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Posts tagged entrepreneurship
A Social Network for Entrepreneurs
May 18th
Efactor is the world’s largest entrepreneurial community, and it’s a great place to find resources on the organization’s four business pillars: find funding, gain knowledge, save costs, and gain revenue. With over 900,000 members in 168 countries, there are plenty of experts, investors, and fellow entrepreneurs for you to connect with and to find what
Are you happily married?
Apr 26th
They say that happily married couples begin to look like each other as they age and grow older. I don’t know how far that is true, but I do know for sure that getting the right co-founder(s) for your business can be as rewarding as the soul mate you may have found or may still be searching for.
It takes two to tango
Hewlett Packard, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Larsen and Toubro – look around and will be stunned by the number of legendary firms that have been built by two or more partners. There is a magic that comes alive when like-minded people come together to create an enterprise. Sure, there are businesses like Facebook or Apple that are one man armies, but if you speak to Marc Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, I am sure they would agree to some of these concepts:
Ownership:
The Soul of a Company rests with its founders. Sure, the heart lies with key executives and senior management but there is that critical heartbeat that only founders can emit. Pain is what founders feel whereas discomfort is what employees feel.
Ask any start up entrepreneur and she will understand. Hired folks who seem so dedicated and committed to your business suddenly become cold and unattached when it is appraisal time or even the weekend. It’s co-founders who have 2 hearts that beat simultaneously.
Race Tactics:
I often say that a start up is like a relay race. You run your course and then hand over the baton (Company) to the next runner (acquirer) who runs his lap. In reality, after the first lap, when the entrepreneur looks around for the acquirer, there isn’t anybody there. That’s when you need your partner to really take the lead so that you can slow down for a couple of laps at least.
I remember what Gaurav Deepak of Avendus Capital told me once. He said ‘Alok, when I get beaten down and am completely dispirited, I look forward to my partners to take over from me’. It’s similar to professional bicycle racing. The lead racer takes on the headwinds for a few laps and then slowly slips behind for the next biker to take the lead in rotation, always making sure that their team is leading.
I meet so many older generation and very successful entrepreneurs who run small and medium businesses. They have no co-founders and lead very sad lifestyles. They rarely take holidays, work almost all days in a year and seem so distanced from their families. They just haven’t understood the concept of co-owners.
Ditch the Horoscopes:
In the arranged marriage circuit, the easy way to drop the discussion for either the boy or the girl being matched together is to inform the mediator that ‘the horoscopes didn’t match’.
In my humble start up experience, my belief is that the similarity of the mindsets (more than training and skills) is what actually makes the value creation happen.
If your co-founders have the same set of principles, goals and dos and don’ts, then everything falls into place. It’s not about ‘I am the marketing guy and my co-founder is the tech guy’. It’s about a couple that THINKS in the same manner, even before doing.
Try this test – take Co-founders of a great Company into separate rooms and ask them ethically challenging questions – you will notice that their answers will be identical.
Role Playing:
There is a fine balance of role-playing in a relationship that works well. In the highly complex business world of today, you need clear demarcations of who is the aggressor- the person who fires and screams, the mild mannered founder – who should always be in front of the investors, the motivator – the leader and sure enough the partner who can call you in the middle of the night without any hesitation.
Study successful marriages carefully and you will see how beautifully role-playing is carved out. Couples quickly figure out their strengths and weaknesses and then distribute who does what as they start and raise their families.
In my businesses, I am the bad guy. The maniac, who loses his patience and just blows up like a fuse. But how do I get away with it? All thanks to my co-founders who balance my destructive behavior beautifully.
Sometimes it’s time to let go:
Sure, the best of relationships drift apart. Sometimes the departure can be ugly and sometimes just smooth and easy. The real challenge is to accept it and move on. I see folks clinging on to partnerships and co-founders who have stopped creating value and are actually destroying equity. It’s your role to step up and actually have the heart to tell your partner to move on.
Trust me, when you put on that Armor of Steel and let go, you will be so relieved by the burden that was crushing you and in a few months or years, your co-founder will thank you for the move.
Partners are what make life successful. Don’t ignore them.
[via Rodinhood]
Which floor are you on?
Apr 19th
I consciously notice the floors of the buildings that I visit and try to indentify the people who occupy these floors.
