About.me founder and True Ventures partner Tony Conrad gave a presentation at Web 2.0 Summit today on something called “Echo Chamber Marketing.” Conrad said that his strategy to scale his About.me online identity platform, which has now reached a million members after 300 days, was to figure out “who [his] entourage [was].”
Counter to the popular notion that you shouldn’t market your startup only to techies, Conrad picked 26 influential members of the technology community — like Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca and Veronica Belmont — to become About.me advisors, which meant 6.5 advisors for every employee at About.me at the time. Turns out Conrad’s plan was ingenious, because in an era where tech influencers have now becomes mainstream influencers, those 26 members pitching the site to their followings played a huge role in the site’s massive scale.
The site later (but not too much later) sold to AOL for seven figures.