Guy Kawasaki Formally Launches Alltop. Wow, It's Bad.
Last year Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors on the cheap (he spent $13,000), which is at least pointing the right way on Compete.com. Today he follows up with a sequel, AllTop. It's a...well, it's a RSS reader I guess.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of Guy Kawasaki's low-budget launch playbook: after putting Truemors live in May 2007 for just $13,000, he is back with Alltop, an RSS-style news aggregation page organized by topic. Alltop had already been circulating quietly — bub.blicio.us wrote up its 'top stories and egos' format in February 2008 — but today marks the formal announcement, promoted mainly through Kawasaki's own blog.
The reception is rough. TechCrunch's verdict ('Wow, It's Bad') treats the product as little more than a directory of RSS feeds, which puts Kawasaki's personal-brand-driven launch style — announce cheaply, lean on his network for attention — squarely against a question of whether celebrity distribution can substitute for product substance.
First-order effects
- Alltop enters a crowded aggregation field with no technical moat — its value proposition is curation of feeds by topic, meaning competitors like existing start pages and RSS readers face a new entrant whose main asset is Kawasaki's audience, not the software.
- Kawasaki's own reputation as a startup advisor is now tied to two consecutive consumer products judged harshly by tech press, raising the stakes on whatever metric — like [[a:compete.com|Compete.com]] traffic, which already showed Truemors pointing upward — he uses to defend them.
Second-order effects
- Traffic-measurement services such as Compete.com become the referee for these personality-led launches: with press coverage this negative, Kawasaki's next moves will be judged on dashboard curves rather than reviews, pushing him toward traffic-bait features.
- The panning sets a template other reviewers may follow — coverage of Kawasaki projects shifts from novelty-of-the-celebrity-founder to scrutiny of the product itself, making future launches from him harder to get sympathetic write-ups.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 2008 wave of ultra-cheap, personality-amplified web launches separates into two camps: those whose founders can convert their own audiences into durable traffic, and those that fade once the initial blog cycle passes — with Alltop positioned as a test of how far a personal brand substitutes for product differentiation in aggregation, where the underlying content is everyone else's feeds anyway.
The trend: Consumer web launches are increasingly built on founder celebrity and near-zero development cost rather than proprietary technology, leaving traffic dashboards — not reviewers — to decide which ones survive.