 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
OXDECAFBAD tries Technorati favorites with XOXO. Hey, it's my OPML Editor Manual, viewable online. Cool. Let's clean it up, finish it, and add links to all the groovy resources. The OPML Community Blog seems like an obvious place for it to live, using the Pages feature of Wordpress. Hey, I wanna get into the OPML Community Blog but something weird is happening -- I'm registering but I'm not getting an email with a password. This may be a problem on my end, I don't know. Gimme a boost over the fence! (psst you can send me a password at lisa AT cadence90 dotcom) Boston Startup Meetup Dear OPMLites: What follows are notes on a meeting of software startups at MIT. OPML might come up -- but it might not. Perhaps you want to eavesdrop, but if not, feel free to scroll on by. [Ah, to use my favorite platform for liveblogging -- works whether you've got internet access or not. I was chatting earlier today to TC Hansen that it was official: everyplace had free WiFi -- I was chatting in a salad bar. But here I am at MIT and there's no fscking wifi] Most here met at Startup School, a program sponsored by Ycombinator Ventures in 11/05 Hey, I'm not the only woman in the room. Kewl. First, pizza orders -- cheese, pepperoni, one call for a broccoli and mushroom, and a call for "meat on top of meat on top of meat, with extra steak" Alexis Ohananian is demoing Reddit.com, a Digg-like site where people volunteer stories First question: "How much of your content is sex-related?" Alexis: "Today's a sex heavy day. Um, usually not much." (For some reason the top story is "Gladiators were Pussies?!") "Practically, karma means nothing on our site -- except for the fact that users squabble about it, and in the beginning, that created some heat, because people were using the site a lot, adding and voting, to compete for karma. Internally, all we use it for is to foil spammers." Now we're working on "sub-Reddits" -- mostly each one is devoted to articles in a language. There's also a Reddit where users vote potential new features for Reddit up or down. Sub-Reddits have ads on the side, we might start putting ads on comment pages. Every listing has an RSS feed. Why not put them on the front page? "We just like it. We got used to how blank it looks." Are the google ads producing a lot of revenue? No -- because they're on very low traffic pages right now. They're exploring different advertising options. Another idea is to allow people to have their own subreddits -- their own page where stories would be getting voted up or down. Private reddits, people pay for hosting. Requests for licensing the reddit engine. Current users: 22,000 unique visitors a day, 200,000 pageviews. Written in: Originally written in LISP with an Apache out front, now in Python with ?? inaudible. Until a month ago all run off one cheap Celeron box -- $100/mo. Moving to three servers in Somerville that they own. Managed hosting has been a nightmare. Holy shit, I'm on the network. The Visitor login at the MIT network works. Monetization: "Ads are our last choice. But unfortunately that's the way that websites make money right now." Google is pretty dismal. One person points out that because Reddit is inherently "a jumble of content" probably Adsense ads are not all that relevant or interesting. Favorite direction for monetization: licensing the Reddit engine to other sites. Example: a Boston Globe reddit for Boston.com. How much time do you have before you have to monetize this? Steve: That's the great thing about our "poor college students" thing -- we actually are! Our burn rate is very low. Alexis: We get investment offers every day. (But they're turning them down). Q: Who are the other players, and who are the potential acquirers? Players: Digg (When we started, the question was, how are you different from del.icio.us?) "There are countless Digg clones, but not many significant ones." Interestingly, VCs like to see you making revenue, but acquirers like to see traffic -- they're acquiring users. Greenspun: You should be worth much more to Yahoo! and Google than to a VC, because they already know how to sell ads. Alexis: "Yeah, Google knows how to make money off of popular websites." Ray Deck: "But if that's the case, what you've got is not a company but a product -- you're not building a business, you're building a product to sell to somebody who will then make it into a business. You're sort of like a one-shot research lab that makes this product. My concern about the acquire route is that it's so incredibly high risk. [Lots of competition.] I've never seen anything that's so sticky that it's impervious to competition. This is interesting. Web 2.0 companies are like drug discovery companies -- small, most go out of business, some end up selling something to Pfizer for megabucks. Talking about: selling engine to news organizations. Steve says: a lot of the buzz around this kind of thing is about "taking control back from editors," but here you're positing us selling it to news organizations. (Yes: the two potential customers/acquirers are newspapers and Yahoo or Google. What does this mean? Yahoo and Google -- and the web more broadly -- are coming into direct competition with news organizations. Dharmesh Shah, onstartups.com, HubSpot "I mostly work with boring companies. When I started up my blog, I had 15 unique users -- and I was impressed with myself because I only know like nine people. Then my users jumped to 151 -- because someone nominated a story of mine on reddit. Then I got up to 450 -- because I was #1 on reddit for something like 73 minutes. On third startup, high ticket items to enterprises (enterprise software) recently sold company last year, now in 2nd year in Sloan/MIT Oh, lord, he's talking about CRM, ERP, etc. Flashbacks. Must have taken the bad acid. "Companies can make lots of money by focusing on a functional verticals (Siebel, SAP, Vignette) -- and they all did!" Then along came the SME market, like Salesforce.com, for customers who couldn't afford Siebel. The same way that Salesforce.com is disrupting Siebel "Oh, don't worry about us, we're only after these 100 person companies...we're way too simple..." but they creep up. And 80% of the customers don't need the nuclear sub of Siebel, anyway. SAP's SME competitor: Netsuite; Why do this? Because it's easy to make money! It's easy to eat Siebel's lunch! VSB market has been ignored -- 25 people or less companies. Why has it been ignored? Because it's hard! They're fragmented, the price points are so low that you need a ton of them to make it real. He says that the only way it will work is to make the functional box bigger -- CRM, ERP, and content management -- and say to customers, well, you don't need Salesforce.com, Quicken Online, and a separate thing to do your website and ecommerce -- we'll do it all. Only doing service firms (smart. Most small companies are service companies). Product companies have a presumption of growth -- so they don't try to go with low-end solutions. The nice thing with service companies, is that you can stay a 12 person law firm indefinitely, and HubSpot is still the right package for you. They'll be putting together ERP, CRM, and a CMS. They'll be using Wordpress or Drupal as the CMS. Technically, I don't really believe in outsourcing for startups. Because it's not a cost play -- We're using C# and SQL Server. Want to do it in house and use tender loving care. Most customers won't have any IT staff. Crowd member: "You could make that your ad campaign: "Fire your IT staff." Because the worst IT people work for the smallest companies." Shimon Rura, Voo2Do A task management and to-do list management site "Not a company yet -- just a project that I did in my spare time." "I made it to solve a personal problem for myself -- I was working at a software company and I was good at my work, but it was very difficult for me to be able to tell people how long it would take me to do something and be reliable about that." Inspired in part by "Joel Spolsky's Painless Software Development." Thinking about monetizing Voo2Doo Right now, there's just a PayPal button, and this puts a dent in the hosting fees. Moving to a service where hosting fees will be lower. Gotten job offers because of it, including his current job -- they were looking for someone who did good UI work and liked Voo2Doo. "Ads are kind of a problem, because all of the data for users is behind a layer of authentication, so I can't use AdSense to target ads." Has looked at varying types of advertising, but hasn't settled on one. Might try AdBrite. Premium subscription version. Some people have asked for some things that aren't practical to do in a free service. "Phillip: I like coaching and offshoring -- and I don't really think there's any software worth paying for. So I think you should combine this with offshore labor -- like coaching." Licensing for private use within a company. People have asked. What about using a task management system to be an eBay for skills? |
Last modified: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 at 11:17 PM.
Tech resources |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
