Poll on Hacker News Brand Awareness

The reason certain users or companies 'break through' to me on HN (i.e. achieve a long term identity in my brain) is because they change my model of how the world works.<p>Two examples -- Posterous and Mixergy. Mixergy has gotten lots of visibility on HN lately, Posterous maybe not quite as much (though maybe I just haven't paid as much attention to Posterous lately). But both changed my model of the world in some way. Posterous, for making me think more about email as the least-common-denominator social network publishing platform, and the value of tapping into that, and the technical issues involved with doing so; Mixergy, for the content of the interviews, but also for the <i>format</i> -- I think a Mixergy-style site on ambitious young neuroscientists could be really interesting, and good for my field as a whole.<p>Posterous and Mixergy changed how I think about things, and because of that, I'll probably remember both for as long as I live.<p>This is a different model of brand awareness from the one that is implicit in the poll results linked to here -- that brand awareness is some function of the number of times a brand gets posted per unit time and the popularity of the post. For me, that's just <i>visibility</i> -- but <i>stickyness</i> comes down to, "Did this change my model of the world?"<p>And that's the value I get from the better posts on HN, the better New Yorker articles, etc.

Shafqat here from NewsCred, one of the startups included in the poll. Interesting results - I'm not surprised only 8% had heard of us. Our consumer site (www.newscred.com) has gotten decent traction and press, but nothing out of this world.<p>Our main business (<a href="http://platform.newscred.com" rel="nofollow">http://platform.newscred.com</a>) has no publicity or marketing attached to it. We've just been heads down, working away on the product and iterating with customers using typical customer development strategies. With that said, it's a sizeable business and growing. And some stage, we need to turn the marketing machine on.<p>But the real question I debate internally is "how important is brand recognition." Obviously it's priceless for the Cokes or Nikes of the world. But for a startup that has a clear path to customer acquisition, has figured out its ARPU and is having success with sales, how much focus should be spent on 'brand-building?'<p>Thoughts?

I'm not sure that the brand awareness of these cases is related to the company naming. For example, I think Bingo Card Creator is well-known mostly because everyone here loves patio11.

I recognize Mixergy, but don't recall what they do.

In my opinion duck duck go is a prominent "brand" on HN for a single simple reason. It's (now forgive my language) but a ballsy startup for a really simple reason. Your competition is Google!!!... and not just a company who happens to be owned by Google, you're competing with Google in their primary business. You're also doing it by yourself, and to top it off you're getting results!! I'll read anything about it, because its essentially like watching the Boston Red Socks play some little league team from Milwaukee... the twist though, is the game is almost tied, and the Boston Red Socks aren't throwing the game. Its plain exciting!