by Graham Lawlor on December 20, 2008
HotOrNot is a photo rating website founded in 2000 by two Berkley undergrads. It was acquired by Avid Life Media in February 2008 for a reported $20 million. Quantcast Compete
by Graham Lawlor on December 20, 2008
PlentyOfFish is a free internet dating site. The New York Times says the owner, Marcus Frind, works 10 hours per week and earns over $10 million per year on the site. The Wall Street Journal gives similar numbers and adds that the site is now the busiest dating site in the U.S. Headquarters: Vancouver, CA [...]
by Graham Lawlor on December 16, 2008
Smule is a California based company, founded in 2008 that makes iPhone applications. Its biggest hit is called Ocarina, a virtual musical wind instrument (video). As of December 2008 the application has been downloaded 400,000 times and Smule is set to become a $1 million revenue company in its first year. This article in Newsweek [...]
by Graham Lawlor on December 14, 2008
chTONGUEeek is the project of Jeff DeChambeau and Denis Hancock, two writers for the Wikinomics Blog. In this post they describe the process of conceiving and launching the project for a total budget of $200. As far as I can tell the content for the site is generated by the founders themselves (as opposed to [...]
by Graham Lawlor on December 14, 2008
Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator. In this recent blog article he questions the necessity of VC’s given the persistently declining cost of starting a tech venture. This inquiry is very much at the heart of the motivation behind Ultra Light Startups – and a question which we continually seek to [...]
by Graham Lawlor on December 14, 2008
Ticketstumbler is a Boston-based two-person startup that functions as “a secondary ticket market search engine and comparison website. We search thousands of ticket listings from hundreds of brokers and ticket exchanges across the internet and present the information in an easy to view and use format. TicketStumbler allows simple ticket comparison, enabling you to find [...]
by Graham Lawlor on December 14, 2008
This NY Times article describes the small but significant number of independent content producers on YouTube who make significant money. Apparently 6-figure annual incomes are not uncommon with the right content, audience, and advertising mix. The same NY Times article is reviewed by Denis Hancock in this article on the Wikinomics blog.
