Shashi had the opportunity to sit down with Laurie Smithwick at the Powerful Solutions for Small Businesses – Free Networking Event with Guy Kawasaki & Network Solutions in Charlotte, NC
. Laurie is a dynamic and smart entrepreneur who is the co-founder of sk-rt.com which runs the site Kirtsy.com. According to her bio, which is really funny and worth a mention “Laurie Smithwick was a bona fide tomboy who didn’t voluntarily wear a skirt until she was in the 7th grade. Now she has lovely twin redhead daughters who wear nothing but skirts and dresses. That’s called irony. Laurie blogs at Upside Up (where there is no dress code), and in her free time she and her clever husband run LEAP Design, a can-do graphic design studio in North Carolina. She likes collecting good things, telling good stories, being amazed, and jumping into cold water without feeling it first. She does not like to brag. Nonetheless she is very proud of having been nominated for a Grammy award in 1998. She didn’t win, but she got to wear an awesome purple velvet dress that made her feel real girly.”

Here are some highlights from the interview which is embedded at the end of this post:

Loving Digg but seeing an opportunity in the marketplace

Laurie and many of her friends used Digg and thought it was a great concept. However, if any of you have been to the site, it is primarily a tech focused site with the audience being predominately male. Digg revolutionized the concept of “Social News” and there have been many clones of the site that didn’t add a whole lot of value to the social media landscape. Laurie and her co-founders looked around and while there were good blogs out there for women there was no, as she likes to call it, “Digg for Chicks”. So Kirtsy.com was born.

Power of Social Media

Laurie talks about how in the past this kind of content would have been shared with friends via e-mail as those “cool links” e-mails that fill our inboxes. When they built Kirtsy.com they did a soft launch, which is essentially putting the site out there without a lot of fanfare. Ironically, the site has grown due to the power of social media with a mention on Digg that brought so much traffic it crashed their site. Talk about irony.

The power of Social Media has transformed the site into a global presence with traffic coming from the US, Europe and Australia. As word of mouth grows, more countries are utilizing this “Digg for Chicks” and loving its relevancy and global reach.

What is also different about this site from a social news site like Digg is that it has editors where the competition relies just on the public to submit and let the law of popularity take effect. This has been a problem with groups of people “gaming” Digg to their advantage. Kirtsy.com avoids that by making sure there is some management of the channel and contribution of relevant content to make sure the site keeps its appeal and relevancy.

Two things you need to do to grow your site

Go viral

As Laurie mentioned previously, their soft launch and word of mouth approach has allowed their site to grow in spurts and not have a huge wave (the Digg post being the exception) that has them flying high and never growing beyond their initial push. Mentions from key bloggers like Guy Kawasaki has been instrumental in helping start these growth spurts.

Attend conferences

The other way they are seeing growth spurts is having the co-founders and editors attend conferences to promote the site. Whether it be speaking, sitting on a panel or just spreading the word in the hallway, it seems to have a positive impact on making those growth spurts happen.

What the future holds…

We expect to see great things from Laurie and her team to really go all the way to the top and create another success story for women entrepreneurs. Men and women alike can learn from her sage advice on growing a site without a lot of up front capital, building something that the market needs and growing it at a fast yet managable pace. We expect to see the site continue to evolve and get more popular than it already is. If you haven’t already, make a visit to Kirsty.com and as viral marketing goes “tell your friends, so they tell their friends, and so on”.