That’s where I see interesting patterns between management styles and the floors of buildings:
The Ground Floor
The people on the ground floor are ‘hands on’.
Mop in the hand, doing the dirty work. Sitting in an office that has no cabins. Talking to the people around them while trying to manage the crowds that come in. Quickly getting hot and tired. Blowing their fuse while trying to be civil. Just wanting to do everything themselves.
The challenge being on the ground floor is that it’s easy to lose perspective. You can’t elevate yourself and peep outside – to get a chance to view what’s new & happening in the big wide world outside or spot encroachments that appear dangerously near you. Your life begins and ends on the ground floor.
All the firms I work with and respect in my personal capacity – my PR & Travel agencies, Tax and Investment Consultants, etc. neatly fall in this category. The more the business leans towards ‘service’, the more it seems rooted on the ground floor. The owners of these ground floor shops are busy running their businesses while personally attending to demanding customers like myself. They rarely get a break to do ‘bigger’ things.
They are martyrs who are happy the way they are.
The 5th Floor
It’s that in-between, hanging, middle floor. Stuck between the ground floor and the top floors. If you operate from the 5th floor, you are involved in day-to-day ops and once in a while manage to get out and lean forward. You can leave your job or work unattended for say a week, before things go crazy.
It takes hard working people a while to reach the 5th floor. So it’s not even easy to abandon.
This also seems to be the ‘inflection’ floor for lots of entrepreneurs. You can get a view of the world outside and can really see where you stand in your current position and where you can reach.
In early 2008, I met an entrepreneur in San Francisco who ran a Photo Sharing website (piczo.com) for teen and tween girls. The business was fully funded by Sierra Venture Partners. Clearly, this Company and the entrepreneur were on the 5th Floor. The CEO could see the Facebook Tsunami hurtling towards him and yet could do very little to escape. He was so patient during our girls’ games discussion while silently acknowledging the death by drowning that awaited him.
My humble advise to those on the 5th floor is to stand on your window ledge and try to climb upwards. Do whatever you can to ascend that building even if it means using your bare hands & feet like Spiderman – with lots of hard work, prayers and hope thrown in. In the end, if you stumble and fall, it will be worth it because it’s better to launch again and aim for the to once again rather than getting stuck on the 5th floor.
The Club Floor (One below the top).
It’s the floor that belongs to those who have arrived. The kind of floor that’s always granted a special status. It’s the floor everyone wants to visit and check out. The occupants have the world at their feet, silently comfortable with the fact that they are living with one more floor above them.
Unfortunately, heights make some people nauseous. You have to have a strong demeanor to enjoy the height – while not falling sick.
I place Jerry Yang and Yahoo! at the Club Level. Both are cult brands and have attained a very lofty status. However the height of success made Yahoo dizzy. It fumbled. The mist surrounding that floor made Jerry Yang miss the big revolution of Search and Social and he along with his Company now remain humbled forever.
Say what you may, Yahoo will always remain an iconic media brand worth billions of dollars. They have their name etched in Gold on the ‘floor plan’ in the building lobby forever.
The Penthouse (with high speed elevators)
Google occupies the Penthouse. So does Facebook. Twitter and Linkedin will join them soon. These Penthouses come with special elevators, which are only meant for the owners of that floor.
The promoters of all these Companies have one amazing similarity – they ride their Penthouse’s high-speed elevators with a vengeance! One moment they are on the ground floor starting up new features and businesses from scratch – the next they are on the 5th floor reviewing what’s happened within the business and then, kaboom – they are back in their Penthouse doing mega deals.
Just look at the way Google monopolized search, bought Youtube, Admob and routinely buys businesses almost every week.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Marc Zuckerberg actually own not just the Penthouse but also THE Building. Each and every floor belongs to them and they are comfortable being on whichever floor the situation demands.
The Terrace (with the Helipad)
Rupert Murdoch and Steve Ballmer come to my mind when I think of Terraces with Helipads.
They have the Capital to ‘land’ anywhere, arrive on top of any building as they please and then buy it if they want. ‘Hey – the MySpace building looks interesting; let’s just buy the damn thing. I like this tower called ‘Search’. Let’s just call it Bing.com and party like never before.’
