Launch Fast, Nurture What Works, Kill What Doesn’t

Gregory Galant is the accidental head of a fast-growing social web empire. Galant is the founder of Sawhorse Media, the company behind Muck Rack, Listorious and the Shorty Awards, but he didn’t start out with the intent to build a media company with several brands. It all started with the Shorty Awards, which honor the best in social media. Now in their fourth year, and with recipients including Conan O’Brien and Neil Patrick Harris, Galant says the idea was never meant to become a business. “We built the site ShortyAwards.com in two weekends without any plans to turn it into a business,” he says. “We were surprised when it became a top trending topic on Twitter within 24 hours and we quickly got mainstream media coverage.” The first ceremony was a big success, which gave him the idea for Sawhorse’s other products.

The Shorty Awards spawned several other projects under what is now the Sawhorse Media umbrella. They include Twitter list tool Listorious, and Muck Rack, a database of journalists on Twitter. The projects are all focused on social media but take different formats, from awards to search engines to industry-specific tools. “They’re all about finding what matters on social media,” Galant says. “With 500 million people on social media, how do you find the right 50 to pay attention to? We do that with Shorty Awards by shining a spotlight on the top ones by category.” He says that after running the first Shorty Awards they ran out of food and drink in their press lounge after a crowd of journalists showed up, which led them to launch Muck Rack. Last year they built an internal tool to see what journalists were saying about the Shorty Awards, which led to the release of Muck Rack Pro last December. The service targets communications and social media professionals and helps them find journalists who are focused on their company or industry, create media lists and get press alerts.

Galant says any chance of taking a traditional nine-to-five job was eliminated after he started a website development company at age 14. “I had so much fun it ruined me for conventional employment.” He says one of the first startup lessons he learned was how quickly the world can change. “When I started I had to convince businesses why they should be on the Internet. Very quickly people stopped asking that question and only wanted to know what they should do on the Internet,” he says. “We’re seeing the exact same thing now with social media.”

In addition to his role at Sawhorse, Galant profiles entrepreneurs on his Venture Voice blog. Based on five years of interviews, he says there are very few things entrepreneurs have in common. “Some are introverts, other extroverts. Some love to plan and are highly analytical, others thrive by the seat of their pants,” he says. “But I did notice they’re all extremely persistent and willing to continue despite setbacks and failures.” Galant views his own web projects like TV pilots. “No matter how good you are at building products, there’s still a lot of unknowns from timing and hitting the cultural zeitgeist,” he says. “We maximize serendipity by launching products fast, nurturing the ones that work and killing the ones that don’t.”

Galant says that even though he recognized the power of the social web early in the hype curve, he finds it challenging to keep up with how quickly it’s changing. “We’ve needed to quickly rethink the Shorty Awards and Muck Rack as social media has come to mean more than just Twitter,” he says. As he navigates the ever-changing social web and his multiple online projects, Galant abides by one golden rule, which he says is also his biggest piece of advice for entrepreneurs. “Always make decisions from first principle, don’t over-rely on the advice of others.”

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