for that pos. Plus he isn't adding in the cost of his time nor the hosting costs. Not to mention the thing just died with under 100 diggs.

Personally, I think the site's a pretty good idea, but he definatly wasted more money then was needed.

Truemors is retarded

Wow dead already.

this is utterly pathetic.

Pay a web developer to program your website: $4500
Register 55 domains and pay a lawyer: $5937.19
Watch your site get hacked right away and not respond to the Digg effect: Priceless

"315,000. Eleven days after the launch, “truemors” had 315,000 hits in Google. I can’t figure out how this can be, but I’m not arguing."

Ugh. I hate people who own a web site and don't know the difference between hits and visits. Or, maybe he doesn't mean hits, but results. I'm not sure. Very confusing.

@zodieman
That comment ws made of win!

For those of you who criticize the amount of money keep in mind that $12,000 is relatively small when it comes to startup fees. There are many little things that eat away at your wallet. For example, I started a non-profit, http://www.Gigoit.org about a year ago. Tax exempt filing fee $750. State licenses and legal documents, $350. Business cards, marketing materials, phones, software, they all add up. Writing your own custom site costs only a few bucks in hosting and your time (if you can code). Running it like a business is an entirely different beast.

considering you can use any of the open-source 'digg' clone cms systems to get a 'web 2.0' site in, oh 30 seconds...this is beyond ridiculous

Hmm.. never heard of it.

lol we created http://www.picli.com for nothing. did it ourselves.

Ew, Truemors.

Well aside from the fact that the POS is down right now, what about the important number.. does it make money?

true-junk is dead now anyway. looks like they need to scale up already? in the meantime, www.newsique.com is actually a pretty sweet site (see above). kudos neoform for doing it for free!

Cheaper, learn PHP and buy photoshop.

a lot of people are saying that $12K isn't that much to start a business. you're probably right

but RTFA. he's talking about the site and the site alone. $12K is a RIDICULOUS amount. to start up with at least. sure the costs of hosting constantly add up. but $1000 on domains? what?! even his blurb makes it seem worse:

"I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy."
keywords: stupid, lazy

"I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround”"
digg.de, digg.co.uk, digg.biz. oh word? they bring up nothing? (except for a few parked domains)

"The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work."
I had no idea what I was doing for free (or relatively nothing) because I enjoy it was worth $4.5K

Not that it's worth seeing, but in case you're interested:

http://truemors.com.nyud.net:8090/

hmmmm yeah this dont load .....

That's just bad ... I mean his Marketing and PR team got the site on Digg.com and then he didnt tell his tech people to be prepared for the traffic?

Most truly useful, successful web companies are built on virtually nothing because the creators don't have to hire anyone (microsoft, apple, yahoo, google, youtube, etc. all had successful products before they hired a single person), and because their ideas are good.

If you do have a great idea, but don't have the talent, you're going to have to hire people -- and it's hard to find people who think like you do and will have the same passion as you will to make the business successful. You CAN pay to contract the work out to someone in India or whatever for < $5k, certainly, but then what have you got? Some code of questionable quality (since you're not an engineer, you're in no position to judge it) and nobody on staff who can maintain, modify, or upgrade it. Good job! You can try to recruit some top local talent, but if you're in the bay area that means you're shelling out $75-$100k minimum per year (probably more since you won't be able to offer benefits). Good luck with that.

On the other hand, if you have talent but no ideas, the most you can lose is your personal time and perhaps the costs of registering a domain name.

Legal fees are a non-issue unless you have partners or plan on incorporating. I'd probably count on spending $2500-$5000 for a competent lawyer in this area, though it can probably wait in most cases, unless you expect your business model to face legal scrutiny.

Once the business is actually starting to attract visitors and people are noticing, though, you will have to pay for things. Hopefully, if you're smart, you've attracted the attention of VCs or you're pulling in some ad revenue already by this point in time. Either way, you'll need funding to pay for bandwidth and hardware if nothing else. As you get bigger, you'll have to hire staff, and that will get very expensive.