The guys on terraces with helipads fly out when they feel like. One building more or less doesn’t mean anything for them. Observe how MySpace is crumbling and Bing.com is going nowhere. Now look carefully and see that the party is getting wound up as the helicopter’s pilot is whipping up his blades to fly the owners to the terrace of another building.
The Murdochs and Ballmers of the world can never repeat the glory of starting at the Ground Floor and climbing to the Penthouse. They are too spoilt and old.
The Terrace (without a Helipad)
ADAG and the Sahara Group are on terraces, which, unfortunately, don’t have a Helipad.
Their buildings are on fire (ADAG earned the distinction of being the ultimate wealth destroyer last year).
All the floors (see the businesses of these groups) have major problems on them. There are leaks, foul smells and a general rot in their buildings. Sure, from the outside they still look attractive, but those are pretty looking scaffoldings that will soon unravel.
ADAG ‘inherited’ the building with all the floors which is surrounded by crooks and sycophants whose interest is only in looting the furniture and valuables of the building and then take off (Career plan for the unambitious – join ADAG for few years, make a salary of a lifetime and then quit happily ever after).
Such buildings are not only self-destructive but also dangerous – they will ruin the buildings around them when they fall.
Finally, given that we have traveled from the Ground Floor to the Terrace, the point to ponder is not to get stuck on the floor that you are on but to make sure you carefully move UP from whichever floor you are on.
[via Rodinhood]
Eleven Learnings I swear by!
Apr 13th
It’s been some fun filled years as a ‘digital’ entrepreneur. With a couple of good hits, some misses and a few big bets, I have chuckled, cried and framed these 11 learnings to carry with me all my life.
1. Just an ‘Idea’ is worth a ‘dropped cricket catch’
An idea by itself, despite its greatness, is worthless. Nada. Zilch. It’s all about massive and backbreaking execution. When I founded Contests2win in 1998 (first ever brand contesting site in the world), I thought that my idea would take the world by storm. Nothing of the sort happened. It took me a good 2 years just to convince people to meet me so that I could explain the idea!
I purposely say ‘dropped cricked catch’ because not executing a great idea can be as painful as dropping a cricket catch – you will not be able to forgive yourself. Example – the Winklevoss twins who had the original ‘facebook’ idea and innocently assigned someone else (hmmm…we know who) to execute it.
2. Don’t be a textbook.
Even God would be confused if she examined the crazy and unpredictable entrepreneurial world carefully. No one understands how some concepts become such global hits and neither can one analyze why the most brilliant ideas and execution failed. For example, I used to ‘check in’ once in 2 months in a hotel room on my travels. So, if you told me to ‘check in’ to my own house on an Internet map twice a day, via my mobile phone in return for virtual ‘ownership’ of my own home, I would have laughed at you like a jackass. Today I check into my home address like a fiend on Foursquare and fight like a marine to preserve my ‘mayorship’.
Don’t go by theories and textbook case methodologies while planning your business. Just take your best shot at your great idea and execute like hell. Then whether it snows or shines, it won’t matter.
3. Be ready to build the Suez Canal
It took 10 years to build the Suez Canal and it takes the same time to build a business from scratch. Even the biggest stars in the Galaxy – Yahoo, Facebook and Google were built painstakingly. Makemytrip.com (a star Indian travel portal) took 12 years to IPO. If you have the misconception that you can build a great idea into a huge business and then hope to exit in a couple of years and buy an island, I suggest you take a boat trip to the island and buy a shack. It will be the faster way of getting there and owning something on it.
4. Don’t play Rambo.
Unlike Rambo, trying to beat the world alone would kill you. Find a team that not only compliments you but also is better than you. They will allow you to – get financing; sleep at night and also get acquired. And sure, if you are a brilliant hermit and just can’t stand people, then write haiku poetry. At least that will help you attain nirvana.
5. Go back to the Altar and Marry again – this time your co-founder.
A VC recently shared an interesting joke with me. He mentioned that since a start-up venture takes 7-10 years to build into a Company of significance and given the fact that an average American marriage lasts about 5 years, the co-founder becomes more important than the spouse!
Employees are those whom you hire and can fire.
A co-founder is someone who can hire and fire YOU.
6. VCs are like God Parents
VCs are good godparents. They are rich, experienced, and very well connected. They can get things done. They have ‘seen the world’. VCs have a method of working and sometimes can be rightfully conservative in matters of corporate responsibility and ethics. VCs also demand respect and are selfish for your ‘Company’ (pun intended). So, go to VCs, explain to them your needs and then choose them very carefully (yeah, unlike parents, you can actually choose these godparents).
Be more honest with them than you can be with your spouse or your parents. And be patient with them. Make your ‘Company’ work for them and win along the way.
7. Spend your money like it’s a debt from Don Corleone
Think of all the investments (your own and that borrowed from VCs) in your start-up as debts that need to be paid back to Don Coreleone (of Godfather fame). You know what he does when you don’t pay him back.
I am not suggesting not to spend money – I am saying spend cash with ‘returns’ in mind – calculated on everything you spend on. The returns may be revenue generating or for creating assets that can be valuable later. But don’t spend on vapor coz that is something Don Coreleone will cut your throat for.
8. Enjoy a slice of Cake. And let others eat it too.
Imagine hosting a birthday party, inviting lots of friends over, cutting a large cake and then refusing to share it!
Don’t fight over equity dilutions. Give enough to Investors, partners and especially your employees so that the party becomes meaningful. If you have a meaningful exit after a few years, the slice that you kept for yourself (oops ate) will be worth more than the effort you put in!
9. Be a mechanic. Dirty your hands
When I joined my father’s factory and asked him a technical question, he didn’t know the answer. He had to ask his ‘jobber’. I didn’t like that and I traveled to Italy to become a ‘jobber’ myself. That greasy, dirty, hands-on experience on knitting machines partially made me who I am today.
Learn the nitty gritty of your business before you hire people to run different aspects of the venture for you. That will help you to understand the moving parts of your business and fix things immediately when they break down.
10. Go to a movie everyday
Going to work should be like going to a movie everyday. And here I am not exaggerating the emotion. Even on the darkest days of all start-ups and businesses, there is a pleasure of having done ‘something’ that felt nice, worth it or just painful pleasure. No matter what the result. If you can’t enjoy your work and it’s become like some crappy job, then you need to press the reset button.
11. Don’t be Marc Zuckerberg. Be your ‘Ownbook’.
Businesses, like people, have a destiny of their own. So many factors working within and out of your control can create successes like you never dreamt of or will just bust you.
Emulating someone and hoping that you can be ‘as’ or ‘more’ successful than him or her is a complete waste of time and emotion. Do your utmost best, be humble to everyone, tackle every challenge that comes your way and respect your circumstances. Then, if it works – wow! If it doesn’t, try again.
You and I, and every entrepreneur will have our own book to write. Who cares what it’s called and how many pages are in it?
[via Rodinhood]
Win $500 in services for your startup
Mar 30th
Elance, an online marketplace for freelancers, freelance agencies, and businesses to negotiate independent contracts, is sponsoring a contest for startups to win $500 in services and professional help. Known as the Startup Cloud Contest, services up for grabs include logo design, website development, market research, social media, or legal advice. The contest is also part of a new feature of Elance called Startup Cloud, designed to provide entrepreneurial advice and other small business advice.
Folks can enter the contest anytime between March 28, 2011 and June 28, 2011. Include any links to videos, assets, etc. to provide additional details about your company or startup idea. Only one entry allowed per contestant, and contestants must be an Elance member in order to enter (it’s free to become a member). Three winners will be chosen over the course of three months. One winner with the most compelling story will be selected and announced by Elance on April 30, 2011, May 31, 2011 and June 30, 2011, receiving the $500 credit for Elance services towards upcoming projects.
A recent study by Kauffman Foundation found that entrepreneurs are building startups at the highest rate in 15 years, and they are choosing to go into business alone instead of hiring employees. According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, a leading indicator of new business creation in the United States, 0.34% of American adults created a business per month in 2010, for a total of 565,000 new businesses. That rate remained consistent with 2009 and represents the highest level of entrepreneurship over the past decade and a half.
Not only is this time of the Great Recession a great time to hire, but it’s also a fruitful time for folks to create their own jobs by starting their own businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity for services to start and to grow your startup.
Entrepreneur Advice: Madam, Are you Pregnant?
Mar 29th
We had established a 30 odd headcount office in Shanghai in early 2001 and were steadily ramping up our operations as Mobile2win, China. Contests2win and Softbank were the original investors and we were operating under strict Mainland China’s government’s guidelines.
As the paperwork increased, we began looking around to hire secretarial staff. As soon as we had spread the word, we intriguingly began receiving resumes of many women – all in their twenties, married and well settled. One afternoon, one of our rather talkative and assertive Sales Head took me in confidence and revealed something quite chilling – He said that all those women who had applied were actually pregnant and were applying for jobs, that they could lock into and then claim maternity benefits as per the dictated statutory guidelines. This was a standard ploy of gaining ‘free employment’ and we should be avoid falling into such traps.
Simultaneously, I was pavement pounding the streets & meeting clients in frozen China. I had a strange situation on my hands. Across Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, large Chinese local Brands dominated the marketing scene and were big budget spenders. Sure, the Fortune 500 brands were around, but the Chinese brands made quick spend decisions on Internet marketing and were lucrative customers.
The only problem was that all these Chinese brand managers expected ‘gifts’ to be left behind for them. It was not money but surely enough a bribe in exchange for business. My local Chinese team members who accompanied me told me, ‘Sir, this is the way business is done in China’.
Both the cases above presented ethical dilemmas to me. They forced me to walk the tight rope of being ‘righteous’ vs. ‘practical’, ‘academic’ vs. ‘practical’ and most importantly a ‘rigid businessman’ vs. a ‘practical one’.
Was I supposed to ask the ladies who came for the interviews indirect questions leading to figuring out if they were indeed pregnant? Pretend that we needed men secretaries’ because they might be required to work the night shift?
In my meetings with the local Chinese firms, was I supposed to carry gifts bought in China and pretend they were from India and just hand them over as a token of friendship?
This blog post examines the challenges of ethics and principles in entrepreneurial and start up life.
Don’t become a cheat if someone cheats you.
Very recently, in one of the group Companies, my COO and I had vocally assured a newly recruited Business Development executive (21 years old, 15k monthly salary) that she would be compensated for the value of ‘barter’ deals that she bought into the company.
Just after a few television spots in return for a couple of web pages, she produced a commission statement of Rs 81,000 for just the first month!! I first thought she was confused but quickly understood she had the mind of a cheat.
All she had done was reproduced the top ‘rack rate’ (stated nominal value) of the media of the TV spots we had received as barter (Rs. 40 lacs), without considering that the value we had provided in exchange to the channel was actually only Rs 1 lac . This rack rate is the typical exorbitant rate you see at the back of a hotel room door (for statutory purposes) – despite you having paid less than half for it. I logically tried to explain to her that Companies exchange the ‘true’ value of goods in the end – so despite the printed rate of the media value being 40 lacs, since we had provided the channel value of just Rs 1 lac, the TV spots we had received were also worth 1 lac since that inventory was unsold by the channel! Simply explained, if I gave you a ball point pen and took another one in return from you, the real value exchanged was Rs. 10(actual value of buying the ball point pen). Sure, as a kid (or better as cheats), I can pretend that my ball point is worth Rs 400 by putting a sticker on it but I was still exchanging it with you for Rs 10! (And hence I am not a kid –just a fraudster).
She insisted that she be compensated on this ‘notional’ value of 40 lacs- given the commitment made to her.
We paid her without any more discussion and surely ‘relieved’ her of her post also.
The lesson here is that we DID not stoop down to cheating even though we were cheated upon. There was no written agreement we had with her for this payment and could have easily refused to pay but we did not.
Why did we pay her?
Because these situations test the principles and the moral fiber of a Company. There is no other way of ‘testing’ where you stand on ethics without such real situations!
In the evening, I chuckled and thought of the 80k paid as fees for an expensive GMAT test of Integrity – whose results thankfully were instantaneous and on which we had received a perfect score!
Being practical.
A couple of years ago, a labor inspector arrived in our office to check our provident fund records. To his utter disappointment, he found that everything was perfect and hence there was no scope for a bribe.
He still insisted on a ‘gift’. When we refused, he did the unthinkable – he sat down on the visitor’s sofa and refused to move. Not just the first day but 3 days in a row!
On the 4th day, tired of having an ugly, smelly owl in our pristine office, we paid him some cash and bid him a happy departure.
