Recently Richard Moross, CEO of UK startup Moo.com, on the Guardian UK site outlined the kind of thinking startup founders may take in the downturn.
Be honest with yourself. Is this really a business? Is it really different? If the elevator pitch includes the words ‘Twitter’, ‘social network’ or ‘it’s web app X meets geek meme Y’ you probably need to rethink things - those days are gone. Today your idea needs to be super-relevant: do people actually need this, or are you just a solution looking for a problem?
Years of complacency have left many an apple cart ready to be tipped over. Startups that disrupt in a way that resonates with consumers and companies could emerge from this recession stronger than ever. Read more at gigaom.com |
There’s a movement afoot by investors to back web services with a real business model instead of the pervasive “give it away for free and hope for the best” approach that’s been in favor for the past four years. It’s much better, in my opinion, to go with the freemium model, give a version of the service away for free to all comers, get a lot of users, get good market feedback, then develop a premium version of the product/service for sale to enterprise customers. If your free version is popular with a lot of users, your customer base is the target for the upsell and you might be able to live without an expensive sales force initially. And, of course, keep your costs really low until you start to get revenues.
In summary, freemium is far from dead, in fact it may be the business model de rigueur. Go to the source
Fred Wilson writes a cliche of the week:
Patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some.
He continues:
“I have never seen patents make a business, but I have seen lack of patents hurt a business on many
occasions.
IP battles are like the cold war. Those who have patents can keep others honest because nobody wants to start a war that might end in everyone’s destruction. But those who have no patents are sitting ducks and don’t have the weapons to keep others honest.
My advice to entrepreneurs is always file a bunch of patents. But don’t expect they’ll ever do more than keep others at bay.” Go to the source
Bianchini said here Wednesday that Ning is gaining traction, minting a new social network every 30 seconds. That’s more than 86,000 per month on top of the nearly 500,000 social networks (65 percent actively used) already on Ning. Among those half a million sites, 3 percent are paying for premium services ($19.95 per month), which allow people to run their own ads and have their own domain. The company reserves the right to run ads on pages of the free service.Go to the source
social media startups that want to tap enterprise budgets need to deal with 5 big worries: 1. Unpredictable scaling issues. 2. Security against IP loss 3. Integration 4. Loss of productivity. 5. Accidental brand damageGo to the source
“League Dues” is a feature that Yahoo! Fantasy Football comes with in their premium package. Why is this relevant? Well, one idea we talked about is how to charge for Clogs. Using the “Dues” model, the person who sets up the clog would be able to manage payment from those who he/she invites to join a “custom” Clog…
Food for thought. The League Dues is managed by your league’s commissioner and helps your league monitor and maintain accurate records related to league fees. Can’t remember who has paid their league fees? Track it all here and call out the deadbeats. Go to the source
Let’s say you want to introduce your product on a certain date. Say on Monday because you are demonstrating your product at Demo or TC50. Well, you aren’t allowed to show off the product, right? So, what do you do?
Well, look at Causecast’s site.
What did they do?
1. It’s an attractive page.
2. It explains a bit about what’s coming. Compare to Usable.com, which is launching at Demo.
3. It asks you to join and makes an implicit promise to keep you connected.
4. It gives a way for potential business partners (and others like press) to get more info.
Clean, leaves a good first impression, and promises more info to come soon.
This is done pretty darn well. Go to the source
A journalist friend of mine once said about Google “they are a freak of a company, the best advertising business ever built is funding the largest collection of mad scientists ever assembled” I love that description of Google and have used it many times My personal goal this year is to get our firm completely off of the office suite and into the google suite Google understands that the infrastructure for the deployment and operation of web apps just isn’t there yet And so they are doing something about it in three important places.
1) They are building a modern browser, Chrome, that resembles an operating system as much as a browser 2) They are building a mobile operating system, Android, that is also designed for running web apps in a mobile environment 3) Google is all about the cloud It is on this three legged stool (browser, mobile, cloud) that Google’s future will be built. And sitting here today, it seems like they are well organized and have a great strategy for doing just that. Go to the source
Clipmarks heads the list of Browser Extensions…Nice Pop for Clipmarks. Note the competitors in this space. Browser Extensions & Addons ClipMarks is the premier online clipmarking tool. You can save chunks of any webpage and share them too. There’s a plugin for Firefox Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer.
iLighter is simply a tool that lets you highlight portions of any webpage. You can then save those highlighted pages to your own notebooks on their site.
Twitterlights works with your iLighter account. Whatever you highlight and save can be sent to your twitter account automatically.
Dappadis a Firefox extension that lets you create notebooks in the firefox sidebar for easy access.
Scrapbook is an extension that mimics Opera’s Notes feature. Cool features include highlighter and eraser.
WiredMarker is another extension that allows you to highlight parts of any website in different colors.
NetNotes is a Firefox add-on that lets you store notes on websites. Go to the source
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A POV on Startups in the Recession
