Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences

Growing renewable audiences (a talk at O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures) | Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen

Non-sustainable:

In fact, I’ll describe press and blog traffic as “fool’s gold” because of the associated emotions that it brings. It’s easy to overestimate the impact of this kind of traffic because it just feels good to have your name and company featured. It strokes your ego. You might get a bunch of inbound emails from other press and partners, and all of these things can contribute to a feeling that you’re on your way to getting tons of traffic. Problem is, you inevitably become yesterday’s old news.

vs. sustainable:

Compare this to the renewable strategies, like viral marketing, SEO, widgets, and ads, which can scale into 10s of millions of users but are primarily centered around tough, non-user centric work. These are things that if you get right, you can optimize your way into a big, sustainable audience.

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream.