Andy Sack, former CEO of Judy’s Book, shared some lessons learned this week on his blog…
The first mistake: we weren’t aggressive enough in customer acquisition…
The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national… Ultimately, this decision prevented us from focusing on the customer acquisition problem I mentioned above as well as other improvements that would have made our product more sticky and compelling…
Interesting insights for Front Porch Forum to consider as we look to expand beyond our initial community.
It’s a bit apples-to-oranges, but I wonder how Craiglist in San Francisco compared to Judy’s Book in Seattle before each decide to expand beyond their original city? My sense is that Craigslist benefited from a much more solid homebase than Judy’s Book… but I don’t have any numbers to back that up.
David Ardia’s post just alerted me to the fact that iBrattleboro is being sued for libel over something written in the comment section of their site.
Steve Outing offers his “lessons learned” on the just-dead Enthusiast Group (“experiment in grassroots media and social networking (as applied to niche sports)”). Here’s one of his lessons that caught my eye…
If citizen-content-exclusive destination sites don’t make sense when it comes to hyperlocal content, what else can you do with user-submitted content? Another approach is to focus on micro-targeting the citizen submissions. I’m intrigued by websites like YourStreet.com, which geo-tags local news and information and puts it on a map mash-up. Using a model like YourStreet’s, a news organization might create a map service that presents hyperlocal (geo-tagged) content on neighborhood maps.
While I live in Boulder, Colorado, I couldn’t care less about news from schools or community organizations serving neighborhoods across town. But I care a lot about anything to do with the school near my house that my daughter attends. I care about the announcement from the local fire station about staffing changes. So targeting that sort of news and information to me is a powerful service that a news company can provide. (Of course, I’d want the option to expand the range of micro-news and information that I view.)
If you can gather, slice and dice hyperlocal citizen news and information, think too about disseminating it outside of your own website. Create a customizable widget that a neighborhood blogger, say, can include on his site to offer his readers links to news and information pertinent to his neighborhood. That’ll drive traffic back to your website, or might include ads that you place within the widget. Win-win.
If a news website can filter the minutiae (from a wide variety of sources, internal and external to the news organization) that’s relevant to a specific online user, and present that in context with the professionally produced output of the news organization, then I think you’ve got something valuable.
Marchex is working on a new network of neighborhood blogs called MyZip. If I read the description correctly, they posit that the $50/month paid to a blogger in their network will provide sufficient incentive to keep up a five-post/week pace indefinitely… that’s about $2.30/posting. Hmm… could be interesting.
I would neither blog about or read regularly someone’s daily blog about my neighborhood… and the $2.30/post payment somehow makes it even less likely. What I want… to hear from and interact constructively with lots of my neighbors. That’s our aim with Front Porch Forum.
Time will tell. Lots of room for new ideas. Marchex doesn’t have the MyZip site up yet.
Kirby Winfield offers a good post today, for as far as it goes, about helping people connect to their local communities through the internet…
It’s been said that individuals today are increasingly disconnected from their communities. They are “bowling alone”; i.e., although the number of people who bowl has increased in the last 20 years, the number of people that bowl in leagues has decreased. Since people bowl alone they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment.
The Internet has been criticized for its isolating impact on society. In many cases increased engagement in online activities results in exacerbation of the “bowling alone” phenomenon.
There is a huge market void in local online media. With the exception of business search/reviews, no one has solved for community connection and conversation at the neighborhood or town level at scale. This brings me to the opportunity of “digitizing local.”
Some of the most passionate and well informed citizens in the country still communicate about their communities through print newsletters, in person meetings, and other offline means. These people thrive on being active locally. If you can somehow harness their knowledge, energy, and networks, you can create a vast forum of local influencers and relevant evergreen local content…
This, of course, is exactly what Front Porch Forum is all about in the 19 Vermont towns that comprise greater Burlington.
He goes one to say that no one has cracked this mystery at scale. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to look at it. Kind of like saying that none of the big box retailers have yet to really feel like a valuable local business. It could be that, when it comes to local, the internet will deliver on its promise of decentralization and small scale and we’ll see thousands of super-valuable local sites rising up, each unique to their own special community… not the one-size-fits-all big box approach emanating from Silicon Valley. Kind of like 100 years ago when every town had its own stand-alone, locally owned, daily newspaper.
Of course, the chains came along and gobbled up those papers eventually and left us with the USAToday model.
Maybe the internet will help usher back true local flavor and thousands of successful local media companies that enliven and enrich their home towns in ways that no clever distant mashup could ever achieve.
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.
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. This type of service could prove useful to Front Porch Forum users to share documents among neighbors.
Docstoc is designed to be a shared repository of commonly used forms and documents… Docstoc competes with Scribd… Today, Docstoc is coming out of its private beta into a public beta. Anyone can now upload and share documents. Already, there are 12,000 documents on the site. There is no limit to how many you can upload, and Docstoc accepts the following file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rft, and .pdf.
I just learned from TechCrunch that Judy’s Book is dead…
We just got word from Judy’s Book founder and CEO Andy Sacks that the Seattle startup will be shutting down operations, and most of the staff of twelve was let go today. The company had raised a total of $10.5 million over two rounds of financing. Judy’s Book started off as a community driven review site for local businesses, but changed it’s focus in 2006 when the original model looked to be failing. The company de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.
Other players in the local review space have fallen in the last year, too. Intuit shut down Zipingo last summer, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch. Yelp is still standing and reportedly doing well, although fierce competition from Yahoo and Google as well as younger startups is looming.
Front Porch Forum does a booming business in our pilot community with local reviews… but with a very different take.
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