Comment by tptacek
12 years ago
Almost anything can help "bootstrap a network effect"; if you have a real network effect offering, every user you gain, no matter how laboriously and no matter how marginally, helps the snowball get bigger.
The point the piece is making is the difference between the actual value of launch publicity (marginal) measured against the typical founder conception of the value of that publicity (enormous).
I've "launched" a bunch of stuff in my career and that part of Graham's piece rang especially true to me.
How do you measure that difference or, rather, how do you challenge the founder, who is arguably the best person to measure that? I've seen several founders attribute success to some critical piece of launch PR (often a big publication article).
Here's an esoteric example (I have a few more of these) - Qik's founders believe many years later Scoble's coverage of them was the reason for their launch being successful. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/03/qik-started-in-a-garage-dis...
Or the Warby Parker guys attributing their launch success to Vogue covering them (something I know they deeply believe to be true) http://mashable.com/2013/03/07/toasting-success-warby-parker...