New Home for Wise Startup Blog
We’re going to be going through a transitional stage here while I figure out the best way to move the content and the readers over to this new domain. This should make it easier for you, the readers, to find the site and tag and recommend it to friends.
Be advised, that there may be a period of duplicate postings, and/or redirects, so please be prepared.
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Analyzing Startup ROI in the Music Space: Lala vs Grooveshark vs we7
Working at Grooveshark, we’ve long been the underdog in the startup music game, and I definitely don’t think things have changed for us, but after 2 years of hard work, we’re finally starting to see some of the fruits of our labor. Rhapsody is spending $50 million on their new DRM-free campaign to try to get users to use their antiquated service, and I think it really puts into perspective exactly how much value Grooveshark provides with such little investment.
I’ve stacked Grooveshark up against two of our (many) competitors, Lala and we7. Both of these have a good amount of funding, an experienced management team, a celebrity spokesperson, yet both of these sites are trailing us in traffic. While the graph used below are entirely representative of world-traffic, and I have no numbers to share with you on advertising and sales revenues for the companies, the experiment still holds merit and proves a point.
grooveshark (red) lala (blue) we7 (green)
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Forget Headhunters, Startups Use FriendFeed to Recruit
Finding a job is a startup is tough, if you don’t know where to look. In college, I had dreams of working at a startup and getting paid little to no money and having no benefits and working ridiculously long hours, all with the vague chance that I would get some eventual payoff, and I think that’s where every eager college grad is looking forward to.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good resource pool to find a job at a startup. The likes of Monster.com and Hotjobs turned up nothing but insurance salesman and retail managers. Now that I’ve been around the likes of the web 2.0 world for 2-3 years, I’ve learned a number of things and know the right places to look for work, but to help people out, I decided to create a Web 2.0 Jobs room on FriendFeed where employers can post jobs and employees can go to find jobs. While the “room” is hardly a full-fledged resource, I think it’s a good environment to be seeking employment and also hire employees.
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Be Your Startup’s Chief Information Officer
Knowledge is king, especially when you’re a startup and have competitors constantly beating down your door. Everyday, there are hundreds of new startups created, and if you’re not keeping a pulse on the scene, you would never know that someone has already created your same product, and already has such a head start that you’ll never be able to catch up.
Keeping tabs on the blogosphere is easiest done by simply consuming as much information as possible, and the best way to do that is by reading, reading, sifting (RSS). Your RSS reader should be packed to the gills with industry blogs, competitors blogs, startup blogs, and just about everyone out there that has something valuable to say.
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Where to Begin Your Startup Advertising Campaign
Looking to begin your startup marketing and run your first advertising campaign? You need to know where to start, and what to watch out for when spending your early dollars.
When you’re first getting off the ground with your startup, cashflow is extremely limited and you need to maximize all of your resources, especially when it comes to advertising.
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Startup Interview: Kaplak, “The Slim End of the Long Tail” Digital Distribution
In an effort to showcase the great startups and give them an opportunity to showcase their product, I’ve begun contacting (and receiving) startups to be interviewed for the Wise Startup Blog, and we have our first entry, Kaplak.
Kaplak is an online distribution platform for digital content creators operating in the “very slim end” of the long tail (ie videos of rare flower pruning). They take your content, put it into a digestable widget/link/etc. and then find the niche online publishers to distribute your product. They split revenues with the online publisher, the content owner, and Kaplak. Kaplak is owned and developed by Morten Blaabjerg and is based in Denmark.
In one sentence, what does your startup do?
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Top 9 Best Startup Blogs You Should Be Reading
Personally I like to live my life surrounded by the best of everything. The best gadgets, the best project management suites, the best startups, and the best girlfriends. How do I constantly find the best in everything? I read a lot, a lot of the best blogs in the industry as well as plenty of magazines, TV, and people watching.
I like to live my life by benchmarking the rest of the world and finding a way to best them by just 1 iota. If we can build a startup that is just slightly better than the rest of the music industry, then we will have a success. If my startup blog is just a bit better than my competition, I’ll get more readers, more advertisers, and I’ll sleep happier. Growing up, I didn’t understand my parents’ fascination with A&E Biography. Why do I want to hear about these other people’s lives, I would think.. But then I realized, if you can find a similarity between yourself and these great people, you can learn to do what they did, but better — because you’re hearing what mistakes they made, and can watch out for them as you propel forward in your career and life.
Now that all of the motivational talk is out of the way, let’s get to the real good stuff. If we’re building a startup, shouldn’t we be reading startup blogs to learn from fellow entrepreneurs? Here is my shortlist of 10 startup blogs you can’t NOT read.
Top 9 Startup Blogs for …Startup Entrepreneurs
OnStartups
As a professional geek I used to work in a reasonably fun job doing what I liked to do (write code). Eventually, I got a little frustrated with it all so at the ripe old age of 24,
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KYSSS: 5 Steps to …Keep Your Startup Simple, Stupid
The new rule these days is keeping your startup as dead-simple as possible. Feature creep has so often been the problem for web 1.0 players and the web 2.5 crowd has definitely learned its lesson. I think the reason we’re seeing such a shift to simplicity in this new crowd of web 2.0 apps is simply the fact that everyone is so sick and tired of having to read [ the vcr ] manual just to figure out how to listen to music.
Just as Apple has simplified the personal computing experience for users, web 2.5 has brought us that same simplification in our favorite web apps.
Drop Dead Simple Startups
Our favorite friend Twitter loves to keep everything stupidly simple, limiting conversations to 160 characters and often time telling us not to be so dependent by bringing their servers crashing to the ground.
There are so many startups now simply pushing the features out the door, and retaining 1 core element:
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MSI Wind - Legitimate Macbook Air Killer …Now that it runs Mac OSX
I hate to keep belaboring over these supposed “killers” but it appears to be the new buzzword along the lines of Web 2.0, re-compensation and the like.
If you’re like me and enjoy Macs in any flavor and variety, you’ll be extremely happy to see this ultra-portable running Mac OSX. The MSI Wind, which already is a beautiful laptop, has just been cracked by some engnireering Spaniards, despite the Wind not having been released up until this point.
To see the step-by-step, be sure you read Spanish and head over to InsanelyMac and let us know in the comments if you’ve hacked your MSI Wind (when it arrives).
MSI Wind-Macbook Air Killer
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Nokia e66 Reviewed: iPhone Killer? No. iPod Killer, Maybe
With all of the iPhone killers being showcased, it’s refreshing to finally see a phone company trying to compete with the lowly iPod. Joking aside, the Nokia e66 spec list is quite impressive including, A-GPS, Wifi, 3G and a beautiful slider-form factor.
Engadget has a great hands-on with the Nokia e66, hit the jump for more:
Nokia e66 “iPod Killer” Reviewed
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