I found it practical to bend my ethics a bit in return for the sake of sanity and the healthy atmosphere of the office!
Taking a bullet
A few months ago, one of my ex co-founders ‘informally’ partnered with c2w (contests2win) to launch some niche vertical sports sites.
He came from a real world economy and had lost touch with the digital media world for over 5 years. He spent months in our office learning the ropes, getting lots of art and programming development work done and just leveraging the entire resources made available to him.
A few weeks before launch, this partner took me in a conference room and declared that he had new ‘views’ on the partnership %’s that were earlier agreed upon and that he was not happy to stick to the original commitment.
We had this meeting at 12:58 pm. I told him that I would think about it and revert. At 1:01 pm, I wrote a mail to him saying that there was a fracture in our business thinking and hence the deal would not be possible.
He offered to buy out what we had made in terms of the product, but we took a call and swallowed a Rs 25-lacs hit (actual cost of time and money) rather than selling out on our ethics and principles.
In this case, we made the gun & the bullet and trained the shooter – only to have him shoot us in the face.
The satisfaction was going home with the headline that we don’t SELL principles, but only our services. And they cannot be bartered!
So how did we deal with the China situation?
I did not heed my China Sales head’s warning and continued with our interviews. Amongst the 3 ladies short-listed, we finally selected a simple, homely (and possibly pregnant) lady.
9 months later, there was no baby.
I later found out that the Sales Head was trying to place a couple of his cousin brothers in the Company and hence had fabricated the entire story!
As far as the Chinese brands went, we did not work for them. Instead we focused on the Fortune 500 brands and won strong business from them – leading to Siemens investing into the Company in 2003 and the Walt Disney Company buying out Mobile2win China in 2006. Neither Siemens nor Disney would have touched us if we had started bribing our way into business.
Mao said – behind every great fortune, there is a great crime.
Rodinhood says – Inside every great entrepreneur throbs an ethical heart.
[via Rodinhood]
Trunk.ly indexes links into personal search engine
Mar 19th
The burning question for any startup: Do people care? With the new Melbourne-based startup Trunk.ly, people certainly care. Trunk.ly is a new type of social bookmarking service that focuses on automatically collecting and indexing links that are shared across the web. It hasn’t about a month since the initial launch and users are lining up to contribute in any way they can.
“We have passionate users,” said Trunk.ly co-founder Tim Bull. “They’re writing extensions to our ecosystem, like browser extensions and plugins. We even have two users developing an iPhone application.”
Bull would not disclose exactly how many users there are on Trunk.ly, but said it’s “in the thousands.” When we spoke with Bull in February, he said that Trunk.ly has indexed over 7 million links and averages an additional 3 million links per week. But the fact that Trunk.ly has already resonated with its users is nothing short of phenomenal.
“Guys and girls are excited,” Bull said. “Our strategy is to make data open and accessible so it’s good for them and it’s good for us.”
Trunk.ly’s strategy had to come together quickly, as Bull said the startup was originally planned for a January 2011 launch. However, when Yahoo! announced in December that it will ends its connection with Delicious, Bull and his co-founder Alex Dong saw an opportunity they couldn’t miss.
“It’s about not being afraid to throw something out prematurely,” Bull said. “People were actively looking for bookmarking solutions and we wanted to reach that mainstream audience.”
Elephants Never Forget
Trunk.ly ensures that no link that’s shared is forgotten, whether that link is one that a user shared or one that was shared with a user. In fact, Bull said the name Trunk.ly is based loosely on the idea of never forgetting, like the trunk of the elephant that never forgets or storing tons of memories in a storage trunk. Trunk.ly remembers the 7 million links that’s been shared by storing them on servers, and at one point had 10 cloud servers via Amazon EC2 in order to handle all those links initially coming in. Only recently has the start up had the time to “consolidate and catch up,” such as optimising those 10 cloud servers into a single box server.
“In the beginning, you do what you can to make things work,” co-founder Tim Bull said. “But it’s expensive to run all those servers.”
Bull said the new box server has 30 times the capacity of the 10 cloud servers, so there’s minimal risk of lost links or overcapacity happening anytime soon.
Future plans for Trunk.ly include finding angel investors (up to this point Trunk.ly has had zero funding!), fixing bugs, and responding to feedback from those passionate users.
