One of the first jobs I had after leaving higher education fundraising was with Kozmo.com. As the Marketing Manager, it was my job to develop buzz around our pending launch.

To do this, I hired 5 people, who in addition to placing drop boxes (the place where a video could be returned), would take whatever trinkets and tchachkis we had laying around and literally go around San Diego and ask for email addresses. We collected over 5,000 email addresses and had one of the biggest first days of any Kozmo market.

Then Kozmo went out of business, but thats another story… ;)

Since then, I have literally watched hundreds of companies launch. Over that time, I have seen two very distinct approaches.

The first, which seems to be the most common, is to try and build as much buzz and hype as possible, and launch a product which is pretty close to being done, but because of the buzz, the product’s value gets lost among the noise.

Two examples:

Wikia – Launched as a human powered search engine and touted as a Google killer by its CEO. It gets lambasted in Tech Crunch. Why? Because expectations were set high, and missed.

A local startup – Given they havent launched yet, I am going to leave them anonymous. They may surpass the expectations they have set. How did they set them? Through tweets, blog posts and an email.

On December 18, 2007 an email was sent out that started with:

It’s been a long time coming, but starting this week you’re going to get a sneak peak into what we’ve been working on for over a year now!

That was wonderful news, but it was the first broken expectation. It is now almost 19 days after this email was sent.

The launch of our beta program has started and we’ll be letting in everyone on our mailing list soon (if you haven’t already been let in). You might not get in immediately, but you’ll certainly get in before the rest of the public! You should feel pretty special…

(emphasis theirs)

The implication here is that 1) if I was cool enough, I would already have an invite; and 2) I should feel special that I received an email that told me I would receive ANOTHER email with an invite.

In this case, I have the expecation to be treated with respect from the folks that are hoping to make money off my loyalty.

In both cases, the arrogance of the management team of the startups have created unrealistic expectations or alienated their user base. In both cases, I will probably never use the services of these companies.

In both cases, the buzz killed the bee.

What about doing it right? Well a great example of a recently launched company is WhyGoSolo? The CEO started following me on twitter soon after I got back from StartupWeekend DC. Never quite sure why, but I assumed that it was because we followed mutual people.

Over the past couple of months, I have read Ann’s tweets, and an occasional blog post or two. I never really understood what WhyGoSolo was or the problem it solved. Then this past weekend, Ann started to tweet about her eminent launch, and I began to read her tweets with interest, and even made sure to get into the beta.

WhyGoSolo is an interesting concept, which allows a person who is attending an event solo to meet others that are attending that event, and connect. Simple, smart and useful.

There was never an unrealistic expectation set, because Ann was honest and transparent. I never felt talked down to, because Ann realizes that she has no product without users.

I once was taught that it takes 16 positive experiences to overcome one negative experience. I have tweeted and written and spoken more about the negative experiences I had with the yet to launch startup and even left a comment on a relatively positive post about Wikia than I have about the positive experience I have had with WhyGoSolo.

If you are going to launch a company, dont let the buzz kill the bee you spent so long building.

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