January 2010 Entrepreneur's Forum

On January 7, 2010, Ultra Light Startups is hosting an expert panel on PR, Branding, and Buzz. After six months of covering and blogging about the various events put on by Ultra Light Startups, I’m now pleased to actively participate and moderate the first Entrepreneur’s Forum of the upcoming new year.

Our panel of experts will include:
Todd Barrish, Managing Director, LaunchSquad
Rachel Honig, Managing Direct, G.S. Schwartz & Co.
Karl Schmieder, Founder, MessagingLab
Lloyd Trufelman, Founder of Trylon SMR, publisher of NYConvergence

PR, Branding, and Buzz are terms that have various and ever changing meanings as the “new media” technology evolves around each one of us. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and LinkedIn seem to launch a new application or sharing tool almost every week.

My company, Bizbriefs, has used many of these tools in conjunction with one another to help various businesses boost their SEO rankings and divert more attention to their websites.

What I’ve found is that it’s not how you use one of these social media tools by themselves, but how you can link them together and start a viral campaign with a targeted audience.

Every business owner seems to have a favorite social media site, just one that they feel most comfortable using. However, not using other site options to support their efforts, means losing out on potential prospects and future customers.

In conducting several social media campaigns during the past three years, I’ve learned that there are certain steps you should take before just diving in.

1. You have to identify the true audience your customers are trying to reach first.
2. Once that’s done, you must craft the message or the image that each company wants to portray to the online community.

Too many times, companies want you to just get started, without knowing the message they want to deliver or what audience they hope to reach.

To learn more about branding, buzz and PR strategies, join us at for the first Entrepreneur’s Forum in 2010 sponsored by Ultra Light Startups.

CommandShift3 – It’s like Hot or Not for web design. Website built by members of New York’s Jelly coworking community, based on conversations at coworking events.

CardPricer Finds There Is More Money Selling Baseball Card Data Than Selling Baseball Cards.

CardPricer is the Reuters/Bloomberg of baseball cards.  Seems to prove selling data as a revenue model really can work…

Big Websites Start Small. Great article on how Digg, Amazon, and Twitter used to look like when they were initially launched.

Myopenbar.com is a website that lists where drinks are free, according to this New York Times article.  It was founded in 2005 by two friends and had over 30,000 subscribers in six cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Honolulu) by the end of 2008.  The site has 30 employes and is profitable, according to the article.

Revenue models: advertising, events

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.

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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

Platform: ASP.NET

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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 describes the companies history, founders and products.

Platform: iPhone

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 the best seats at the best prices.”

According to this article by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, “Ticketstumbler has made it to profitability on Y Combinator’s $15,000 investment and they hope not to need more.”

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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.