Videos are at pressheretv.com, if you want to check them out. But there was one part of the conversation that really struck me as critical for startups and entrepreneurs looking to navigate today’s tech press. While interviewing Eric Ries, I asked how startups can navigate launching new products in what is a very crowded environment.

The answer? Don’t launch in the press.

The full answer:

“It’s really an important point. We try to teach entrepreneurs not to launch in the press, with all due respect. When you’re iterating and making mistakes and failing, you want to do that in private. You want to take advantage of the fact that you’re an obscure new startup and no one’s ever heard of you but a pathetically small number of customers. That’s actually a real asset. Take advantage of it. Do the big publicity push after you’ve already figured out how to build a sustainable business. We call it the ‘product launch’ when you put the product in front of customers — and you should do that as soon as possible — but do the marketing launch — when you’re pounding your chest and talking about how great you are — as late as possible.”

When considering this topic, I thought about all the world-changing new startups that didn’t live up to the hype — and those that saw almost immediate negative feedback from the same news outlets that agreed to cover their launches just a few hours before. Think Wolfram Alpha or Color or Cuil — all of which were supposed to revolutionize the way we did things with big funding announcements and applications but didn’t perform as well as promised. Like how Cuil couldn’t find relevant search results or how users generally had no idea what Color was for or how to use it.

Those startups launched their products before they were ready — that is, before real people had a chance to use them and before they got a chance to revise things to make them usable. Meanwhile, there have been any number of interesting products and services that launched with little fanfare but slowly found their groove as time went on. Think about Twitter, for instance, as one example of a company that took advantage of being an obscure startup and iterating before making huge announcements in the press.

The lesson here is a simple one, but one that frequently eludes entrepreneurs: Don’t launch before you’re ready. And don’t expect a lot of press to make up for a half-baked product. You only get one chance to make a first impression, after all.

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I believe that the economics of attention is much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. What I mean is that you can find money for your company from an investor, but it wouldn’t really matter if you don’t have users’ attention.

This is a hard reality that has been obvious in highly competitive and somewhat subjective marketplaces. Hollywood movies, music and even fashion are markets where “attention” determines the outcome. As far as I am concerned, the Internet and mobile applications fall in the same category.

No Second Chances

And just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s “apps” are likely to lose their place in the marketplace if they don’t make a good first impression.

For nearly a decade, the start-up mantra has been release early and release often,” a concept that first was applied successfully in the development of Linux. I think it is time to amend that line of thinking a little. That means that developers will have to find a balance between the speed of offering a service and the promise of happiness and utility from the get-go.

If an app makes you happy or if it is useful, then you will more likely focus on the positive and overlook the shortcomings, argues Chaitanya Sareen, co-creator of the foodie app, Chewsy.

MVP + Happiness + Utility = Early Traction

Sareen makes a good point. If you look at some of the more successful products, they found early traction because they combined a concept popularized by Eric Ries as the “minimum viable product” and “happiness/utility.”

I distinctly remember the day I downloaded MoveableType’s blogging software and installed it on my server. It was an arduous process, but in the end it was worth it because it made my blogging experience so much better. Ben and Mena Trott added features as they went along, but it was that first stage of “satisfaction” and “happiness” that made me use the platform for nearly four years.

It is hard for any of us to remember that Google’s Gmail was a pretty bare-bones product when it first launched, but it had search and seemingly unlimited storage, which helped us focus on the upside and less on the downside. Ditto for Apple’s iPhone 1.0, which seems downright dowdy compared to its younger siblings. It was so delightful that we put up with AT&T’s terrible network, the lack of copy-and-paste and long wait lines.

What Doesn’t Work?

Now compare these examples with the likes of search engine Cuil, video platform Joost and more recently Color — they all found themselves in a hole from the minute they launched. All the focus was on their shortcomings.

Before focusing on the latest whipping boy of the web, Color Labs, I wanted to point your attention to Joost, one of the most anticipated startups of its time. As an early enthusiast, I loved the possibilities of the company, which was started by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstram and Janus Friis.

It had pretty much everything going for it, and yet it flopped. It had gained so many early adopters but it didn’t have content for them and it didn’t know how to solve the technology problems it faced.

Cuil, which was co-founded by an all-star team from Google, had similar issues — it had a ton of money ($33 million and change) and an idea that made perfect sense. Except it wasn’t able to deliver on its original promise — to out-Google Google — and to it all, the site went down when faced with an onslaught of visitors to the website.

