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The idea that Arrington apparently tried to glom onto the project with no engineering contributions perfectly fits the tropes discussed on HN: MBA-types make a

• sjs382 17y ago
  TechCrunch has already given the project tons of visibility. Maybe they just needed an initial press push. I guess we'll see...
  • wvenable 17y ago
    TechCrunch is a technology blog, they give lots of products visibility. You're not going to claim they own everything they report on? They own the name Crunchpad, but this product isn't the Crunchpad. If they had a business relationship, they should have had a contract. One that locks this product into using the Crunchpad name. But they (apparently) did not.
    • sjs382 17y ago
      > You're not going to claim they own everything they report on? I made no such claim. What I meant was that TechCrunch's job is pretty much done from Fusion Garage's perspective. They're in the press.
      • wvenable 17y ago
        If they never had any prior involvement with TechCrunch, they'd still be in the press. On Engadget just as they are now. Hell, they'd probably be on TechCrunch too. The difference is, the press might be a little more positive that it is now with this big mess.
        • sjs382 17y ago
          Engadget wouldnt have been doing a "Press Conference Live Blog" if it weren't for the TechCrunch scandal.
          • cakesy 17y ago
            Maybe not, but they still would have been reporting on a new table, whether it was positive reporting or not remains to be seen.
• wvenable 17y ago
  That may be true but Fusion Garage has decided to go without Arrington's marketing. That may be a bad idea; I'm already not impressed with the name. But the point is that there's no evidence that Arrington has any claim to the product.
  • ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    IANAL, but I highly doubt this is automatically the case. The lack of written contracts is troubling, but I suspect that a competent legal team could demonstrate significant enough contribution to warrant joint ownership, assuming such contributions exist.
    • wvenable 17y ago
      IANAL either. Arrington says they contributed IP to the project -- that's pretty significant. I'm curious to find out exactly what it is they contributed. They do have the staff for it. As for marketing, so far it's consisted of a few blog posts. They do blog posts for other products too. I don't see much in the way of any ownership coming from that.
  • CamperBob 17y ago
    The last time I heard this much pissing and moaning about a product's name, it was aimed at another Asian tech company who came up with the ridiculous name "Wii."
• dbreunig 17y ago
  As an employee at an ad agency, I completely agree. (I mean JooJoo? Really?) Perhaps I wrote that sentence a bit odd, but I don't mean to imply myself that this is what happened. The 'idea' central in this story simply fits similar tropes and themes I see on HN all the time. And you're right, the up-votes verify this.
  • vaksel 17y ago
    they don't even own joojoo.com, it's some asian language site.
    • dimarco 17y ago
      thejoojoo.com
      • potatolicious 17y ago
        Which is just lazy, terrible marketing. If you don't own the most obvious domain, do not use it as the name of your product. If I go to joojoo.com and don't find what I'm looking for, there's not a chance in hell I'm going to start iterating through other possibilities. I'm either going to hit up Google or give up.
        • aditya 17y ago
          It worked for a while for dropbox :)
          • potatolicious 17y ago
            That was a great recovery for dropbox - but note that at the end of the day they still needed dropbox.com. This isn't to say that you can't succeed despite a crappy domain name, but rather that when you haven't even locked down your brand yet, why commit to something that you can't secure the domain for?
        • BigDamnDeal 17y ago
• nir 17y ago
  "sales and marketing" != "having a popular blog" EDIT (for some reason reply doesn't seem to work): TC is a hugely popular site, of course, but my point is that sales and marketing is a lot more than what any website can do. They can have huge impact on a website's traffic (though the long term effect is arguable) but getting readers to follow a link isn't the same as getting them to pay a few hundred $ for a product.
  • breck 17y ago
    Since when is TechCrunch just a blog? They have multiple blogs that get millions of readers. They have conferences and meetups throughout the world that are covered by major media outlets. They run the most successful startup contest around, where companies like Mint, Dropbox, and Yammer publicly launched. It sounds like Fusion Garage and TechCrunch did a terrible job at setting clear expectations about the partnership from the beginning, but to call TechCrunch just another blog is not accurate.
    • prakash 17y ago
      http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html?cid=17189379 http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html?cid=17189379
      • breck 17y ago
        Good point. But TechCrunch has become 1 or 2 orders of magnitude bigger since this post. Also, I think a large segment of the target market for this product is this exact market that is very familiar with TechCrunch.
      • skmurphy 17y ago
        The "53,651 readers in the Silicon Valley echo chamber" argument in 2006 had more force than "only 3,739,000 readers in 2009." TechCrunch now clearly has a larger reader base than early adopter in Silicon Valley.
      • Teulon 17y ago
        I was considering getting one of these when it was released and I live in Wausau, Wisconsin.
• hristov 17y ago
  But marketing does not give you an automatic right to the product. (Note I am only mentioning marketing, because Arrington did not sell any of the products, obviously). You may tell how great your iphone is to all your friends, but that will not give you a right to any share of the iphone's profits. If Arrington signed a contract with fusion garage to do their marketing, than he is entitled to what the contract gives him. But to say that he has an ownership interest in the product just because he did some marketing for it is imo just not true. While he may have ownership interest in marketing materials he may have created (such as the crunchpad name) I don't see how he can get ownership of the actual device. BTW -- this is just wild speculation based on incomplete facts, none of it is legal advice.
