Well, Well, Well, One of My College Roommates’ Companies is Now Advertising on the Howard Stern Show [Anecdote]
I’d say I am the most effective and interesting writer, when I am bashing someone over the head. This is not that. It’s just a real life anecdote. Plus my two-cents.
Today, on the Howard Stern Show, a company started advertising on the SIRIUSXM airwaves, called SquareSpace. I lived one year in college with the founder. A nice guy. He is the one that introduced me to Patron Tequila before it was all trendy. I will give him that much.
His company, SquareSpace is a blogging platform. The business model is, you can set up a free account, and then when you wanna take your blog to the next level (added features, a domain, etc), you start paying a monthly fee.
At one point, I mustered up the balls and went up to Anthony, and I said, “Hey, you know I am a blogger and I do a pop-culture blog, and it’s admittedly off-color, but how ’bout I do a blog on SquareSpace and call it NSFW.” A Not-Safe-For-Work blog. Again, admittedly that’s probably not a gold mine in a start-up founder’s eyes. But here’s why it is and why it’s a shame my inquiry fell upon deaf ears:
As a blogging platform, the biggest way to attract new customers in my opinion is to become the de facto standard. If I like Home Improvement, DIY blogs, for example, and all of my favorite bloggers use WordPress, when I eventually start up my own blog, I am going to want to emulate my favorites, and USE WORDPRESS. The way for a blogging platform to explode is to have the taste-makers, use your product. As a company like SquareSpace, you want every prominent blogger using your platform. It raises awareness of the brand, and the adoption rate, obviously. You want the content makers, exclusively making content on your company’s product. So, instead of spending all of the money advertising on podcasts and shit, what SquareSpace needs to be doing is paying prominent bloggers to leave WordPress and TypePad, and go to SquareSpace. That will sell shedloads of blogging solutions. This is why WordPress offers a VIP (unlimited bandwidth package) to it’s power-users. WordPress WANTS the heavy-hitters to continue using their product. That is why WordPress also recently released the free Jetpack plugin, which gives many features that you normally only see in a pay-product. So, they’re currently killing da game.
Anyways, the point of this? WordPress and Patron are king. Because I use ‘em. Also, the last time I checked, Howard Stern is “Not Safe For Work,” just saying… but hey, at least now you’re back on the $habooty radar, congrats. ;)
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