The founder is a friend of mine, so maybe I'm bias, but I'm surprised wired doesn't get how network effects work and adoption curves happen, at least, it seems strange to publish this about a project someone did in a weekend, a few weekends ago, and is now trying to make a go of it? Like.. give him a couple of months to see how to improve the flow for the bots side, and general discoverability of the platform for agents at large. Maybe I'm a bit grumpy because it's my buddy but this article kinda rubs me the wrong way. :\
Right but, do you or the founder have actual responses to the story posted? It seemed to give RentAhuman the benefit of the doubt every step of the way. The site doesn't work as advertised, appears to be begging for hype, got a reporter to check it out, and it didn't work.
That's life. Can't win them all. Lesson here is the product wasn't ready for primetime and you were given a massive freebie for free press both via Wired _and_ this crosspost.
Better strategy is to actually layout what works, what's the roadmap so anyone partially interested might see it when they stumble into this post.
Or jot it down as a failed experiment and move on.
I know it’s your friend but whenever you hype something, there’s a chance it will be covered. It’s really not Wired’s fault that something was hyped heavily before it was ready to go. This is something you live with or you turn media adversarial. If you want uniformly positive content, that’s called advertising.
None of the quotes were damning enough to fit the narrative they at some point decided to go with.
Wired has devolved into pure outrage reporting with like 80% political focus. Just have a look at their front page: https://www.wired.com/
Kind of funny, since it was known for the opposite (fluff pieces) during it's first and only influential decade. Yes, the first few years had some great writing. But so much fluff, too.
I’ve been writer, editor and interview subject in that scenario and it’s hot crazy, it’s just how PR works. All three roles are part of that happening.
I have run a lot of multi-sided marketplace scaling (for doordash, thumbtack, reddit, etc) with ads. Happy to chat/advise for free, just DMed you on Twitter. This project is so fun!
What? If anything the tech press is overwhelmingly sycophantic towards both startups and Big Tech alike, often just passing along talking points verbatim without any critical analysis at all.
Also, being "anti-AI" isn't being "anti-tech". AI is a marketing buzzword.
For sure- I haven't forgotten just how thoroughly deified the likes of Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried were in the tech press at one point.
