Venture News

Sprouter helps entrepreneurs collaborate globally

2010-01-27T20:31:46Z

By Corey Kossack

If you're a startup trying to navigate the path to success, there's no doubt you have probably heard of a website or two that might help you get there. Communities like StartupNation, PerfectBusiness, eFactor, YouNoodle and others provide access to entrepreneurs and each provide a number of different resources, information and tools for entrepreneurs.

But if you're on the lookout for a new resource to check into, try Sprouter. If you look at Sprouter right now, you would likely call it "Twitter for entrepreneurs", but the site intends to become much more. Founder Sarah Prevette said that her intention in creating Sprouter was to give the thousands of entrepreneur organizations a centralized place to continue ongoing conversations online - rather than infrequent ones that happen at occasional in-person gatherings. The site's functionality does not fully represent that intention at this point in time, as Prevette's strategy was to get a beta version of the site up to get users in, then add additional functionality to fulfill her vision, which is on its way shortly.

One of the key features Sprouter is working on is two-way communication with Twitter, so users can share entrepreneur-specific twitter posts automatically with the Sprouter community rather than having to update from within Sprouter. The company is privately funded by angels.

As Sprouter adds more features specific to helping entrepreneurs collaborate on the issues that help them accomplish their goals (as opposed to another general forum for entrepreneurs to connect), they could be a very interesting startup to keep your eye on.

Winning in Entrepreneurship is a marathon - not a sprint

2009-12-14T17:29:57Z

By Corey Kossack

Entrepreneurs love to rush. We are always in such a hurry to get things done, whether it be the launch of a website or the closing of our first big deal. We rush primarily out of fear, and sometimes that fear gets in the way of doing the right thing for our product and those who use it. What fear? Sometimes it's: "If I don't get this out to the world today, someone else will come out with a better version tomorrow", or "If I don't get an investor in the next 90 days, my company is going to go under and all my hard work will have been for nothing".

While there certainly is validity to both of these fears, entrepreneurs need to remember that there is always a way to continue moving towards achieving success - that is, if you meet the three following requirements:

1) You genuinely care about the impact your product or service will have on the people who use it

2) You created your company because there was a need for it - not because you had a need to be an entrepreneur

3) You are willing to do whatever it takes to turn your vision into reality

Maybe I am still a little too young and still a little too naive, but it is my belief that if you meet those three requirements, nothing will really stand in your way of continuing to make progress towards your end game.

One of my favorite entrepreneurs, Lyn Graft from Austin Texas, always said to me "It's more of a marathon than a sprint", when referring to growing a company. There were times when I thought that maybe Lyn's words were more of an optimist's way of making excuses for why things at their company weren't growing as fast as they had hoped, but I've come to see this as more of a reality than optimism. Those who are looking for a quick hit in entrepreneurship likely won't get it, but those who are in it for the long haul (who listen to others, adapt to what their customers need, and continue to push the envelope) will have a fighting chance at success.

Last week I read an article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard Business School about innovators and staying 15 minutes ahead of the competition. Here's what was interesting to me about that article and how it applies to the subject at hand. Kanter said "Innovation is risky... Innovators often have to ease anxieties by sounding conservative when doing something radical." She said that rather than trying to change the world, change your industry or change the way consumers behave overnight, you need to take baby steps toward your end goal, consistently staying just 15 minutes ahead of everyone else. So true. Look at Facebook. Back in 2004, if Facebook had launched with this mega-social network that allowed people you had loose relationships with to see every detail of what's going on in your life, do you think you would have signed up? Maybe not. But after years of conditioning us (15 minutes at a time) to open up and share our lives with others, today we are more than willing to tell people what's happening with our lives, and some of us have even gotten comfortable enough to tell people exactly where we are at any given time, using services like FourSquare.

So rather than trying to sprint towards your end game, dig your heels in and get ready for the marathon ahead. Just don't forget to listen to your customers, stay 15 minutes ahead and keep innovating along the way. If what you are building really matters to enough people, you'll get to where you need to go.

eBay Meets Craigslist Meets Facebook: Addoway Launches Free Social Marketplace

2009-12-08T18:11:37Z

By Corey Kossack

While eBay continues to hold on to an ample lead on a slew of competitors that have popped up in the e-commerce space over the last number of years, the online marketplace giant is slowly losing market share as new startups emerge with innovative solutions to satisfy online sellers who have been disenchanted with eBay’s ever-changing fees and selling policies.

