When the website, Artsy, went live in 2012, it rated a glowing New York Times profile. The paper observed, “The site aims to do for visual art what Pandora did for music and Netflix for film: become a source of discovery, pleasure and education.” Cool!
Yet, years later, what I remembered about the budding business was not what it did, but its top-flight list of partners, investors, and advisers: Wendi Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, and Jack Dorsey, among others. These are the kind of people who don’t lend their time and names to something unless it’s worthwhile.
To wit: instead of emphasizing your bells and whistles, focus on your biggest, boldest names. They’ll do your job for you.
Related: Show Me the Stories: How to Measure and Market Social Media
Addendum (8/4/2014): Two more examples:
1. While writing the script for The Wolf of Wall Street, Terence Winter said he was forever trying to explain even limited Wall Street terms, like “IPO.” Ultimately, he concluded it didn’t matter. “The techno-speak goes in one ear and out the other,” he recalled. “What [people will] remember is that in the Madden deal, [Jordan] Belfort made $23 million in two hours.”
2. Entrepreneur Suhail Doshi proposes something called the “OKM.” He explains: “Companies should start by tracking a single actionable metric that they can literally bet the company on. I call this their One Key Metric (OKM). Companies choosing their OKM realize they must pick an actionable metric because pageviews or sign ups aren’t harsh enough and don’t correlate highly enough with the success of their business.”
