Remarkable

Seth Godin @ TED '07:

The thing that decides what ideas get talked about, what gets changed, what gets built is "is it remarkable?". Remarkable is a great word. We think it means: "Is it neat" - but it really means - "Is it worth making a remark about". And that is the essence of idea diffusion. 

Takeaway: Marketing a product is a whole lot easier if the product itself is remarkable. 

Also, interesting is the practice in the entertainment industry to have a "One Sheet"

from Wikipedia:

 one-sheet or one sheet is a single document that summarizes a product for publicity and sales. Often comprised of both images and text, one-sheets typically serve as a way to introduce the unfamiliar reader to a particular artist. The name of the artist (and perhaps the title of the release) will appear prominently.

Man in the Arena

"Man in the Arena" is a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris, 1910. 

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Here is the full speech: Link

I spend a lot of time commenting on other companies and critiquing them. It is important to remember the importance of being in the arena. 

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Thanks to Mike Arrington's talk at Startup School '08 and Yossi Vardi -- the Israeli VC for highlighting this passage. 

Dr Vardi btw is an extremely successful VC - He cofounded Alon (Israel's largest energy company) and Tekem (Israel's largest software company for a while). He also backed Mirabilis (The company behind ICQ). His VC is called Pitango - One of Israel's largest VC firms. 

Publicity for your Startup

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch gives interesting advice about obtaining publicity for your startup in his talk at Stanford for Startup School 08. Other interesting speakers here are David Hansson of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Paul Graham of YCombinator.

1. Criticism

First time entrepreneurs can't deal with criticism. Embrace your criticism (not trolling). e.g: Ning's realtionship with TechCrunch went from being trashed to getting great coverage and raising money on a $500m round of financing. 

2. Bloggers

• Make friends with big-name bloggers by providing them leaks.
• Maintain a blog + twitter
• LinkBack to your coverage.

3. Signals vs Noise

Don't barrage people with information; You will become background noise. Analogous to training a dog - you need to make "one single impact" instead of constantly badgering people with information. 

4. Disruptive Technology

         (Mobile Platform, Wikipedia, etc) gets attention from the press. Like Seth Godin's analogy of the Purple Cow.

Here is the full Video

Here's TechCrunch's coverage of the event: Link