Enter Addoway, a new free social marketplace for online merchants and service providers that recently closed an undisclosed amount of seed funding and is launching today. The best way to describe Addoway is a social alternative to eBay and Craigslist. Addoway brings together traditional online buying and selling with social media, in a more interactive environment than classifieds sites and a more open environment than your average online marketplace. The site was created to increase trust between independent buyers and sellers, while also giving sellers a new way to promote their products and services online without the burden of selling fees – which Addoway believes will lead to lower prices for buyers who use the platform.

Beyond its cost structure, Addoway’s biggest selling point is its ability to integrate social networking into the traditional marketplace/classifieds model. Users on the site can bring their reputations from other platforms by linking their social networks to their profile, and can easily publish their Addoway listings to their Facebook and Twitter feeds. They can also import their feedback and listings from eBay, if desired.

All Addoway users can post unlimited listings on the site at no cost. There is no listing fee to post an item and no final sale fee when the item sells. The site makes money by offering premium upgrades for users who want increased exposure on the site. Because Addoway has chosen to avoid the transaction-based business model that most online marketplaces use (where the seller gets charged a fee every time they sell something), they have the advantage of being more open than eBay, Etsy and Bonanzle because they aren’t concerned about ensuring that all purchases are made inside the marketplace. Instead, users can promote their own websites and social networks as well, using Addoway as a portal to drive traffic to their entire online presence in addition to selling directly through the site.

Addoway will face the great challenge that all new marketplaces face – attracting a large enough user base of buyers and sellers – fast enough to compete in a tough space against some very established competition. If they can overcome that all-important hurdle, Addoway has a shot to become a great tool to help people sell things socially and save money. Video below.

Disclosure: Addoway is part of the Game Change Ventures portfolio and I serve on Addoway’s advisory board.

4 ways to automatically get rejected from an angel investor

2009-11-09T16:57:44Z

I loved this post so much that I had to give it some major love. The post is from Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software. He lists these four ways he believes will automatically get you rejected from an angel investor.

1) Be dismissive of the competition

2) Have five-year projections

3) Gloss over your strategy for customer acquisition

4) Do what you think you "should do" instead of what feels right

See full post at VentureBeat.

Facebook Connect and Open Graph To Become the standard for new web startups?

2009-10-29T22:12:01Z

Facebook is continuing to move forward with initiatives to spread its platform outside the walls of Facebook. The early implementations of Facebook connect by third-party sites focused primarily on allowing users to register and login via Facebook, rather than having to register through the site itself, but new implementations are taking things much further. Check out a couple shining examples below of how Facebook Connect is being utilized by new startups that you may or may not have heard of yet.

1. Thread.com - Thread is a new service that allows users to meet friends of friends through their social circle, all utilizing Facebook's social graph. When you sign in to Thread, you will see which of your Facebook friends are already using Thread, how many friends of friends are using Thread, and can invite any of your Facebook friends you want to participate directly. Thread's integration goes way beyond traditional Facebook Connect, and shows us a preview of just how powerful Facebook Connect can be as a tool for new startups to build off of. See more on Thread in the video below.

2. TheHotlist.com - The Hotlist a startup that you may not have heard of, founded by NYU students. I first learned of The Hotlist while it was in development a couple years back, and today is another great example of a platform that leverage Facebook Connect. Like Thread, the only way to register on The Hotlist is by signing in with Facebook. Where The Hotlist focuses is on giving users a deeper look at the events and happenings going on in their neighborhood or on their college campus based on what their Facebook friends are up to.

Today Facebook also unveiled their plans to extend more Facebook functionality to third-party websites through the use of their new Open Graph API. Open Graph is a ways away from going live, but the general idea is to let third-party sites integrate Facebook-like features that resemble Facebook Fan Pages on their own external sites. As the months go by, we are seeing more and more signs that Facebook is heading in the direction that many speculated back when Facebook Connect debuted, to allow the entire web to leverage their user's social graphs to enhance the experience on third-party sites, build trust between users and facilitate transactions all over the web. With Facebook now also making user email addresses available to third-party sites who use Facebook Connect to register, the popularity of Facebook Connect should continue to skyrocket. See CNET's coverage for more updates on today's events.

Thread.com in less than a minute from Thread.com on Vimeo.

Trouncing the Recession like an Upstart!

2009-10-27T22:22:11Z

The following is a guest post written by Donna Fenn, Author of Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success

Small business owners are typically an optimistic lot, even in the face of dismal economic conditions. But a recent American Express OPEN Small Business Monitor survey found that GenY entrepreneurs are more optimistic than most. "More than three-quarters (80%) of these entrepreneurs have a significantly more positive outlook on business prospects versus GenX and business owners overall (each 55%), and Baby Boomers (52%)," the survey noted. GenY business owners were most likely to be hiring and making capital investments, and least likely to have cash flow issues and to be "stressed out" about the economy.

