Chicisimo : using PR for community-building

Yesterday, we had a session with Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, founder of Chicisimo. Gabriel was here to talk a bit in general about his entrepreneurial story so far, and then specifically about using PR for a startup. In this case, the success or failure of Chicisimo hinges on it's ability to build a large and involved/active community of users. Good PR is key to this.

The most interesting things that I took away from the session were:-

Gabriel ventured into a business that he didn't 'get' at first. Can't blame him, Chicisimo is about young girls sharing their 'looks' and commenting on each other. Gabriel is quite far removed from this target segment !
But it doesn't matter if you don't really follow why do people behave in a certain manner online. What matters is that you think of a way to get 'em together on your site to continue doing whatever funky thing it is that they do, and then make money off it !!

Inspite of a PR background, Gabriel was emphatic on this - the product has to speak for itself. All other publicity is secondary.

And while still on the topic of publicity, it's imperative to figure out how best to influence your target segment.
In Gabriel's case, his target segment were the young fashionistas, who probably devoured fashion magazines and blogs. But these fashion journos and bloggers probably got pitched similar ideas every single day.
So Gabriel decided to go a step further, and pitched to people in his own circle of entrepreneurs, both here and in Silicon Valley. End result, Chicisimo got some buzz going for itself in the 'business of fashion' circles, and that drew in the fashion journos and bloggers like anything !