Cuil lacked that aha feeling that keeps end-users coming back for more. The service’s initial promise turned into a negative experience, and the company failed to recover. Joost and Cuil are cautionary tales for anyone, and I cannot but notice eerie similarities between the three companies

• Exceptionally well-known and talented founders.
• Big hairy audacious goals
• Tons of initial investment money
• Promoting a new consumer usage behavior
• Lack the happiness/utility balance

I would argue that the Joost and Cuil failures came at a time when social media amplification was not as effective as it is today. Today, the sentiment good or bad news gets amplified very quickly, thanks to the growing number of people using Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, it takes a lot longer for those waves of negativity to slow down.

Now if there was only a little competition on the market, then Color could find its way back to the forefront, but these days there are just too many options. Tomorrow there will be a new hot app, and another and another. And if you miss your chance once, then as I said earlier, you are toast.

So What Does Work?

In my post mortem of Joost, I wrote:

Remember what your mom used to say when you took too big of a bite? If you’re not careful, you’re going to choke. Startups are just like that. Unless you focus, you’re going to choke. Joost couldn’t focus on one single market — and startups need to focus on one market at a time in order to win.

What that means is that you need to do one thing and do it well. If you are making a mobile app, then you focus on developing for one platform — one that offers the path of least resistance, has the highest market penetration and, more importantly, is the platform of choice for the people who are likely to use and talk about your product. In the U.S. at least, developing for Apple’s iOS platform is a good bet.

And once you have made the platform choice, I think it is important to get the user experience just right, even if it means holding out for a couple of weeks.

With over 650,000 apps across multiple mobile platforms and tens of thousands of web services, it is pretty clear that there are no second chances on today’s Internet.

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Cpedia, an attempt to create automated encyclopedia-style articles from search results, was recently launched to less-than-enthusiastic reviews (including one from me). The encyclopedia was created by Cuil, a search engine that also got a less-than-positive response from users and reviewers when it launched in 2008. You might think that after the rhetorical beating Cuil (pronounced “cool”) took when it emerged into the world, founder Tom Costello might have developed a thick skin when it comes to criticism. But you would be wrong. In a long blog post responding to the bad reviews for Cpedia, the Cuil CEO — who created the search engine with his wife, former Google executive Anna Patterson — lashed out at his critics, calling them “vituperative” and “haters.”

Costello suggested that most of the criticisms came from writers who searched for their own names, but just aren’t that noteworthy, saying:

“Cpedia does very badly with people who write much more on the web than people write about them. Given the 1 billion people on the web one might think this unlikely, but it happens. When we try to summarize the information mentioning these people, we run into a problem. Almost none of it is about them. It’s about random things they have opined on. Dave Parrack, Farhad Manjoo, Louis Gray, I’m talking about you.”

The other complaint (which was the central point of my post) was that the entries simply didn’t make any sense, even when they were about someone well-known enough that there was plenty of information to pull together. In response, the Cpedia founder launched into a bizarre description of how the Christian Brothers who taught him Irish when he was a child used to beat him with straps until he got his vocabulary right, and how his Irish was technically correct but had no “blas.” That’s apparently an Irish term for the polish that players of the Irish sport of hurling get on their sticks after playing for a long time (I’m not sure that’s correct though — Wikipedia says the top of the hurling stick is called the “bas,” and an Irish dictionary says the word “blas” means “taste”).

Costello also says that what Cpedia is doing is *not* trying to pull together all the information about a topic and make sense of it — he says it’s trying to find the undiscovered, unique pieces of information, such as the fact that a VC he was meeting with apparently “has a tendency to over-imbibe.” Because the encyclopedia’s engine removes duplication, “unique ideas have more chance of coming to the top,” he says. And finally, Costello says that Cpedia “has errors” and that this is “intentional,” because “we have tried to be inclusive, and dredge to the bottom of the web.”

So if what you’re looking for is an automated encyclopedia entry that doesn’t make sense of things, intentionally has errors, and dredges the bottom of the web, then Cpedia has got what you need.

Some commenters on our post and on Twitter said that criticizing Cpedia was unfair, and that, as Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon put it, the company was trying to solve an interesting problem. And there’s no question that trying to turn search results into automated, encyclopedia-style articles is a hard problem. Will Cpedia get better and eventually solve that problem? Perhaps. But it’s a long way away from that right now.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user acordova

During the rise of the Beat movement in the 1950s and ’60s, avant-garde writer William S. Burroughs developed a process he called the “cut up” technique, in which he would literally cut out sentences and passages from poems, stories and books (both his own and those of other writers) and stitch them together. If Burroughs had ever decided to automate this process and develop an online encyclopedia, it would probably look a lot like Cpedia. The new offering from Cuil — a startup (pronounced “cool”) that launched in 2008, claiming to have developed a better and faster search engine than Google’s — is destined to do at least one thing very well: make even the most poorly-researched Wikipedia page look like the repository of all the world’s knowledge.