Those findings didn't surprise me in the least. Last spring, as I was wrapping up my book, Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business (McGraw-Hill, 2009), I decided to do a short survey of the 150 young entrepreneurs I had interviewed. Among other things, I wanted to know how they were surviving the recession. Here's what I found among the respondents: 20% said the recession had actually been
good for their companies; 32% said they had felt very little impact; 44% said revenues would be lower in 2009 but that their companies were stable; and only 5% said they had taken a big hit and were barely
hanging on.

When I followed up with some of them directly, it became clear that many entrepreneurs in this generation actually welcomed tough economic times. They said that the recession was teaching them the art of laser-
like focus, and compelling them to make better decisions, to become more frugal, and to initiate systems and procedures that would help position them for economic recovery. Here are a few recession-trouncing strategies from Upstarts! that you can apply to your own company:

Pursue repeat business. It's far less expensive to nail down repeat business from your existing customers than it is to land new ones. Now is the time to reap the benefits of those good customer relationships that you've been cultivating over the past few months. At Undercurrent, a Manhattan-based digital marketing firm, co-founders Aaron Dignan and Josh Spear offer their young employees three levels of quarterly perks, depending on how many repeat business deals they manage to rustle up as a team. Three deals might earn everyone a
Friday afternoon at the movies; six or nine deals could mean massages for all or a shopping spree at nearby Whole Foods. New rewards are offered every quarter to keep things interesting. The program keeps employees motivated and Undercurrent on the radar screens of important clients.

Focus on your core competency. Robert Weber's company, W3i in Sartell, MN, markets third party computer applications and has been growing 53% a year. W3i continues to post significant gains this year because, Weber says, he had the foresight to eliminate divisions of the company that were hogging resources without generating significant revenue. He shut down a lead generation business and sold a mobile applications
business "we never really figured out how to integrate into our main company." With a single point of focus -- "to be market leader in applications distribution" -- Weber says the company is well positioned for growth this year.

Snap up top talent. Layoffs at big companies mean that there's a surplus of great employees on the market now. Recently, Joel Holland, the CEO ofFootage Firm, a Reston, VA company that sells stock video footage, put out the word that he wanted to hire a new head of web development and a top sales person. "I was shocked to get applications from executives who, in a better economic time, never would have taken my call, let alone responded to a job posting," he says. "I hired a rock star web developer, and I'm in talks with a former hot shot at a major online media company to take the sales lead." He's also hired a part-time CFO, and picked up numerous talented freelancers -- people who would have been inaccessible in a better economy.

Respond rapidly to market shifts. The economy is almost certainly having a profound impact on your customers: they may have altered their purchasing habit, or found themselves with entirely different needs. It's your job to respond to those shifts. Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams, co-founders of Manhattan-based In Good Company Workplaces (IGC), run a membership organization that provides women business owners with shared office space. Previously, their clients were mostly mature, established business owners. But Lancaster notes that the recession has created more "entrepreneurs of necessity" and she's seeing more opportunity for IGC among startups. So the company, which also offers consulting and educational programs to its members, has "begun to offer more start up oriented programs and an accountability group for folks that were more used to working in a structured environment and need help adjusting to working on their own," says Lancaster. She and Abrams are also partnering with professional organizations that have traditionally catered to corporate women, but are now filled with people who have lost jobs and are considering starting companies.

Look for hidden sources of revenue. Sometimes your best source of new revenue is right under your nose. That's what Talia Mashiach, the CEO of Eved Services in Chicago, has discovered. Mashiach's company partners with hotels to provide their corporate clients with access to all the outside independent vendors they need to organize an event (such as florists, videographers, entertainment, transportation, etc.). Her competitive edge is the proprietary technology she developed to manage those vendors efficiently. The system works so well that Mashiach is now marketing it to other companies. "They'll use our technology platform and pay us a transaction fee," she explains. Also included in the package is access to an award-winning corporate university that Mashiach created for her own staff called Eved University. It's not the revenue model what she had in mind when she first developed the technology, but it's one that she now expects will spur significant growth for her company.

Where are tweets being sent from? Twitter plans to match tweets to location

2009-09-04T18:34:59Z

By Conrad Wadowski

A recent announcement on the Twitter Blog shows an intriguing development in social media: linking tweets to geographical location. Basically, a soon-to-be technology would allow a Twitter user to choose whether or not to display the longitude and latitude coordinates from where the tweet was sent off. This might be positioned like the current display which shows the service used to send out the tweet (e.g. the web, Tweetdeck, photokit, etc.). Adding a new dimension to Twitter has the potential to provide marketing data limited to specific regions, and create a potentially powerful tool for the locally oriented business. It also takes a step towards reduced anonymity between a customer and seller in smaller digital markets, possibly leading to more trust and reduced overall risk. Although the technology isn't available just yet, I wouldn't be surprised if it came out in some form in the not so distant future.

