Startup Next Door

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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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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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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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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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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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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Welcome to the first segment of “Ask Startup Next Door”.

Today’s question: “We’re doing a datacenter move in order to handle more capacity.  How much of this should I tell the customers, and to what degree?

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