Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Through the encouragement of my advisers, I decided to publicly announce the beginning of a new super-secret stealth project: Bitchrs. As pitched in comments, the premise behind the service is that …you can pay people to be mean to others for you. That way you can say what you want, without having to be personally accountable. I mean, it doesn’t get more Web 2.0 than that, does it?
I was inspired to begin this effort by Guy Kawasaki, when he wrote on his Truemers effort:
In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.
Ha! I can beat that. I can throw together a startup in five days, for $43.86 and a case of diet orange pop.
I’m already contemplating the spinoff once Bitchrs goes big–and we all know it will go big–inspired by Marc Andreessen’s post, Bubble? There ain’t no stinken bubbles!, and his sabre tooth tiger economics:
The human psyche seems to have a powerful underlying need to predict doom and gloom.
I suspect this need was evolved into us way back when.
If there is a nonzero chance that a giant man-eating saber-tooth tiger is going to come over the nearest hill and chomp you, then it’s in your evolutionary best interest to predict doom and gloom more frequently than it actually happens.
The cost of hiding from a nonexistent giant man-eating saber-tooth tiger is low, but the cost of not hiding from a real giant man-eating saber-tooth tiger is quite high.
So hiding more often than there are tigers makes a lot of sense, if you’re a caveman.
Cavemen, tigers, and dot-com bubbles. It fits. So much so that I’m not waiting for the inevitable success of Bitchrs and am introducing the new super-secret stealth project now: Doomrs, where you can hire people to supply all the criticism, caution, and skepticism that you, yourself, believe with all your heart, BUT are afraid to vocalize and still be invited to hang out with all the Kool Kids.
Ladies and Gentlemen, forget Flickr, forget del.iciou.us, forget Google. This is the face of Web 2.0:
Bitchrs. We bitch, so you don’t have to.
Doomrs. Reality hurts. Don’t be real.
For early subscribers, a bonus service: Gripelets for Twitter.