From Mike on an FPF neighborhood forum in Charlotte, Vermont…
Thank you for your work. Front Porch Forum is a great service and worthy of a donation to help out. It’s in the “basket.”
Thanks to Mike and the dozens of local folks who have donated cash during Front Porch Forum‘s early stage. This represents a small part of our revenue stream, but an important and much appreciate one. Many FPF members consider it a “voluntary subscription” with some even signing on for an automated monthly contribution. If you would like to support our work at any dollar level… by all means click here! Thanks!
Antonio Rodriguez, founder of Tabblo (acquired by HP), makes some interesting points about East vs. West Coast dot.com start-up environments. In part…
The hardest part of embarking on a consumer Internet startup here in New England is finding wealthy veins of talent to mine out of big companies that provide relevant experience sets. From my non-technical entrepreneur friends I often hear about how hard it is to find class-A engineers that know “web stuff,” and we ourselves at Tabblo had a very hard time finding good direct marketing talent that understood how factors like viral adoption could be weaved into a coherent user acquisition plan. Both skills can be learned by those who are really talented, but this takes time and discipline— something is hard to cultivate…
2. Thanks to the more conservative nature of investors here, ventures in the consumer Internet space often fall prey to the business equivalent of premature optimization, favoring getting to revenue at the expense of adequate distribution (users) or product refinement. I don’t know that I would go so far as to espouse the Y-Combinator idea that you just need to “make something users want” and everything else will take care of itself— in fact if you’ve taken venture capital and are expected to deliver venture returns, it is irresponsible not to understand what the path to positive cashflow is, and to be testing the key assumptions at every step of the way. But an over-emphasis on this can lead to a dangerous situation where amidst slower growth than expected (which happens to just about every startup I’ve known at some point), the management team gets distracted by the “monetization problem” just to focus on something that might in the short-term appear to be more directly controllable. And when you’ve got a board of investors that encourage this trap, things can get ugly quickly.
Incidentally, the VC fund which we raised our money from at Tabblo, Matrix Partners, and our board member David Skok were A+ at helping us to avoid this trap. David was always pushing us to focus on solving the distribution problem at the cost of prematurely optimizing a business which would not at that point not have been at scale. Revenue is important, as is understanding the drivers of the business, but I’ve seen way too many entrepreneurs prepare for board meetings replete with spreadsheets and powerpoints that are more fitting of HP’s printer business than of a rag-tag bunch trying to find a market with their product.
Both of these shortcomings can together create a vicious downward cycle that takes anyone who is not sitting on top of a golden egg idea down quickly.
But best of all, the best thing about starting a company that will eventually need regular users to scale (which is the case with all consumer Internet businesses) is that we are much less subject to the echo chamber effect of the Valley. In the Valley everyone is twittering, sharing links on Delicious, digging articles left and right, and uploading pictures to Flickr from their super phones, but the rest of the country is really not quite ready for a lot of these applications. And the sad part is that most of the companies that I’ve seen started appear to be aping a lot of these initial Web 2.0 experiments instead of trying to think about how to move the adoption curve back into the mainstream.
TechCrunch writes today about Zilok.com, a French start up now in the United States that facilitates people renting stuff from strangers… kind of like eBay, but you get the things back. The comments mention several competitors doing the same thing.
Front Porch Forum sees a lot of exchanges like this among nearby neighbors, but without the rental fee. We like to call it “borrowing something from the neighbor.” Some readers with long memories may remember such a practice from days of yore. And, while borrowing, you actually get to know the people who live around you a little better. Gadzooks!
FireEagle sounds interesting. I’m eager to see what grows up around it. From TechCrunch…
Yahoo isn’t just announcing Kickstart this evening. Salim Ismail’s Brickhouse is announcing a very useful new platform service tonight tentatively called FireEagle, which is currently in closed alpha testing. The team is working on the launch name and final launch date now – it’s expected to be open later this month.
FireEagle, which is built entirely on Ruby on Rails, was originally inspired by Yahoo’s ZoneTag research product. It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.
From TechCrunch today…
Sometimes products are easy to sum up in single sentences, sometimes they are most definitely not. Whrrl, a new site by Pelago, is one of those that eludes definition. Hence, Pelago’s need to describe it unhelpfully as “a seamlessly integrated Web and mobile experience that is social, useful, and fun”.
Let’s start with the fundamentals and go from there. Whrrl is at heart a social network, as are many websites we see these days. But it’s a social network with a purpose (or, several related purposes, as we shall see). Members primarily use Whrrl to share their opinions and knowledge about local outfits, such as restaurants, bars, retail stores, and hotels. In the spirit of Yelp, users can find basic information about establishments and then, more importantly, share reviews of them (with brief descriptions and a star rating system). You can also write simple notes that correspond with particular locations, notes you can choose to share with all Whrrl members or just your friends…
Pelago raised $7.4 million last November from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Trilogy Equity Partners. They are currently running a promotion campaign with American Eagle to get the word out to Whrrl’s target demographic, 18 to late 20 year olds. Robert Scoble recently recorded an interview with Pelago CEO Jeff Holden.
I have no idea if this will be successful… perhaps it will turn into a real champ. What catches my attention is how much venture capital is flowing into dot.com start-ups with silly one-word names that are aimed at gear-heads living in major urban areas who have too much time on their hands. That’s not a knock against Whrrl, just an observation about the online universe.
Perhaps the division I’m groping around is between those who use the internet primarily for entertainment and those who use it as a tool to get things done more efficiently, cheaper, better, etc. Seems like internet-as-entertainment has won the day. Maybe we should start calling PCs mobile devices “the new idiot box.”
Ghost of Midnight just turned one! That’s 12 months of blogging. About 425 posts. One comment for every 2.5 posts. Mostly me tracking the “local online” space and reporting updates about Front Porch Forum and stories lifted from our various neighborhood forums. We get about 100 visitors/day to this blog.
I’ve also read thousands of blog postings over the past year and learned lots… about the topics, about people, and about the medium. There’s a tremendous amount of repetition and amplification in the blogosphere… a kind of conventional wisdom machine. Instead of being in the hands of the old guard traditional media powerbrokers, the conventional-wisdom-setting power has shifted to the blogging elite. And they’re mostly tuned into the big players (“What did Google do today?”) and dot.com start-ups that are following the venture capital model.
Reminds me of the sports page being half filled these days with details of the players’ contracts… and the other half taken up with articles about the Yankees, Cowboys and Lakers. So be it.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more