Interview with Noah Kagan from OkDork.com

October 30th, 2007

I recently had the chance to interview Noah Kagan from OkDork.com, a blog that I have been reading and getting ideas from for quite some time. Noah worked at Facebook and coordinated Community Next, as well as being the director of marketing at Mint.com.

His blog is filled with short, thought-provoking and call-to-action posts, which I find great. Anyways, without further ado, here is the interview.

1. How did you get into the fields of product management and marketing?

I got into the field when i started making web businesses in college, comegetused.com, collegeup (defunct), ninjacard.com. I had to market and PM which i guess was deciding how to build the websites.

2. As you have grown and taken on new projects (like Mint and CommunityNext), what has been one or two of the most important lessons you have learned in terms of marketing?

Marketing is 1 thing. who is your audience and how do you get a hold of them. secondly, is how to get your audience to help (want to) do the marketing.

3. From a marketing/promotion standpoint, what are some things that you always take into consideration when launching a new project (for example, creating hype for the product/service)

Build hype WAY before you ever need it.

4. On OkDork.com you state that you are interested in social networking and that you have worked at Facebook. Obviously, these sites deal with many thousands of users - is there anything of particular interest that you have learned by dealing with such a large volume of users?

Yeah, people love complaining. its hard to figure out what to do when you have so many people wanting so many things.

5. Do you have any essential tips, techniques, software, or resources that you think would be beneficial for new webmasters struggling to promote their sites?