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Why (Most) Internet Startups Suck?
Inspired by WhyDoesEverythingSuck.com and learning from Kroomsa.com, following is why I think most internet startups suck:
When the business model depends on free, only a very few lucky companies can survive. Advertising, at best, should be a secondary source of income for a startup. How would startups keep on innovating their services when they are giving away stuff for free. Where is the motivation, dude? On the other hand, when you charge for what you are offering, there is a direct incentive to improve your services in order to attract higher prices or more customers, which directly translates into better earnings. Thus, charging for something you offer kick-starts a positive feedback loop which reinforces itself. And, that is good for a startup.
This directly translates into absence of vision and low barriers to entry. When you don’t have to invest time thinking about why you are doing something, you end up doing a quick but messy thing. This is especially true for startups. Today, starting an internet startup is so easy that anybody, really anybody, with a basic knowledge of web can start a so-called internet company. People find it cool to have a company these days. And, successful startups are seldom cool. So, in a nutshell, either try to do something not-so-cool and/or try to do something hard, which will force you to think about the reasons for your motivation.
While for the industry and consumers, it is good to have so much of choice, for entrepreneurs it not so good to have an idea and then discover that there are already tens of internet startups offering *exactly* the same service or product (and, chances are, for free). How is your new internet startup going to make money when some freaks are offering the same thing in a better package, at a better price and with a better marketing budget. So, get a little away from Internet and think if you can do something useful in traditional fields where there is a moderate amount of competition and where barriers to entry are higher.
Introducing StartupLogic.com
Have a look at it here. Like it?
Beautiful Design by Jay
If you notice, I have recently (yesterday, to be precise) released my first ebook: How to Start an Online Business: 11,520 Free Resources for the Internet Entrepreneur.
Now, as I have finished writing and publishing the ebook, it is time to promote it. I am looking at ways to advertise it on various blogs relating to this subject. However, with so many ebooks on the same subject (of making money online), how do I make sure that my ebook stands out from the crowd?
The answer is design. I want the advertisement banner for the ebook to look killer, professional and cool. While researching on the internet about how to create such an advertisement banner, I stumbled across ScribblesAndWords.com, a design firm by Jay. In an instant, I was mesmerized by the banners he has created. They look so beautiful. In addition to banners, he also does Copywriting, Blog Header Design and Blog Consultation for a very reasonable fee. ...
The New Avatar of ParasChopra.com
Well, after a week of back breaking work, my site and my blog can be seen in its new avatar. The design is cool looking and I have fixed many broken links, spelling mistakes, grammar errors, etc.
Hope you like the website in its new avatar.
Click
Finding My Passion
Here I found an excellent post on how to find your passion. The article presents you a list of questions which you must answer. Let’s see what is my passion:
1) If money was not a worry, what could you see yourself doing? What would you do for free?
Well, I guess, I would work on interesting ideas for free. I wish I could generate ideas day in and day out and make a quick prototype of those ideas. That would be awesome.
New Venture Creation 101 – Man, you are lucky…
…because you are getting an opportunity to read this amazing piece of document, which is a result of my (some 0.33 or so) years of hard work at numerous (some 2 or 3, depending how you define) startups.
Jokes apart, the reason I am writing this step-by-step guide to new venture creation is because in the past I have made a major mistake of getting-things-done at impulse. I am sure many suffer from this ailment of getting far too many ideas; more ideas than a sole head can accommodate. If you loose your sleep over an idea, start implementing it the next morning and find yourself loosing passion after a week or so, this document is for you.
So, below is a step-by-step proper method for new venture creation.
Hacking Successful: 24 Jan 2008
Dear Visitors,
The Immortal Blog and The BioHacking blog are no more. They were hacked on 24 Jan 2008. I lost all the data.
I could only recover data from the latest backup, which turns out to be of Sept 2007 era. So, my apologies for any inconvenience.
Regards,
Paras Chopra