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

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 users) but they made great use of what could alternately be called ‘ultra light’ or ‘crowdsourced’ components in launching the site – WordPress, CafePress, crowdSPRING, etc.

Platform: WordPress

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 test the boundaries of.

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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