startup hustle

So I came across a site called Venture Capital Wear. They produce humorous (in someones opinion) t-shirts that can only be bought by accredited investors and they cost $100 a piece. Or you can buy the entire company for $100,000, which includes the VC Wear site and 20 of each t-shirt (remember, $100 a piece). I am assuming this is a joke but you really never know with those crazy Valley guys. VC Wear also has their VC Pitch (PDF) on the site. Below are a few of the t-shirts.

UPDATE: The site was not made by crazy Valley guys, it was made by crazy Andrew Hyde in the mountains of Colorado (comment below). Mr. Hyde runs Startup Weekend, which is also a crazy event. I am now interested to see Andrews next project. He is definitely a creative entrepreneur.

TheFunded.com has been a big deal in the startup world. It allows entrepreneurs to write about their experiences meeting with venture capitalist while staying anonymous. TheFunded.com has become such a big deal because no one knew who was behind it. That and most of the reviews were negative, aggravating named VCs. The suspense even reached outside the blogosphere with magazines such as Inc. wondering “Who’s behind TheFunded.com?“.

Last night at an event at Stanford, Aedo Ressi announced he is the founder of TheFunded.com. This is a classic PR mystery move, I couldn’t but see it as a linkbait move as well. Ressi’s site received as much publicity for its unknown founder as it did for its function, reviewing venture firms. Since the story of who ran TheFunded.com has quieted down in past months, Ressi comes out and sets the startup/tech blogs pumping out articles again (like so).

While we see traditional linkbait as writing an article that grabs ones attention (usually in a negative way), Ressi just kept quiet. In the current internet marketing environment, the tactic was brilliant. Ressi didn’t write a scathing article attacking a VC to grab the attention of the Valley, he simply opened a platform that allowed any entrepreneur to do it. At the same time hiding from , instead of bathing in, the publicity that made it even more intriguing.

Thus turning in old PR tactic into a new linkbait tactic. Well Done Mr Ressi.

There is a good discussion over on yCombinator about a guy that went to the Ebay Sellers Conference this past weekend and wore a Google shirt, which he claims led to him being thrown out. If you missed the story, Google wanted to throw an event for Google Checkout to compete with Paypal (owned by Ebay) at Ebay’s conference. So Ebay stopped all of their Adwords campaigns and Google backed down.

So this guy was at the conference to pitch his product to Ebay sellers when his Google apparel caught the attention of Ebay marketing executives, who apparently intimated him to the point that he left (escorted by security).

Regardless if the story is true or false (better if true) this was a great way to create linkbait in this tough linkbait time.