Startup Next Door

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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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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Our first Startup Next Door interview features Earndit and its founders, Andres Moran and Harry Kautzman II.  Earndit is a site that rewards you for exercising – specifically runs, walks, jogging, and bicycling.  Here’s a listing of current rewards.

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As I mentioned before, my bias for Linux comes from me being cheap.  And since it’s my responsibility to provide free and low-cost options for you to build your business, I’m sticking with it.

If you have VC or angel funding, you can spend money without regard for current or future costs.  Lucky you.

If you’re building your business on a shoestring, free is great.  But you don’t want free stuff that will cost you an arm and a leg later.

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The regularly scheduled post will be a little late, as I’m waiting to hear back from Rackspace. So a little diversion…

Great video from This Week in Startups, featuring an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, whose remarks mimic the Startup Next Door philosophy, where your revenues dictate the scale of your business, and how taking other people’s money is a mistake that stifles your “hunger” in building your business profitably and efficiently.

This video begins 47 minutes into the show, where the interview starts, and after a brief history of his programming career, we get to the meat of the interview.

I’m not a member of the IEEE, but I have ambitions that someday I’ll speak with as much distinguished eloquence as these guys.

So here’s my fancy paper:

Abstract

Twitter is a valuable tool for marketing your business, but Twitter as a tool is a meritocracy, whereas only the most interesting of ideas will permeate concentric layers of user influence.

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Although I tend to talk quite a bit about getting your startup done yourself, not all businesses can thrive that way.  A good home-based startup with lots of traffic and revenue will require quite a bit of customer support efforts, and eventually you will need help to keep it running.

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When I was driving to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport today from Abilene, I saw an old building with a large realtor’s sign on it that read "Residential – Commercial – Ranch". That got me thinking – how different is a ranch from a residence or a commercial property? It’s really both. A ranch is where you live and work, with pastures for cattle and fields running with horses or other animals. I live where I work, since I work from home. On further thought, I thought, "I’m a rancher – a rancher of startups."

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In the beginning when the idea of some hot new startup idea is fresh in your mind, but may require considerable resources, you’ll be tempted to borrow money from friends and family. You’ll go on about how they’ll be rich and how the idea is sure to succeed because no one has ever done it before, and there are potentially billions of customers.

But it’s a bad idea – a really bad idea. Why? Because you’re mixing the social contract with a financial contract (even if there’s no physical contract involved).

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