The Future of Start-ups and Web Companies – Mike Arrington (TechCrunch)
February 20, 2007
The Future of Start-ups and Web Companies
Mike Arrington (TechCrunch)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007
Key factors of success for start-ups
- Have a good idea
- Invent a market (digg)
- Destroy a market (eg craigslist)
- Remove friction (eg youtube, skype) – eg cost, tech
- Have a business plan
- (But be prepared to throw it out…)
- Have a revenue model
- Youtube was burning $1m a month on bandwidth…
- Myspace was making $25m a month before google deal
- Build it cheap, test the water
- Research is bad? [Maybe if you have an early adopter audience...]
- Avoid high burn rates
- Stay hungry!
AIME.ST – digg for music, price varies by popularity, defined by downloads
- Solve a real problem
- You must (as founders, devs, etc) blog
- Create buzz – and if you can’t, then rethink your product (not your marketing)
Opportunities in 2007
- Offline / Online
- Adobe Apollo lets you create offline apps using html, ajax, etc
- Firefox 3.0 is rumoured to include offline capabilities
- Websites that access the filesystem
- DRM for music/tv/movies
- Anybody who can crack this has it made
- Joost is working on it
- Data and service portability
- Teqlo, Ning, Pipes
- Mobile
- Edwin Aoki, Chief Architect at AOL and Chris(?) Wiles, Product Manager at Google agree
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