Startup Next Door

Let’s face it. We want to make all our customers happy.  More happy customers means more money and fewer complaints.

So what happens when you discover that a feature isn’t working properly in one obscure browser?  If you’re like me, you let it go. 

There are quite a few obscure browsers out there, and my obscure meaning that the percent of the overall users using them is very little: Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, SRWare Iron, K-Meleon, Lunascape, FlashPeak SlimBrowser, Songbird, Beonex, Camino, Galeon, Epiphany, Kazehakase, Avant Browser, Maxthon, and I’m sure the list continues.  Even well known browsers (though older versions) fall into this category: Firefox 2, IE 5.5, etc.

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I was dumb.  There was once a thriving forum on zKorean.  In an attempt to make some money from the heavy forum traffic I announced I would charge members a monthly charge to use it.  This was met with protest, as many people had contributed a lot of time helping others on the forum.  I analyzed this to mean that people would not pay to use the site because I’m just a guy, not a business.  But I was wrong. It was just a dumb thing to ask users to pay for.

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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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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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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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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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Once you click it, you can never go back.

As a newsletter subscriber or “insider”, you’ll get startup opinion and information that won’t be published anytime soon, or maybe ever.  You’ll also get beta invitations to upcoming services that will be available on Startup Next Door in the near future.

What are you waiting for?  Embrace your destiny and click the button.