Startup and Entrepreneur News

There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10’000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions.

Since I have started two such businesses already, here are thirteen tips from my own experience.

What to build

1. Build for someone specific

It’s very tempting to create a product for the widest audience. “Everyone can use our product, therefore if even a tiny proportion use it, we’ll be rich!” Beware the generalised product. If your product is not built for anyone in particular, it will not be good for anyone in particular. The worst possible market for a product is “small businesses on the web”.

On the other hand, if you build something that is directly useful for even just one real human being, chances are there will be others like that user and your product will have some success.

2. Don’t be afraid of targeting a narrow niche

Niches have numerous advantages. There’s less competition in niches, which means that your marketing dollars will go further to get you new customers. It’ll be easier to target likely buyers since there are probably already channels (blogs, magazines, trade shows) targeting that niche, that you can make use of.

Niches also tend to be very badly served in today’s world. If you look into almost any niche you will find a plethora of awful products that are just begging to be replaced by something better suited. Being able to build great products cheaply is a fairly recent development, and most pre-existing businesses have had to make do with duct-taped, poorly conceived solutions that are begging to be replaced. The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success.

3. Solve a real problem that costs money

As DHH pointed out, the way to realistic profitability is not through gathering an outrageous number of eyeballs, but through creating a product that people are willing to pay for. The easiest way to get someone to loosen their purse strings is to convince them that using your product will pay for itself

Full Story Here http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creating-a-successful-new-online-product/

ATLANTA — Hundreds of young Atlanta women are signed up on a Web site that some critics are calling total exploitation. The founders call it free enterprise. And just about everyone Channel 2 showed it to called it shocking. It’s called MyFreeImplants.com and it’s a donation site for young women who want free breast implants. But it’s what they do to get the big money that’s troubling for some.

“Everyone uses sex to sell. That’s what this really is. It’s marketing and this is America,” said MyFreeImplants.com founder Jay Moore.

MyFreeImplants.com is a business venture hatched at a bachelor party in Las Vegas to help young women raise thousands of dollars for breast augmentation surgery through online donors.

The Web site has taken off. Five-thousand women are now signed up. One woman took her bid for new breasts to YouTube.

The surgery isn’t cheap. It’s usually $4,000 for silicon implants and $5,000 for saline. The money is held in an account until the goal is reached and then sent directly to the surgeon selected.

But it’s how the women get the donations that is raising some people’s eyebrows.

Read Whole Article http://www.wsbtv.com/news/16061686/detail.html

Today turns out to be the twenty year anniversary of when George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs.  In the post, ”February 3, 1986: Divorce, Mogul Style,” Chris Seibold tells how Lucas decided to “see a smallish piece of his Lucas Film empire” to raise cash to settle his divorce.  Given Lucas’ predicament, Steve Jobs was able to bring Lucas’ initial asking price of 30 million dollars to 10 million. 

For years, the company Steve Jobs called a hobby was little but a serious money pit. Unexpectedly, Pixar became the source of the majority of Steve Jobs’ immense wealth after an extremely successful initial public offering. It was this month in 1986 that Steve first acquired the hobby that eventually paid off big.

On January 24 of this year, Disney announced paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar.  Jobs will be on Disney’s board of directors, and two executives from Pixar will head the new Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and lead the creative vision.  See ”Disney buys Pixar” at CNET for more. 

The takeaway for my Web 2.0 readers?  On the one hand, be careful of the decisions you make when you’re in financial need (eg. startups trying to cash-out).  On the other, your hobby (eg. your “little web app”) may sometimes become much more than that, but only if you take it seriously.

http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/twenty-years-later-no-longer-just-a-hobby/

Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million).

Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly.

Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000.

That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web.

“You never know when something like this is going to go away,” Mr. Kedersha said. “I better ride the wave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/technology/23howto.html?em&ex=1209441600&en=feb7bd02817e4a02&ei=5087%0A

When Chris Clark bought Pizza.com for $20 in the mid-1990s, he never expected that almost 15 years later, the seemingly benign domain name would sell for $2.6 million.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/16/AR2008041602014.html

Sean Stafford was a support representative at Louisville-based Modern Gigabyte when his idea led to the founding of the domain name platform company DNZoom (Domain Name Zoom) in June 2007.

He is now director of product development for DNZoom, which was acquired on Feb. 18 by the Delray Beach Fla.-based online bidding site BIDO.

He is an investor in LouisvilleVP (venture partners), which was founded last month. The company is developing a new music platform, Band.org, which will link bands and musicians with musical enthusiasts.

Stafford’s book, “Domain Graduate: Tapping the Online Mines,” was launched in electronic form on Jan. 15. It sells for $87 at www.domaingraduate.com.

The book has made Stafford something of a cyber-world celebrity in Australia and Europe, and he is a sought-after domain name speaker there.

Web companies Sedo.com and Fabulous.com use Domain Graduate to train their new employees. An expanded version is to be published in book form by early 2009.

http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2008/04/07/story13.html?b=1207540800^1615444

THE e-commerce bandwagon bypassed millions of carpenters, massage therapists, lawyers and other service providers, mostly because it is impossible to drop an appointment into a shopping cart without unleashing a scheduling nightmare.

Now that a set of Internet start-up companies has emerged to help solve this problem, though, small businesses could start using the Web as more than just an online brochure. And while the category is too new for analysts to handicap with much confidence, there are signs it could gain a significant following.

“This is something that’s been needed for a while, but no one has been able to do it successfully,” said Greg Sterling, of Sterling Marketplace Intelligence, an online consultancy. “With these new services, there are a lot of circumstances where it can work quite well for both the business and the consumer.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/technology/31ecom.html?ref=smallbusiness

I saw this on MSNBC . It is an interesting business

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23098673/

Prevent sidejacking .. That is people can see and copy and steal what your doing when you use a public hotspot ..

