No one knows much about what German startup Popula is building. But German tech blogs can’t stop writing about their pre-launch video marketing gimmick.
The Popula home page says (in German) only “Popula is an event calendar of all for all. Whether party, concert or children’s birthday. Here you will find what you are interested. Register now and test!” People who’ve email them for more information hear nothing back. All visitors can do is enter their email address and wait for more information. Or, they can read the Popula blog, which has just three entries.
Two of those three are the videos linked above, titled The Early Adopter Song! (Part 1) and The Early Adopter Song! (Part 2), featuring songs about early adopters and beta testers, along with images of bloggers, entrepreneurs and other people in the startup community.
German bloggers can’t stop posting the videos and speculating about what the service might be. And all those links are creating enough buzz and driving enough traffic to the unlaunched site that it’s almost as large as some competitive startups (Alexa thinks it has a larger reach than Socializr, for example). And since the company won’t respond to email inquiries, the speculation grows.
Would the same gimmick work in the U.S.? No – people might think it was entertaining but it likely would be drowned out in the noise of startup news (I think it would have worked in 2005 though). But in Germany, a which has a much smaller tech startup community and an odd taste when it comes to entertainment, it seems to have hit a nerve.
Thanks to Jessica Neuhaus for the tip.