Truemors: no such thing as bad press?

Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki posted a great rundown of his total costs associated with building Truemors, his new crowd-sourcing news / rumor aggregator. I love to see posts that open up experiences and costs associated with any startup, and even in the case of truemors, a site that we built, I learned from it.

Apparently, not everyone felt the same as I. Reading the comments this morning, I’m again amazed at the reaction. Even though Guy explicitly calls out the for-$12k-who-cares-if-it-implodes nature of his experiment, onlookers are still taking the time to comment on why they feel it sucks real bad. Take out the element of real life (face to face) interaction, and people get sassy.

Our association with the project pulls me into some of the development comments, a few of which suggest the site could have been built better and/or for less money.

Truemors was built in true path of least resistance form. We hacked WordPress. We launched loose and tightened things as we went. We bid low and ignored project hours. And, although we would have loved to build truemors from the ground up (sans WordPress,) the end result is a solid blog that you can post to three different ways using your mobile phone alone.

For those of you not wanting to read the original post, here’s an exerpt from Guy’s post:

The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

I’m amused by the inexperienced developers / college students suggesting they could have gone cheaper (I’m looking at you Paul.) Maybe they could have (not knowing the full scope up front.) We probably could have too – we were in it for the fun.

But, wow, do some people miss the point. Guy just spent $12,000 to launch a fully-charged startup. Good, bad or ugly, truemors is doing a hell of a job getting attention for cheap.

Note: it’s been said that I need to make sure my disclosures are clear, so here goes: Guy K is a client, and I love the way he’s approached this project. Maybe it bends my perception. Maybe not.