hackr abt. hackr startup school

Der erste Megatrend 2011 sind ganz eindeutig diese Single Photo Sites als Splash Pages für noch nicht gelaunchte Sites…

LifeLitUp

Wawadoo

MealTik

spekios

Aden Earth

Wovox

Let’s do this

Kajoo

destinity

Betapolis

rewardli

OvenAlly

oder auch abstrakt: drumbi

nur als Auswahl, viele mehr in der Sammlung Invitation im MoMB.

Paul Grahams Dezember Predigt: Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups – probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator – the biggest expense is simply the founders’ living expenses.
…
$3000 is insignificant as revenues go. Why should anyone care about a startup making $3000 a month? Because, although insignificant as revenue, this amount of money can change a startup’s funding situation completely.
…
Once you’re profitable you don’t need investors’ money. And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability can be trivially low.
…
And while founders may not have needed VC money the way they used to, they were willing to take it if offered—partly because there was a tradition of startups taking VC money, and partly because startups, like dogs, tend to eat when given the opportunity.

Aber founders sind auch wie Affen:

Imagine what it would do to the VC business if the next hot company didn’t take VC at all.
…
VCs think they’re playing a zero sum game. In fact, it’s not even that. If you lose a deal to Benchmark, you lose that deal, but VC as an industry still wins. If you lose a deal to None, all VCs lose.

Im Umkehrschluss kann man deutschen VCs weiterhin gute bis rosige Zeiten prophezeien. Die Gründerszene ist weitestgehend top down, ein CEO und sein Marketing-Freund haben eine Idee (oft die, die Idee von einem anderen hier auch zu haben, cheap shot), das VC wird immer gebraucht, um dann die Realisierung und die Koordination der Realisierung einzukaufen.

Ev Williams (Blogger Gründer, bevor es Google gekauft hat, dann Odeo und Twitter) gibt Blogger ein paar Tipps.

I don’t believe blogging is dying, but…it’s complicated. Like in most healthy ecosystems, new species are breeding. Whether or not they’re called “blogging” is a question perhaps best left for scientists, but there are many new forms that are undeniably part of the blogging genus.

Interessante Case Study wie Ylastic die YUI verwendet hat. Ylastic ist übrigens auch nicht unspannend, ist ein UI für AWS.

Time

So I’m telling you in advance: raising money is hard.

Paul Grahams August Sermon: A Fundraising Survival Guide

Propeller seems to have gone the way of Yahoo Buzz, which to me, basically says: we (AOL) are a huge company, and we need a Digg clone. But, we don’t want to confuse the non-nerdy audience, so we’re going to make the site seem as plain and simple as possible.
Wrong. Users who create communities around sites like these love their news organized. They love being able to quickly scan a lot of items.

Mashable zum neuen Design von Propeller, wahre Worte, die das grundsätzliche Dilemma skizziert, das grosse Unternehmen haben, wenn sie sich auf sich erfolgreich erwiesene Modelle stürzen und diese Massenkompatibel machen wollen (und sie können nicht anders, als das zu wollen, und also können sie nicht anders, als in diesem zuge auch noch den letzten funken wert/sinn/ausdifferenzierungspotential/usw. zu zerstören).

Paul Graham’s Juli Sermon: (30) Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund

A lot of people don’t seem to understand a key implication of the long tail: Given the choice, it’s better to make a hit.
…
The problem, of course, is that you don’t have a choice. You can give the hit a shot, but it’s awfully crowded at that end of the curve.

wieder da

arrington interviewt evan williams

in related news die crunchbase api usw.

Frank Westphal über gnip. Highly recommended.

Advice = limited life experience + overgeneralization

Buchheit (gmail, ff) in seinem Talk in der Ycomb Startup School.

(auch: building a product that is perfect for everyone is impossible. your two choices are: build a product that is tolerable for everyone; build a product that is perfect for a subset and then let others come around)

Google I/O Session Videos and Slides (77 Sessions, teilweise seriously cool stuff, teilweise etwas verkaufsgesprächig)

Design Patterns für Reputation Managment Systems (Repmans) von Yahoo

The Competitive Spectrum is the first pattern you should look at because it asks you to consider the degree of competitiveness in the community you are trying to build or foster. Are you aiming for a highly cooperative community, an arena for death-matches, or something in between? The answer to that question will inform which of the remaining Reputation patterns best apply to the design of your site or application.

heute vor 2 Jahren

Alle mir bekannten Web 2.0 Anwendungen, Blogs oder sonstigen Internetschrebergärten versuchen nicht das Aufmerksamkeitsproblem zu lösen, sondern für sich zu entscheiden. Was ein riesiger Unterschied ist und die weitere Entwicklung des Gebrauchswertes des Netzes sehr behindert.

(Siggi Becker)

irgendwie ist Seth Godin echt nicht schlecht… Why bother having a resume?

(abt. post xing)

Casestudy wie man’s mundpropagandatechnisch richtig macht (Sonntagmorgen) bei Exciting Commerce

(wobei – auch wenn die diagnose sicher nicht falsch ist – ein bisschen die wirkung mit der ursache vermischt wird. etwa: eine rockband muss man nicht sein! – eine rockband und also der logik der popkultur unterworfen war und ist jedes startup ganz automatisch und immer schon, nur wissen es die meisten nicht)

What is a brand? It’s a promise: information from a firm promising you a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of a good or service. Brands shape your expected value.
…
when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.

The Shrinking Advantage of Brands

heute vor 2 Jahren: Notizen (Sch.acht.er @ FOWA)

condensed edition:

• zur Verschiebung der Userbasis

Work out ways to let the system fragment in to different areas of attention.

• zu Tags

“Beware librarians” – some people want to give tags a specific, underlying
meaning. Don’t let them.

• zu Usern

People don’t read, they cram crap in to boxes. Let people wander don’t give them tasks.

• zur Moral

You have to develop a sense of morals when you build your system. It’s the user’s data; it’s not yours. Make sure they can remove themselves and their account if they want to.

(abt. reuse)

rivva beim elektrischen reporter