Getting Wiki with It: The Launch of JotSpot

Situation: Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, the original Excite.com co-founders and high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, enlisted Voce's help in the spring of 2004 to help them launch JotSpot. While both Kraus and Spencer were well respected in the technology and investment communities and building a product that was truly innovative, they were still entering an emerging market category with an unproven product, limited resources and facing competition from a crop of open-source products, as well as from some established players. The JotSpot team needed to quickly build mindshare with several key constituencies, including customers, developers, media, and the broader tech and investment communities.

Strategy: The company and product go-to-market strategy was to use several different news items and platforms to tell the JotSpot story and engage key audiences leading up to the launch. The formal company debut and funding news was shared with the business media and VC blogging community early on. This was followed by a series of technology, customer and partner news announcements that demonstrated JotSpot's momentum and allowed the PR team to maintain a steady dialogue with key media, analysts and tech influencers. During this period, two projects simultaneously started: First, CEO Joe Kraus began a personal blog to share his thoughts and opinions on what it was like to be back behind a startup after all that he had experience and learned as the CEO of Excite in the dot com boom. Second, a top-tier business publication began researching and writing a deep background story on the company.

Results: All of these projects culminated in the launch of JotSpot in the fall of 2004 at the Web 2.0 conference. At the conference, which attracted some of the Internet industry's biggest names and top innovators, Kraus previewed on stage the long-awaited JotSpot beta. Simultaneously, stories in BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, InfoWorld, and many more appeared. A key part of the strategy for launching at the conference was also recognition of the number of influential bloggers who were actively covering the event. On the day-of-announcement, nearly 2,000 unique blog posts appeared mentioning JotSpot's launch. Two weeks following the launch, JotSpot confirmed it had signed up more than 3,000 beta customers, including several high-profile Fortune 500 companies. Two months after the launch, that figure jumped to nearly 10,000 customers.

The JotSpot debut was a successful launch for several reasons, not least of which was a compelling product and a seasoned management team, however, the way that the company and product story was told via a blend of traditional and non-traditional communication was what ultimately helped the company surpass its goals.