Does TechCrunch matter to your customers?
That was one of the questions raised by Sean Johnson at BarCampMadison, where he gave a presentation titled "How To Burn Your Business Into The Ground – Lessons in Entrepreneurship"
I was reminded of this when I saw that TechCrunch just got a CEO. (Many people are asking “Why does a blog needs a CEO?”)
Sean’s point was that, as cool as TechCrunch is, at the end of the day, do your customers in the real world really care, or even know about TechCrunch? For most of us, we build things that are used by average people, not the select few digerati that are hip to the Web 2.0 lingo. There are tons of successful companies that have never been, and will probably never be profiled on TechCrunch, yet they do great work and make their customers happy. And that’s where the focus should be. Happy customers. Slashdot, Digg, TechCrunch, they all serve as these spotlights to shine on the latest online-thing that will give you brighter whites and cure what ails you, but it’s just a small percentage of a small percentage of people who pay attention to these things.
At the end of the day, do your customers, the ones paying the bills, really care if your company was profiled by some nerd news site?