There was a story on TechCrunch last month about a new service entitled “Hipster” located at UseHipster.com and you could sign up now but absolutely no one (including the author) had any idea what the startup was. Great. That seems worthy of a post.
Then, another post a few days later about the startup already locking in 10 thousand signups and some info on how they achieved this. The deal was that if you want “early access”, you can share an invite code with three friends and this “pyramid signup” process was a huge hit whether you gave those people early access or not, it meant quite a lot of buzz around your company even when absolutely no one knew what your company did.
Now, other startups (1, 2) are implementing this and there’s even a startup now that runs this system to make it easy to add the “viral signup” process to your company’s beta page. They call themselves “LaunchRock“.
Here’s the thing, rarely is there a company, product or service that is worth joining badly enough that you must sign up for the beta or be the first to sign up. Back in the day, I may have even touted that I was one of the first 500 members of Foursquare (it is now at 8 million users) and in the 900,000 user number for Twitter (which is approaching 200 million). Cool, you’re user number 45 of this company that goes out of business before hitting 1,000 users. It’s interesting that we measure our hotness by our member number. “I was here first so I’m better than you.”
Hardly.
Of the thousands of new tech services I’ve joined, only two (Foursquare and Twitter) are worth mentioning my very low / very early signup date. There’s a reason for this.
Six TechCrunch articles later and tens of thousands of users later and UseHipster.com is already dead. The site is still up and I’m sure they’ve raised money and will be launching in other cities but their SXSW page’s most popular questions, at most had 5 answers and SXSW is still going but the last three days of content is only 20 new questions. Three days, 20 questions or what Yahoo Answers does every second.
The way this works though is their CEO will write a post about the lessons he learned and that will make TechCrunch article number 7 followed by number 8 when they launch more cities with some possible game mechanics and promise of local deals with merchants. I’m getting sidetracked.
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If you share out one of these links to get “early access” to a startup that will probably not exist in 6 months or improve your life in any way, you have issues. These systems ONLY benefit the startup. You having access to a service 24-100 hours in advance of the rest of the world doesn’t help you unless it’s a service that’s going to give you a free car or something then spam away but, the question is, knowing that UseHipster was a local Q&A site, would you still have spammed your friends for early access? Once you got early access, was it worth it?
I will never share out one of these links to get early access to a product. This is something I simply won’t do. I will promote your product if it does something meaningful to improve my life or helps me do what I do more effectively but, if it does nothing for me or is a logo and a sign up form promising nothing in exchange for my email address, I may not ever sign up and it’s a guarantee that I won’t then spam my friends so I can find out what this mystery company does FASTER than everyone else.
I didn’t sign up for UseHipster until the day it was released at SXSW. I browsed for 5 minutes and never went back until today to see what’s going on with it. Most people haven’t gone back at all.
I feel sorry for the 10,000+ tweets Hipster beta users sent out in order to get “early access” to yet another startup that’s over-hyped and delivers nothing more than a copy of a copy of another startup.
As for the image, I signed up for a service but I can wait until they pick me the natural way. I won’t spam people for an earlier spot at a product I may never even use. I wish companies would pick users based on the fact that someone was nice enough to hand over their email and preferred password and not how many social media links they spam their friends with.