Celebrities are just people who want to be involved in really interesting projects, so if you give them the opportunity, they'll talk about your product.
We've been really fortunate. We launched our location-based commerce platform at Startup Weekend in L.A. where a number of celebrities started tweeting about our company right away. In fact, before we even had a product, 85 percent of our site's traffic was probably driven by celebrity tweets from Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher (now an investor) and LeVar Burton of StarTrek fame.
That's great for building buzz when you're in development but then it's all about producing a quality product. These days, less than 10 percent of our web traffic comes from celebrity endorsements. And celebrities certainly didn't play a role in helping us raise $15 million in financing. But we've had a lot of high profile people talk about Zaarly in ways that have been really beneficial.
The recession hurt Rosana Santos Calambichis's frozen-food business. The company recovered and recently Big Chef made its first million in revenues.