Cpedia launched last week with a blog post from Cuil co-founder and former IBM staffer Tom Costello, who described a meeting he had with Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy when Costello and his wife Anna Patterson (a former Googler) were trying to raise money for Cuil. Joy told Costello that people didn’t need a new search engine that just returned a list of results, they needed something that would write an article based on a search. A note on Cpedia topic pages reads: “We find everything on the Web about your topic, remove all the duplication and put the information on one page.”

It’s important to note that this doesn’t say the service finds everything on the Web and makes sense of it and then puts it all on one page. If what you want are snippets of articles from somewhere (links to source pages are difficult to find) mixed up seemingly at random and then displayed as though they were a coherent encyclopedia entry, even when they are not, then you are going to love Cpedia.

To take just one example, in the entry on Philo Farnsworth, the man who many credit with inventing the modern television, the article starts with a reference to — and a large picture of — an actor named Jimmy Simpson, who apparently played Farnsworth in a movie. There is some history about the development of television and the race with RCA (which reverse engineered Farnsworth’s patents and took credit for the discovery), but it’s all mixed up with references to Simpson and the movie, along with random people including actor Sid Caesar and Jonas Salk, as well as snippets of Farnsworth-related information that appear without any reference to anything.

In his blog post launching the service, Costello says that Cpedia “is very different from a traditional search engine, and not at all like Wikipedia, but that is its strength; it is something new and different.” The Cuil founder is almost certainly right. Unfortunately, being new and different doesn’t necessarily mean that it is either good or useful. Other users who have tried it out describe it as “sentence after sentence of automated nonsense,” and Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment says that “if this feature is meant to become a serious product, I truly feel bad for them.”

If nothing else, Cpedia proves that there are some things that algorithms and automated processes can’t do — and one of those things is to make sense of all the information that exists on the Internet. Perhaps human beings are good for something after all.

courtesy of Flickr user Kellan

Initially billed as a potential Google killer, Cuil attracted gobs of media attention when it launched last year, yet quickly received criticism that its search capability was weaker than Google’s. The company has since faded from the limelight and has seen traffic to its search engine fall over the last year. Tapping into the real-time trend may help Cuil get out of its rut. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company received $33 million in funding from Madrone Capital Partners, Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners last year and has a valuation of $200 million.

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The company, which has raised about $33 million in two rounds of founding from Madrone Capital Partners, Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners, has been the subject of much speculation in Silicon Valley, mostly because of founders’ (Patterson, Tom Costello and Russell Power) pedigrees — not to mention some well-known search luminaries who have joined the company.

Patterson, for instance, was the technical lead of Googlebase and helped form Google’s TeraGoogle search index. She had worked at Archives.org before joining Google. Costello had developed an early version of WebFountain. Power also worked on TeraGoogle. Former Altavista CTO Louis Monier is also at Cuil. The company had gotten into a spot of bother earlier this year when it started to crawl in what can be described as an ungentlemanly manner, prompting a few thousand sites to ban its crawler. Despite all that, it is still one of the more interesting companies to watch.

During his keynote address at a search industry trade show earlier this year, Monier had noted that “search engines can be used for more than just navigation.” It is becoming increasingly evident that the battle of navigation has been all but won by Google. However, Monier and his cohorts at Cuil are betting that the company can use new information retrieval-and-dissemination technologies to overcome the information overload on the Internet.

My big belief is that “serendipity” is the right way to go as we continue to get immersed (and drowned) in information. From that perspective, Cuil might be on the right track. Patterson stopped by at our San Francisco offices last week to give us a brief overview of the company and how it works.

How it works is that company has an index of around 120 billion pages (which is a lot smaller that what Google claims) that is sorted on dedicated machines, each one tasked with conducting topic-specific search — for instance, health, sports or travel. This approach allows them to sift through the web faster (and probably cheaper) than Google, which still enjoys a huge infrastructure advantage over its rivals. The results of those specific searches are then funneled to the search results page, which looks more like a magazine web site than the search results page we are so used to seeing on, say, Google or Yahoo.

I have no clarity on Cuil’s infrastructure; we couldn’t get into the details because our meeting was quite brief. I do know that while indexing is the easy part, analyzing and displaying all the information is extremely resource-intensive and was one of the main reasons why Powerset took Microsoft’s money.

The search results showed off by the company executives seemed pretty accurate and useful, but since I didn’t get to test them myself, I can’t vouch for their veracity. When I asked Patterson about the challenge of consumer adoption, she countered that most people are willing to try new search services. She feels confident that searching on Cuil will win them over.

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