“It’s an active community. We want to keep it a two-way street.”
Startup Talk: Appsplit wants to create a massive app marketplace
Mar 17th
We are seeing this as a trend now. When there are too many things to be sold what’s more better than a marketplace? But where there are 500,000 apps available for purchasing, it takes a whole new twist. A few good apps bubble up to the top and the rest get left out sinking to the bottom. All that siad, the app business is so lucrative that more developers want to dive headlong into the app scene without a second thought.
In tha pst we had featured Appbistro – a startup trying to create a marketplace for facebook apps. Today we are featuring Appslit – a startup that wants to create a marketplace for iOS, Android, Blackberry, WebOS and Facbook apps. Technically speaking, the concept is quite simple but Appslit has a whole new angle to it. While the startup allows developers to sell apps at wholesale rates to potential buyers it also allows app developers to work with Appsplit on making a product successful, for a cut of course. This is a brand new way to attract developers to submit and let Appsplit (called the Split program) manage apps that may or may not sell too well while looking out for potential whole sale buyers. This way appslit is doubling up as an app marketing consultant and borderline investor – taking anywhere between 40% to 60% of app profits based on the contract period.
Stratups such as these bring to my mind questions about sustainability of single owner apps. Yes, there is an opportunity to grow thanks to the ever growing consumer and manufacturing base for mobile phones and the ever growing user base of facebook. However, there is also a need for liability sharing in the app developer’s invetments since there are too many apps put there. This is what Appbistro is doing. Taking a share of the liability in an app’s journey to success is a great way to encourage development of new innovative apps.
All this said, we believe that there is space for a bunch of app marketplaces in the ecosystem as single the Android market and Apple Appstore get crowded. All this given, an intermediary who can manage risk certainly helps.
Startup Talk: Now sell off those group deals you bought and did not use through sellmydeal.com
Mar 16th
This day had to come. It’s an almost predictable cycle for products. Once you have something and cannot use it, sell it. Marketplaces prop up everywhere when there is second hand stuff that can be sold. Craigslist should get you up to speed with the size of the second hand market.
Now sellmydeal.com wants to help you sell off your unused discount coupons you got from group buying sites like Groupon. Why this sudden flash of genius? Well, numbers talk. Apparently 20% of all group bought coupons never get used. So why not just sell it to someone at a reduced price compared to the reduced price you paid for it already? In the end the second hand consumer benefits from this sale. Sellmydeal also sends out a daily newsletter to make your second hand coupon hunting even more of a breeze. Depreciation rocks or what! Whatever be the case we can almost predict that there will be hundreds of sellmydeal clones very soon if Groupon and Livingsocial don’t already have plans to start off a second hand delas marketplace. These guys support deal hunting in almost all major cities in the US and Canada. Watch this startup!
Startup Talk: Publishedin brings non-commercial referral revenue to bloggers and publishers alike
Mar 15th
For too long now, bloggers and publishers have written honest words about companies and businesses without any expectation of reward. Publishedin wants to change all that. Publishedin is an Israel based startup that wants to put referral rewards into the hands of every blogger and online publisher just for writing about a business or a company that they naturally write about (Ideabing writes about startups).
This is how it works – the publisher installs a small snippet of tracking code from publishedin on the website. Publishedin then tracks clicks going out of the website and reports it on the publishedin control panel. The publisher then invites those businesses to sign up on publishedin so that the referring content starts getting rewarded by the beneficiary for the amount of traffic that has been sent out. Think of it as a “reward per click” program. Simple enough?
So how does it change things for publishers and bloggers? Publishedin has setup an active paid referral system for scribes who would otherwise have not bothered to ask the referee to pay for referrals since it’s natural online content. Publishedin allows publishers and bloggers command more respect by telling the business “look, we have written nice things about you, why don’t you reward us”. Another trouble that the writer does not have to go through is contacting these businesses asking them if they would be interested in signing up for a referral program. The answer would almost always be a no. This way publishedin is creating a brand new monetizing mechanism without the hard work of cold calling and cold emailing by the publisher. What we are skeptical about is wether the end businesses care enough about online media to sign up for such a service since blogs are essentially free to use media for PR agencies. Let’s see how this startup goes on into the future.
