I was going to simply update my earlier post on nominees for Black Enterprise’s 11th Annual Small Business Awards with a mention of Tap It FAME, an online showcase for musicians, models, artists and entertainers that is nominated in the Business Innovator of the Year category, but then I took a closer look at the site.
I think it might well be a fine service but, in the May issue of Black Enterprise (p. 46), the description of the company describes the creator Jonathon Alexander stating that they are "on target to list 30,000 artists in his database by mid-2006." But I can’t even find a hundred artist’s listings based on browsing all the categories.
Maybe I’ve missed something but I’m getting a real flashback on Russell Simmons’s radically inflated stats regarding Phat Farm sales that were intended to boost the public perception of his brand. Simmons was able to get away with that because those figures weren’t public. Tap It FAME’s database is their business so that means that such claims can be checked out fairly easily.
Of course, the 30,000 is a prediction related to the future given prior to BE’s publication but to be considered "on target" for 30k by this summer, you’d expect at least a few thousand rather than less than a hundred.
Not a good look for a new company, in my rarely humble opinion.
Update: I’ve had a brief email exchange with Tap It FAME’s CEO Jonathon Alexander and we’re going to talk a little more in the next couple of days. Suffice it to say that whether or not his projections turn out to be accurate, he is doing more than meets the eye to build the site and I’ll do a follow up soon.
Related: Jonathon Alexander on Tap It FAME
