The Wisdom of One: Guy Kawasaki On Alltop.com - Page 5

To return to the magazine rack analogy, if you’re the magazine publisher, do you blame Borders if your magazine isn’t selling well? Or, is it your cover, headlines, and content? It’s probably both; if Borders had more foot traffic, it would sell more magazines. If the magazines were better, Borders would get more foot traffic. But there’s no such thing as too much distribution in the news business whether we’re talking printed or online formats.

Is Alltop a hobby or do you want to make money with it?

Alltop is the most satisfying project I’ve done since Macintosh. Site owners really love it when we add them to a topic, and readers of the topic — particularly ones like Adoption.Alltop, VIPS.Alltop, Autism.Alltop, Cancer.Alltop, and Women.Alltop — really appreciate that we took the aggravation out of aggregation.

Like any honest content-play, we’re still trying to figure out the business model. That is, we’re trying Adsense, sponsorship, and affiliate programs. The beauty is that our burn rate is about $10,000/month so we have long runway to figure out how to take off.

The general consensus seems to be that you're a "really nice guy." Were there ever times when you had to take a hard line and have people really dislike you to get things to where they needed to be? If so, can you share an experience where your claws came out for the greater good?

There are plenty of people who dislike me. I’m a dirty hockey player, for example. Off the ice, there are many entrepreneurs who think that I’m an asshole because I told them exactly what I think of their idea. I’m 54 years old — I’ve stopped caring about what everyone thinks of me. At this point, I am what I am.

Guy concludes our chat ironically by adding, "Not sent from an iPhone."

Article Author: Mark Buckingham

Mark Buckingham is an avid freelancer, gamer, tech-head, reader, movie watcher, pianist, guitarist, and hockey player.

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