  • mcantelon 17y ago
    >If Arrington signed a contract with fusion garage to do their marketing, than he is entitled to what the contract gives him I'd like to see this contract. Fusion Garage says there were no agreements.
• tptacek 17y ago
  You're right, but in a case where one side is contributing mostly intangible business value, you expect written contracts. The alleged lack of them is damning. Marketing, of course, is not about the product name. It's feature/function, pricing, ship dates, channel development, and general promotion/branding.
• pageman 17y ago
  I have to agree with you - "marketing"? - Arrington did some heavy duty technology evangelism for this one - they should have given him something for all his efforts.
• cowmoo 17y ago
  Thank you for your $0.02; this might be really obvious to you, but could you be kind and enlighten the oblivious engineering crowd on this forum and be more specific as to what kind of value-add does sales and marketing add to a early-stage hardware startup or any consumer-oriented tech startup in general?
  • aikiai 17y ago
    I disagree with your assumption that this is an engineering crowd. I would say entrepreneurship is at least as important to the HN culture as engineering. You ask a huge question, which is discussed every day all around the internet. But to take a high level stab at it: Marketing is crucial to an early-stage hardware startup to start to determine if anyone actually wants to buy what you're proposing to build. Good luck getting money from a VC, much less a customer, if you can't talk intelligently about your target market, and demonstrate an ability to connect with it. Sales becomes paramount after Version 1.0 is released, when you have to demonstrate that your business is actually profitable. Many engineers are under the impression that, if the quality is high enough, the product will sell itself. While this is true for the (tiny) subset of your market that cares enough to really investigate your product, it seems that a great sales team with a mediocre product will outsell a mediocre sales team with a great product more often than not.
  • zaidf 17y ago
    You can start here: http://southeastvc.blogs.com/southeast_vc/2009/11/vcs-hear-it-all-of-the-time-entrepreneurs-say-they-have-the-best-software-for-xyz-industry-they-tell-us-how-their-software.html http://southeastvc.blogs.com/southeast_vc/2009/11/vcs-hear-i... and http://redeye.firstround.com/2009/11/lets-just-add-in-a-little-virality.html?awesm=frc.vc_31v&utm_medium=frc.vc-twitter&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=bookmarklet-twitter http://redeye.firstround.com/2009/11/lets-just-add-in-a-litt...
  • danielrhodes 17y ago
    There's a lot of nuance to getting partnerships and getting distribution on your product. It's a different mindset that needs to be learned. In most cases, early-stage web startups should have at least one person who is capable of getting in the door (at minimum, an engineering person who can also do biz dev). It is rarely the case that you just make something and let the orders stream in. People don't know about the product yet and there's a lot of work involved in convincing them that you are capable of actually producing the device at scale or even at all. Just off the top of my head, if you see things like Twitter using bit.ly instead of tinyurl like what happened earlier this year, that wasn't a technical decision, that was done through business development and leverage. It really depends on what it is you are producing, but in this particular case of the JooJoo/Crunchpad/whatever marketing and sales is probably part of the fundamental strategy. If a lot of time and money has been invested in something, it would be a major oversight to not have somebody who can specialize in distribution/marketing.
• codexon 17y ago
  Think about it this way. If you have no product, having the best marketers in the world will not make you a single penny (unless you do preorders, which you still need a product eventually). If you have a product and no marketers, will you still be able to sell some units? Most certainly. Because of this, the actual engineering of the product is more valuable than the marketing if you were forced to choose between all engineers, or all marketers.
  • zaidf 17y ago
    Just because you are a marketer doesn't mean you can't build some crap and sell it. Just because you're a prod dev guy doesn't mean you can build it and sell it.
    • codexon 17y ago
      Actually it does mean you can't build some crap and sell it when your product is high tech. In this case Arrington only had pie-in-the-sky hand waving ideas about a $200 touchscreen computer that could do everything. He clearly wasn't interested in putting actual effort and resources into the project until someone else started working on it. The project would have died if Fusion Garage didn't start working on it. And in this situation, a "prod dev guy" actually did build it. And I am willing to bet you that he can sell at least one.
      • zaidf 17y ago
        And I am willing to bet you that he can sell at least one Okay, even if he can sell one, so what? That "one" is pretty arbitrary. I can bet you if Arrington put up a preorder page of a product called SUPER-CRAP, he could sell more than one. Again, so what? The end goal is not to sell one. It's to build a successful business. And that requires significant(even if unequal) contribution from both prod dev and marketing.
        • codexon 17y ago
          I can bet you if Arrington put up a preorder page of a product called SUPER-CRAP, he could sell more than one. Again, so what? People like to exaggerate that a good marketer can poop in a box and sell it, but at some point it becomes scamming. And I guarantee you that the likelihood of getting sued and losing even more money goes up astronomically.
• ojbyrne 17y ago
  I don't think anybody believes that sales and marketing are as important as engineering. I think instead that most people here believe that all the sales and marketing people treat engineering as if it doesn't matter at all. And we'll cheer for anyone who says it's not the case.
  • ojbyrne 17y ago
    I meant to say "I don't think anybody believes sales and marketing _aren't_ as important as engineering....