Startup Next Door

Not too long ago, I wrote a lengthy post called “I’m Your BlackBerry” where I explained how great my BlackBerry is for getting business done.  I was at that point shopping for a new BlackBerry to replace my aging one.

Then a little over a week ago a buddy of mine was showing me his new Droid Incredible. It was mighty impressive.  It was fast, beautiful, had a polished user interface, and did everything my phone did (camera, wi-fi, web browsing, multiple email accounts, etc) but better.

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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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Today we introduce Medizzle, a medically-focused social network that connects doctors and patients, and matches up users using a whiz-bang algorithm so that they can find each other more easily and share experiences and questions about their medical conditions.  I interview Dr. C. Layne Fontenot, the CEO of Collaborative Health Solutions, and Wade Sikkink, Chief Marketing Officer.

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When you’re working on a website design or testing a layout, testing it in the one browser you normally use is a recipe for surprises down the road.  Your layout could be broken in Internet Explorer 7, or the JavaScript function you’re using breaks in Opera 9.  Checking your website in multiple browsers on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) will help keep people on your site instead of giving them a bad first impression.

So how do you go about checking what your site looks like in IE7 when you already have IE8?  Or how do you check it on Firefox under Windows if you’re on a Mac? Let’s dive in.

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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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In the last article on advertising, I introduced you to the complexity of Adwords and the promise of Trada.  In this article I’ll go over a few more services to help get your startup marketed, this time covering display ads.

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Today I feature an interview with the founder of PicClick, Ryan Sit. 

PicClick is a site that helps you shop on eBay and Etsy by displaying the images from listings and minimal text.  It’s a much more efficient way to find items than standard search.

 
I first heard of PicClick when it was mentioned as a sponsor on “This Week in Venture Capital”.  When the host, Mark Suster, said that PicClick was a bootstrapped company and one guy, it got my attention and I contacted the founder.

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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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Making money on your site with ads pretty much sucks nowadays.  Unless you’re pulling in lots of traffic and your site has a focus or product connection that advertisers can target users to, you’re not going to make very much.  In this article I’ll give you some advice on what works and what doesn’t, from my experience.

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