Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Startup Business Model Considerations

Fantastic post by Christian Gammill -

Startup Delta Force…

From a competitive perspective (e.g. all the other folks out there that will try to enter the same market) the barriers have been dropping over the last few years.

  • Customer Acquisition – social media, SEO, SEM, etc
  • Economies of Scale – not as big a barrier in web world
  • Investment – little to none required to get started
  • Pricing – free or freemium makes trial simple
  • Distribution – syndication and APIs make partnering easier
  • IP – in general the battle has been over users and less on IP
  • many more (please comment below)

On one hand, it is nice that all of these appear to be lowering, but remember that all of these make it more difficult to compete once you are in the market. How’s that for duality.

Now, given our current economic crisis and VC ‘challenges’, the barriers to funding have gone up significantly as well.

  • Team – higher requirements for caliber of team members
  • Product – focus on truly differentiated and not me-too
  • Market – is it really big enough to provide investor returns**
  • Traction – need more users, partners, patents, etc
  • Timing – are you building for yesterday or 2 yrs from now?
  • Business - how are you actually going to make money?
  • many more (please comment below)

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Layoffs Hot Keyword for Second Half of January 2009

Last month we Launched Los Angeles Tech and in the announcement we provide the Hot List for the first half of January 2009. This hot list is based on various social signals of what people are writing about, reading, bookmarking, searching, etc. You can go to the Hot List post to see what was hot then. But, in running it now for the second half of January, the keyword that popped to the top was:


And this is definitely a sign of the times. When I drill down on that term, you can see why with posts like:
And it's also interesting to see what geographies are being associated with "Layoffs" more often than others:
I guess this is a sign of the times. Here's the rest ...

Top for January 16, 2009 - January 31, 2009

Posts
Keywords
Curious any thoughts.