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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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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See this box? It’s the reason you’re here. 

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.

Today we feature an interview with the founders of KnowEm, a rapidly-growing startup that has found great success without venture capital or outside funding.

KnowEm is a brand protection service that allows you to create your brand’s user account on 300 popular social media sites and will not only help you secure your name but they can also show you how to contact each site in order to have the name released and returned to you in the case where someone creates an account in your brand’s name.

KnowEm is headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey and was started by Michael Streko and Barry Wise after a user account-checking website they had been using went offline.  They decided to create their own and improved on the concept.

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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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