blog.emilykwan.com

Interesting read about HotOrNot. Rumor has it Hotornot is making 20 million dollar per year.
http://www.startup-review.com/blog/hotornotcom-case-study-mixing-free-and-premium-services.php/trackback/

This provides free wiki hosting and it will do the adsense on the side.

http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia

And this just provide web 2.0 companies listing.

http://www.allthingsweb2.com/

From http://blog.labnotes.org/2006/08/04/seven-things-you-need-to-know-about-your-next-big-startup-idea/

VC funding is not a liquidation event. When you’re playing in an emerging market, the most you can do is speculate. VC rounds are hard numbers, but they’re not market intelligence, unless you’re price shopping for interest rate. Borrowing money is not the definition of success, it’s a sign that you’re not making a profit.

Search is not broken. Search works great for most people most of the time. There’s a few places where search can improve, and you can round up the corners. But if you understand that it’s not broken, just has some untapped niche markets, you’ll be able to cost it better.

There’s no bottomless pit of attention. We have not found a cure for sleep, and people still don’t have more spare time to divert more attention to more services. Attention is hard to find. And what TechCrunch gives this week, TechCrunch takes away next week when someone outdoes you with better gradients.

All problems are interesting to solve. Some problems are also profitable to solve. It depends on how cheaply you can do it in the face of mounting competition. Yes, you can make a boatload of money dominating in the software industry, but even Microsoft’s ticket for success was bought for cheap. The Web is not different.

Objects in the mirror look closer than they are. Craigslist, Evite and Yahoo Groups didn’t just happen, they took years to build up the audience. And it will take you years to build up your audience, and a smaller one if you’re trying to win users away.

People are intelligently lazy. In VC pitches people have a tagging problem they can intelligently solve by being lazy and using your service. In real life, people have real problems and they’re intelligently lazy enough to ignore your service.

All the good ideas are taken. Launching on TechCrunch a week ahead of your competitors is not being first to market. It’s being late to market by five years.

And what about the fallacy of ads? I don’t believe in that. Ads are a source of revenue and you can make profit. Provided that limited attention spread over years is enough to make your non-interesting solution profitable after you pay back the debt. It’s the other variables of the equation you need to pay attention to.

And last but not least, if you’re doing anything in the architecture of participation economy by leveraging user generated content to maximize the wisdom of crowd, maybe you should listen to the wisdom of crowd first. Read some blogs even if you don’t like what people have to say.

17 Pithy Insights For Startup Founders

1. Seek transparency and understanding with your partners early. Issues get harder as time passes
2. Startup founders work long hours for a reason. There’s more work than there are people. If you’re seeking balance, seek it elsewhere.
3. Bad customers will drain you of passion. Really bad customers will drain you of both passion and profits. Unfortunately, most bad customers will degenerate into really bad customers if you don’t do something about it.
4. If you’re changing direction ften, worry a little. If you’re changing people often, worry a lot.
5. It’s lonely at the top, but even lonelier at the bottom. In the early days of a startup, hardly anyone wants to talk to you (except some desperate vendors).
6. Eventually, your product will need to work and do something useful. No amount of marketing or strategy will get you around this.
7. At the end of each day, ask yourself: “Did the product get better for customers today?”. If you don’t have a good answer, stay up until you do.
8. Until you are profitable, time is working against you. Once you are profitable, time is on your side.
9. Learn to take calculated risks. The market rarely rewards safe bets.
10. To improve the quality of your output, improve the quality if your inputs. Read, converse and connect with the right people.
11. Force yourself to write, as it will force you to think.
12. At least once every year or so, your startup will almost die.
13. The problem you solve should be ugly. The solution you build should be beautiful.
14. Even the most successful startup ideas had 100 reasons not to pursue them. There is no perfect idea.
15. If the pain doesn’t kill you, it just hurts a lot.
16. You choose your destiny, because you choose your team.
17. Be who you are. Do what you love. Join people you like.

http://onstartups.com/Home/tabid/3339/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/743/17PithyInsightsForStartupFounders.aspx