Earlier this week, I wrote about Twitter’s inability to articulate a value proposition to its potential users and my disagreement with the marketers who believe that inability is a fatal flaw. Well, I guess that raising a $35 million C round with a post-money valuation of $225-$250 million isn’t the sort of thing that’s possible when you can’t communicate a value proposition. Wait, hold on. That’s what Twitter just did, raising $21 million from Benchmark and $14 million from IVP. If it was 1988, I would tell the marketers that they just got ‘moted. Oh. Shit.
MBA Marketing Benchmark Capital, funding, IVP, marketing idiots, Twitter, venture capital
One of my professors seized on the start-up’s inability to articulate a clear value proposition to its users. I don’t believe that it matters, but apparently he did because I’m now going to fail the class. Twitter isn’t so much a service with a specific value proposition as it is a platform for all sorts of services. It is a way to search what people are saying right now. It is a way to communicate and converse with a group of people using your phone. It is way for companies to share information with their employees easily in real time. Yes, it’s a microblogging service too.
I’m not a particularly huge fan of Twitter and don’t derive much value from it, but I think I’m on the wrong side of the fence on this issue. But at least I’m closer to the fence than my professor. “Value proposition” and similar terms are the exact thing that made me cringe when I considered going to business school. Now that I’m in business school, they make me want to vomit. They’re often irrelevant in the way that businesses conceive of products to reach potential audiences, especially in the world of web 2.0 with modular applications and platforms. Quite simply, if users find something valuable, they’ll pay for it with time or money, if not both. Will people pay for Twitter? We’ll see. Whether its owners can articulate the reason is beside the point.
MBA BS Marketing, stupidity, Twitter, value propositions