(the marketing part starts around minute 37 of the above 51 minute video from Jawed Karim–the often forgotten 3rd Youtube co-founder)
a) Pitched a bunch of Wired.com reporters. Womp, womp. Didn’t work, got no replies.
b) Pitched VCs. Womp, womp. They thought youtube was “cute.”
c) Email all their friends. Womp, womp. Followed HotorNot.com’s formula, as the HotorNot.com guys never did any marketing beyond emailing their friends.
d) Put up ads on craigslist asking women to make 10 videos and put them on youtube, and the youtube founders would pay the women $100 (if the founders liked what the women looked like). Womp, womp. The youtube founders got no responses.
e) Revamped Website (e.g., external player, related video, easy video sharing). Ding, Ding, Ding! Youtube grew in popularity on Myspace. Slashdot.com covered youtube.com and the traffic never went down after that coverage. The frequency of viral videos grew as more users uploaded more videos.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “I need to do what youtube did—revamp my product”. If that’s what you’re thinking then I’m really sad. Letter c) from above should suggest that following somebody else’s blueprint just isn’t the key. You have to play to your strengths.
The youtube guys didn’t have any friends at Wired.com. They didn’t have any friends at a VC firm (although one of the youtube guys is related to Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and Netscape fame). They didn’t have any “sneezers” for friends. Los Angeles, where the craigslist ads were posted, didn’t have women that were interested in posting videos to youtube.
What youtube did have was this: experience at paypal, which sold to eBay for over a billion dollars, Chad – a UI expert with an art background, Steve and Jawed skilled/tested developers– helped scale paypal from couple hundred users to a 60 million users over 5 years. You don’t learn how to scale like that in school boys and girls.
What do YOU have??? Play to YOUR unique strengths.