Not to take anything away from patio11 of course - he's a bright guy and always full of good advice. It's just that he sticks out more by not fitting the mold.
Before the wife, kids and mortgage show up, this seems to me to be the way to do it. Don't shoot for the fences. Look for the ideas that can get you enough cash in your pocket to move on to the next idea where you can shoot for the fences. You'll have the stability of the first income and the experience it brought.
(Hopefully this doesn't seem like I'm taking away from what Patrick has done but I think it's clear that this idea isn't making him a millionaire.)
Not because he's "loved".
I think the take-away here is that "any publicity is good publicity".
Our main business (http://platform.newscred.com) has no publicity or marketing attached to it. We've just been heads down, working away on the product and iterating with customers using typical customer development strategies. With that said, it's a sizeable business and growing. And some stage, we need to turn the marketing machine on.
But the real question I debate internally is "how important is brand recognition." Obviously it's priceless for the Cokes or Nikes of the world. But for a startup that has a clear path to customer acquisition, has figured out its ARPU and is having success with sales, how much focus should be spent on 'brand-building?'
Thoughts?
Just depends on the business.
Long term I think it's imperative though, the personal interactions and feedback and direct relationships I've been building with my clients does not scale so well to a wider audience.
Two examples -- Posterous and Mixergy. Mixergy has gotten lots of visibility on HN lately, Posterous maybe not quite as much (though maybe I just haven't paid as much attention to Posterous lately). But both changed my model of the world in some way. Posterous, for making me think more about email as the least-common-denominator social network publishing platform, and the value of tapping into that, and the technical issues involved with doing so; Mixergy, for the content of the interviews, but also for the format -- I think a Mixergy-style site on ambitious young neuroscientists could be really interesting, and good for my field as a whole.
Posterous and Mixergy changed how I think about things, and because of that, I'll probably remember both for as long as I live.
This is a different model of brand awareness from the one that is implicit in the poll results linked to here -- that brand awareness is some function of the number of times a brand gets posted per unit time and the popularity of the post. For me, that's just visibility -- but stickyness comes down to, "Did this change my model of the world?"
And that's the value I get from the better posts on HN, the better New Yorker articles, etc.
