Fyre Festival
Imagine this.
You are a founder of a company that has a cool new app. You are in a great market and you knew some VCs to have been blessed with enough funding. You need to get the news about your app to a bigger set of audience. You decide that you will organize a huge, luxurious event, where famous people will be there. By this, you can get the word about your app in this event. You wish that you can get momentum out of this event and grow your app.
Sounds like a usual thing done in a growing your business.
But just one small problem. If all these things are built without on one small thing, trust or integrity, everything crumbles down like a house of cards.
This is exactly what is shown in the new Netflix documentary, Fyre.
It’s about a company founded by people who are famous, supposedly brilliant but basically charlatans. They tried to organize a music festival near the Bahamas. They promised great food, awesome parties with supermodels, luxurious stay in the sun-soaked private island. One minor blip: Nothing they promised happened.
The founder was ballsy enough to give an interview to the press that, “Hey, we tried to organize the great event. The v1 (version 1) of it just failed. Nothing else.”. When all the people, who paid for this event had complained and raised a lawsuit, he could just be out in bail.
During his time out, he even sent promo emails to all the people, who paid for Fyre festival about another Ponzi scheme. A luxury event or an exclusive event for people in NYC.
This movie is a good lesson for an Internet consumer on which influencer to trust, which hypes to buy in. Basically, how to spend wisely to get good experiences.
Because more than buying things, we are supposed to invest in experiences to be happy. Isn’t it?