How Fred Wilson Destroyed My Startup
Widget Requests over the Past 30 Days
Back in January, Fred Wilson wrote a post on AVC about how he wished he could put the daily song post from his tumblog onto the site. That sounded like a fun challenge to me, so I spent a few hours and hacked together the flash widget that you see in my sidebar today, and sent it over to Fred. Well, he loved it, and it lived happily on the upper right corner of avc.blogs.com for the past six months. A handful of other sites followed Fred’s lead and embeddded the widget, and while here was no “daryn” branding or links to me on it, it was super-cool to see this little creation of mine getting hundreds of thousands of impressions every month.
I didn’t keep any per-site stats, so when AVC.com was recently relaunched, stripped of most of the widgets including mine, it was a sad day in the Nakhuda household, as I realized that 97% of my traffic had gone away.
I had to sell the boat and the jet, and fire the butler.
In all honesty, it didn’t really bother me. The widget was something I whipped together in a hurry, and it served its purpose well, but wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about. Dan Kantor’s new Tumblr MP3 player kicks ass. It looks dead sexy, and works great. I’ve met a lot of awesome people via Fred, and I’ve got a widget that I can use on my own blog, and on TheMusic, that I never would have written otherwise. Plus, I’m saving $1.25/month on S3 hosting. In a few months, I’ll be able to hire Jeeves back again…
About the title of this post: Dave and I were talking about web traffic at the gym this morning, and I pointed out how 97% of the hits to my tumblr widget were from AVC, and how if I was a startup, I’d be whining to Techcrunch right now.
-
whitneymcn
reblogged this from
daryn
-
daryn
posted this
