Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Scarcity rocks

in: Communicate, Create, Standing out

I wrote an article a while back about Linkedin and Notchup. The short version: With a particularly viral offer, Notchup used Linkedin to harvest and enrol 900,000 users in around 3 weeks.

Many of the blog comments that came back concerned scarcity. The whole premise of Notchup was to help recruiters find the hottest candidates–the ones who weren’t looking. They figured that it was worth paying to talk to this talent, and with a decent paycheck at the end of it, even the most tight-mouthed candidate would be willing to part with some personal details.

But with popularity, the cachet of “reach the people who are hard to reach and not looking” goes away.I call this the Krispy Kreme problem. A friend of mine handled operations for the donut maker years ago (sort of the opposite of high tech), and he wondered to me one day whether the fact that you could get their donuts pretty much anywhere was a bad thing. He was right.

Unfortunately, scarcity doesn’t scale.

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