We’re talking about hype and how to use it for good in your business this month at Smartups. Unfortunately, some companies have gotten hype wrong. Let’s look at three of them and see what we can learn from their mistakes.
Cuil was a search engine that came out and had a rockstar launch in 2008. They claimed to have a larger index and that they were faster than Google. They even had an ex Google engineer running the show, which provided credibility to the claims. And they had already raised $33 million dollars. They got tons of press right away from the launch. They had some unique and innovative ideas. Unfortunately, as people dove into the search engine, they didn’t find the results as good as expected.
The hype turned to backlash, and, eventually, the company shut its servers down.
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