Download Hotspot Shield  from   www.anchorfree.com

http://www.cnn.com/video/?iref=videoglobal

This is one of those things that make you go .. Hmm .. People are paying Millions of Dollars for Custom or vanity license plates .    !!!!!!!! WHAT !!!!!!!!!  See video below

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/02/01/dinnick.vanity.plates.cnn?iref=mpvideosview

Note to self . Never fly in small plane .

So … I was reading the article below today and I was shocked at some of the comments that followed the article  ..

I mean some people … Let me rephrase that . A lot of people are not happy if you are successful .  Read the article below . What do you think ??

You should really never start a sentence with .. SO

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/air-crash-kills-3-including/story.aspx?guid=%7BA4DBDAE6-4065-4DE8-BBAD-42E4FA2DD95E%7D

http://respectance.com/panamaplanecrash

Two years in the planning and launched last April, the website grossed an estimated $1 million in less than nine months last year. The revenue was generated by an advertiser list that has grown to 40 clients, including the hefty likes of Pitney Bowes, Hewlett-Packard, United Parcel Service, Citrix and VistaPrint.

Here’s the kicker: Nielsen, a 2003 graduate in entrepreneurial studies of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, was a sophomore when he started the first company. And now, with a business model that has attracted 10,000 members and 90,000 visitors a month, the gent is just 25

http://www.startribune.com/business/13824061.html

Paul Bourque started affiliate marketing less than a year ago and now is earning over $300,000 a month from AzoogleAds. Paul is current 19 years old and has done so well for himself over the past year he decided to drop out of college and work full time as an affiliate marketer. Aside from his obsession with conquering the internet, Paul enjoys spending his time with friends and family and plans to move into his dream house in early 2008

http://retireat21.com/interview/interview-with-paul-bourque-affiliate-marketing-super-star

CLICK  LINK http://www.retireat21.com/top-young-entrepreneurs/

 http://www.retireat21.com/top-young-entrepreneurs/

I talked with several publishers making so much from their blog that they left their day jobs. One such blogger – Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com – makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month on his site about rainforest conservation. Such success usually comes from experimenting with ad-revenue models, advertised products and ad positions. It can take several months to find the best model for a particular site.

Of course, drawing big ad money depends more on having a blog with lots of interesting and unique content that draws lots of readers, showing up high in search-engine results for your topic and having ads that pique your readers’ interest. The vast majority of blogs make dimes, not dollars, a day, according to ProBlogger.net.

While the programs are expanding, some bloggers are coming up with their own ways to make money. For instance, Roger Fredericks, a golf pro who sells DVDs teaching golfers flexibility exercises, used to spend $10,000 to $25,000 a pop airing infomercials on the Golf Channel. When the network raised its rates last year, he decided to focus on making money on his Web site.

http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/01/15/bloggers-get-creative-to-make-dough/

For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.

There’s much to be admired in Mr. Frind’s entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13digi.html?em&ex=1200459600&en=b9c0cb998ca49b2a&ei=5087%0A

Michael Stajer bet big on his idea to start an eBay-style (EBAY)Web site for buying and selling wines in 1999. The Bay Area attorney sold his personal wine collection for $25,000 to finance the site, called WineCommune. At the time, he hoped to get venture or angel funding early on. “My original plan was, ‘Hey, I’ll get this product up and then I’ll shop it around and see if I can get some money, hire some people, and then take it to the next level,’” Stajer says.

That didn’t happen. The dot-com collapse came a year after he started WineCommune, and investors were wary of the regulated market of alcohol sales. Stajer kept his day job and gradually developed the site. He amassed more than $40,000 in credit-card debt to finance the business. But despite the time he spent wondering how he would ever pay the bills, Stajer says he’s glad he never got funded. The company expanded by launching online retailer J.J. Buckley and WineZap, a price comparison site with a social network. He expects WineCommune to have $17 million in revenues this year from a mix of advertising, paid referrals, and retail wine sales across the three sites. “Now, of course, [the credit-card debt is] paid off, and I got my wine collection back,” he says.

Read Full Story Click Here

Storeatmyhouse.com is a site for people who have extra space, simply enter the address, put in a brief description of the size, location and price, and post the information.

Users searching for storage space simply enter their zip code and browse through the available listings. Available storage spaces include extra rooms, attics, basements, and pre-paid storage facilities.

Now US-based NapAd has picked up on the same theme but played it in bars and nightclubs instead. NapAd, which just launched this fall, uses what it calls high-definition napkins to bring marketers’ messages directly into the hands of urban consumers when they’re relaxed and uninterrupted by other media. The photorealistic, 5-by-5-inch cocktail napkins are distributed free to NapAd’s network of bars, nightclubs and lounges; in exchange, the venues serve them with drinks to their patrons, who can then be exposed to the messages printed on them for hours at a time.Targeting is customizable within NapAd’s network, so that if an advertiser wants to reach males aged 18 to 34 in Garden City, Kansas, for example, NapAd might tap into a network of sports bars in the area. The company is currently focusing its program on Manhattan, but it’s planning to add five more markets in 2008 and can serve areas requested by clients as well. A typical New York City campaign with 1 million NapAds starts at about USD 27,500.

NapAds is part of Maryland-based guerilla marketing firm JI Worldwide, which was founded by 28-year-old Jay Jaber, a finalist in the 2007 Wall Street Journal’s Creative Leaders Challenge. The company (which also sells its napkins under the name HDN—High Definition Napkin) is now seeking distribution partnerships with major airlines, cruise ships, bars and lounges, and is also interested in hearing about other collaborative opportunities, Jaber says. It’s a big world out there—so many bars, so many patrons, so little time…

Website: www.napads.com