Y Combinator startup Listia breaks the mold for giving free stuff away

2009-08-10T21:32:21Z

By Corey Kossack

Last week, Y Combinator debuted one of its new startups, Listia, which the site is describing as "auctions for free stuff". The basic concept is that users list items they no longer need or want, and other users bid on those items with points earned through the site by registering, referring friends, listing items or purchasing additional points through the site. For more information on how the site works, see Michael Arrington's [Techcrunch Review].

Listia is a novel concept and has a real shot and gaining traction for a few reasons in my opinion:

1) They have a solid niche: Sure, there are places online where you can find and give away free stuff, but there aren't any recognizable brands in the space that do exactly what Listia does. The site does not try to compete directly with eBay or Craigslist, but rather focuses solely on making it easy for users to find free goodies. Listia should appeal to individuals looking for stuff they can pick up for nothing (or next to nothing), rather than targeting the small retailers who have made their home on eBay and eBay's slew of competitors that have popped up over the last number of years.

2) It's fun: One of the factors that made eBay such a huge success in its early days was how engaging and fun it was. I remember when I first started using eBay almost a decade ago, I used to love checking to see if anyone outbid me on that pair of front row concert tickets, and wanted to sneak my last second bid in to beat them out. eBay was like a game for that reason, and similarly for sellers, who beyond wanting to grow their business, seemed to get caught up in wanting to sell more stuff so they could reach "Platinum PowerSeller" status. Listia uses these types of concepts to their advantage by creating a fun experience where users will spend a good amount of time on the site to find ways to get more points and get the items they want.

3) It has built-in viral marketing and positive appeal: The site rewards users for bringing new users to the site and for listing new items. Unlike other reward programs that focus on direct financial incentives, Listia rewards its users for helping to grow the site through the use of its own special currency, points. For most people who won't want to pay for that extra 500 points they need to grab the free iPhone they want, they can earn those points by engaging in activities that help the site flourish. Referring a friend that ends up listing an item gets you 50 points, and listing an item on the site gets you a hand full of points as well. In addition, they have created a charity component to the site, which will help them spread the site to those charity networks as well.

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles for Listia will be getting high-quality products listed on the site (since people are "giving away" their stuff). The site shouldn't have a terrible time getting low-ticket items to show up on the site, but higher-priced items may be few and far between. However, Listia has begun something they call "Rewards Auctions", which are bigger ticket items that are put on the site by Listia itself. This is a great idea in itself and could keep users coming back to the site to see if they can get their hands on stuff like a new plasma TV for nothing.

Looks like an interesting company to keep an eye on.

The death of the business card? My name is E brings business card exchange to the iPhone

2009-07-30T20:34:21Z

By Corey Kossack

As we have all become accustomed to transitioning to a digital age where printed business cards are becoming more and more obsolete, a number of startups have looked to come with innovative solutions to start leaving our old business cards at home.

My Name is E is essentially an electronic business card that allows you to share your contact information and your social profiles (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) all in one place. While we've all seen that before, the twist is that you can easily swap "cards" with people in person using a mobile phone - and not just the iPhone. The video below shows how quickly you can transfer between phones.

What I find challenging about My Name is E is that it appears that both in-person users need to be signed up with My Name is E in order to exchange contact information. If they considered allowing for the option of a one-way transfer (I meet someone at an event and tell them I can send them my E card directly to their email address - with an invite to join My Name is E as an option, and they hand me their paper business card in exchange). In an ideal world, everyone would exchange digitally, but as we all know, even after My Name is E hits critical mass, most people you meet will still not have an account set up and therefore the mobile transfer idea will become irrelevant pretty quickly. I think this could be a useful tool, but that would be the factor that could make this a really useful tool. My Name is E also allows you to widgetize your card and post on your website or blog, as you can see I have done below here.

Read additional review at TechCrunch.

E on iPhone from My Name is E on Vimeo.

GOOGLE MAKES ITS MOVE: ANNOUNCES GOOGLE CHROME OS TO COMPETE WITH WINDOWS

2009-07-13T16:32:12Z

If innovation is driven by creative destruction, then this is exactly what Google has in mind with the recently announced Google Chrome OS. Techcrunch has headlined this as Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft, signaling a possible game change in the IT landscape. The netbook version of Linux-based Google Chrome OS is promised in the later half of 2010, and aims to be the simple, quick-starting operating system, made possible through external data storage. More details at wired.com.