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When you set out to build your startup, coming up with a business model is one of the qualifiers, and hand-in-hand with that decision is what payment model to use. If making money solely using ads is your revenue model, you may skip this article. Today I’ll touch on how customers will pay you.
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Google Adwords is a force to be reckoned with in the online advertising space. According to IAB Internet Advertising Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the year 2009, search advertising is 47% of all online advertising efforts, and of this Google has the lion’s share. So when it comes to advertising your startup by being in front of the most people, many agree that Google is your best bet.
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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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Today I’m going to discuss two more services for handling your startup’s email. These options are for those of you who need a little something more in your email hosting. Looking for Exchange and Sharepoint hosting? Got it. Need tons of mailbox space because you never delete email or attachments? Covered. In addition, I’m trying to keep your costs low. Let’s dive in.
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My first startup involved hosting websites and offering email accounts to users, so I had to set up an email server and programmatically add/remove email accounts, filter spam, and knock it with a wrench then mail got stuck in its innards.
These days setting up an email server is pretty easy. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do it.
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I don’t speak much about raising capital at Startup Next Door. For goodness’ sake, the tagline is “Venture without Capital”. But Wednesday night I spoke with a gentleman who had been involved in a few startups (most of them huge), and who has raised funds and is currently raising funds for another ambitious startup. In speaking with him about a business idea and how to raise funds, his advice was to create a story about what you are trying to accomplish, and a part of that story MUST involve making money. That old chestnut – the business model.
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Back in my first startup where we were accepting credit cards, we purchased an SSL certificate in order to assure our customers that their credit card information was being transmitted securely.
We bought that SSL certificate from VeriSign for $495 per year. That was 2003.
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If your reaction to my last post was “screw you” or words to that effect, and you plan on running a site that will attract large amounts of traffic without a business model, you will 
suffer as Twitter has suffered. But in your case, users will probably never see your cutesy version of the fail whale. Your server will be so busy, backlogged, and exhausted of threads that it will not even be able to serve it. When you get to that point and want to expand to more boxes, it will be constant game of catch-up. Now if you have a good set of servers in the beginning and can see as things get rapidly worse, you’ll be in good shape to get some funding when you boast of your staggering traffic. Some companies aren’t so lucky. In the age of Twitter and Facebook where you’re one famous person’s update away from getting pounded, having the niche as your audience will save you.
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When someone imagines a business idea that launches a startup, many times it’s a “big play” – which means it’s a large idea that will need many people to build, and will likely serve a huge market. Such ideas cost a lot of money. And you’ll either need a lot of up-front invested capital or revenue on the first day to help fund it. And you’ll need to have a certain amount of capacity built-in so that your site isn’t always down.
This is a common problem. There are so many services that are trying to reach a percentage of the market, and the market is usually everyone in the world with a computer or a cell phone. That’s a lot of people.
There is another option…
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So you’re a businessperson and you have a great idea but you know nothing of the IT nerd world. Or you’re the nerd but have no business acumen. Here’s a great video segment on finding someone to fill in your partnership.
From This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis interviewing Jason Nazar from Doctstoc.com, the question came from a caller about finding a technical co-founder.
