Startup Next Door

When I first moved from a shared host to a dedicated server, and had my sites set up to send email (to customers), I immediately received rejections from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and many other email servers (this was before there was Gmail).  The rejections all shared the same reason.  The IP block my server was in was blacklisted.  That means that the IP address of my server was within a list of neighboring IP addresses that was blacklisted.  It seems people grabbed dedicated servers and used them as spamming machines.

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You may not be aware that placing your email address on your “contact us” page is a sure-fire way to get yourself truckloads of spam.  As we speak, there are bots traversing the web, looking for email addresses that have been published publicly on web pages.  These email addresses (and items that resemble email addresses) are stored and sold to spammers.

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As I mentioned a few months back in I’m a Startup Rancher, I tend to create startups, let them run for a while, and see if they have any traction.  Some flop due to difficulties in the business model, or in the marketing, or just because I didn’t solve a problem that many people had.  So the failed startups get taken offline and are heaped onto the compost pile.  But once you have paying customers, turning off a service that people depend on can have big consequences.

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He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.

  – Paul Atreides

And if that thing is valuable, you become the monopoly.

Providing a reference tool is a good business idea.  I’ve been in organizations where having a large-size data repository and searching capabilities keep people coming back.  This is a solid method for building a long-term SaaS (software as a service) where you can charge a monthly subscription for its use.

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Before the web, everyone had a Rand-McNally map in their car.  Once the web was prevalent, MapQuest was the destination for getting maps online.  Then around 2005, Google began to pull market share from MapQuest and is finally now surpassing MapQuest.

If you go to Rand-McNally nowadays, it looks like MapQuest did back in 2005.

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When you’re running your own startup and trying to make your product better, it’s tempting to take everything your users say and build it into your product.  After all the users are the ones closest to it, right?  A user makes a suggestion and you’re more likely than not to add it in.

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Not all business partners are going to have the same “get it done” attitude that you do.  Some will be lazy or get bored with your startup idea.  Some will just need to quit for honorable personal reasons, like to take care of health or family.  So how do you approach them to take the business out of their hands?  Read on.

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