This is the best article I've ever seen on how NOT to build a Web 2.0 site.

$1,115.05. Total spent on 55 domains that are going to be composed entirely of "Related search" links within a year.

never heard of it.

but i did RTFA, and after reading the comments, he has proven his point.

There is no such thing as bad PR.

Not to be a naysayer or overtly negative...but that website is terrible. Not only is the layout hard to follow and categorize mentally, its unreadable and unorganized. Its messy and unintuitive! A better layout and design for the simple premise of the site could be done in LESS than an hour (with a much more marketable logo). Plus, I dont see the point of having to call to submit a "truemor" its way to much trouble just for confirmation...and there's no way of adding links or verification. The logo cost him 400 bucks??? What the heck?? Its not even a logo! Its a speech bubble with embossed block text!!! Literally, done in 10 minutes, tops. Sorry, but to actually survive in the business you have to have the smarts in all areas and know exactly what you are doing. Not only does he think he's "cutting-corners" financially, he's actually cutting corners in useability and appeal.

What a terrible site. I can't believe I wasted my time looking at it. I couldn't even tell you what is on it because the layout is so terrible. He needs to get his money back from the people who designed it.

Wow... a lot of bitter people here tonight.

Does the site scale to Digg-level traffic? Apparently not. Does Guy care? Probably not. His goal isn't to test how much traffic his ISP can handle, or see how scalable the applications running his site are, or even to see how cheaply he can get things built. His goal is to test an idea. If the idea is good, he'll have plenty of time to add servers and the money to hire even the most expensive programmers and lawyers. If his idea isn't good, he'll still learn something about starting an online business that he can use when advising the start-ups he invests in or writing his next book.

And for those of you that think $4.5k is a lot of money to pay to have this built because you could build it in your spare time for free - start charging what you're worth and $4.5k might not seem like so much money anymore. Think about it.

In my 10 years of web-building the average site has cost under 10K for sure. =P Glad he kept it simple.

I'm just amazed that anyone still pays attention to Guy Kawasaki.

Guy Kawasaki seems very proud about only spending $12,107.09 to build his new company, Truemors. However a lot of people are missing a crucial point: it’s not what it costs to build, so much as the length of the payback period and the follow-on costs that an entrepreneur should be concerned with...

Read More:

http://www.leveragingideas.com/?p=350

people are shooting him down for the stupid idea of his site, but read his post again, it's not about the idea, it is just an experiment by him to see how much time and money is needed to start a proper website

the idea is clearly stupid but that's not the point

I launched http://www.artclubhouse.com for the cost of the domain at godaddy.com - I thought of the idea and within a few hours it was up and running.

Same thing with http://www.theanimationblog.com ...

Of course my sites aren't web 2.0 sites... one's an art discussion forum and one if an animation blog... but still... for only the cost of the domains, I launched the sites in a few hours. :-)

To think what I could do with $15,000....

that is waste of money if you think about it!

first of all, this site is really crap.
and, why the hell does he need 15k? i think most of the people her at digg would need the hosting costs and a domain. thats it.

and finally, motleytool ist absolutely right. the concept ist nothing special and nobody even cares about it.

God help you all, subject of the grand slam this article was. AKA, took the time. Gets bad after that.


bragging advertising is it that supports the life?

Caught rambling and voting recklessly.

Take away the K and I am sold.

The logo cost $399!?!? ...looks like he overpayed by about $398.50.

some of you are just assholes
ignore the look/feel of the site, no startup site is perfect
do you remember this
http://web.archive.org/web/20041209040106/http://digg.com/
that is the $500 digg, looks way worse than this

how many of you ***** talkers have a better site?
i give the guy props for havin a pair big enough to attempt something
that is the thing most dont have, and cant do
so tired of the negative ***** throwers on here, starting to remind me of Fark
/overit

The site he launched is a digg-style site called Truemors, feature true rumors.

The number one story as of right now?

"That truemors logo cost Guy $399!"

Hahahahaha.

Can someone please explain what truemors.com is about? I've looked at the front-page and it's chockablock full of spam comments.

Sigh..