One of our initial marketplace platform inspirations was 99designs. I was really drawn to the idea of building a brief that was a text/link based representation of what I wanted our design to be. As I began my own time/money planning for marriage (I'm thinking ahead, but I'm at that age..), I kept asking.. Why can't I do something like what I did with 99 designs, and get a bunch of vendors to use my brief and respond back with proposals of service?
Re: connecting couples to wedding planners. Currently we find that only a small number of wedding actually use planners (< 20%). Evolving our initial thought of connecting couples to vendors, we could connect our clients to these wedding planners. Our initial thought was to offer something like this as a premium service, which would be our initial service plus a wedding planner who would help pull everything together. They would handle all the back and forth, pulling all of the details out of the couple, and also be there physically the day of to make sure it all goes off smoothly. The real question is do we start up market or down market? We're experimenting now.
Thanks for your points, they may really help evolve the product.
One idea was to incentivize couples who've already had weddings to share their details of their weddings/vendors with us. We in turn we would build and host a wedding web page that the couple can always reference back to. The vendors would be evaluated by the couples there. We've considered even giving them credits if someone in their social circle booked a vendor that a friend has used through our service.
Either way, socially validated reviews/recommendations need to be a big part of this platform.
Check out Hubspot's blog (http://bit.ly/nDZyos ) - they have really good stuff on lead gen.
Also check out this video by Jason Fried of 37 Signals. Great explanation on how they were able to grow their business with minimal marketing spend: http://bit.ly/ooclky.
Our startup is in GA, and I would say no. There is little vetting of business model to get in GA. In fact, I would not even consider GA an incubator. They don't take equity, nor do they offer advising. It's more like super cool startup friendly paid office space.
The value we've gotten has been being around really smart startups working on cool projects, and being able to share ideas.
I realize this article is a bit of link bait, and it's certainly not the clearest article in the world, but I do agree with part of your point; Startups need to think bigger. There are so many smart people and so much money being invested in ideas that are simply devoid of any ambition whatsoever.
But you also have to realize that big ideas can incrementally grow out of small ones. These are early stage concepts, and they are still iterating to what their business will grow into. So to knock them for that kind of misses the point of YC.
I had the first palm pre and to this day still think it's the most intuitive mobile OS. Over the past year HTML5 has become pretty legit.
Tons of big companies like Amazon and Financial Tomes are are using it to build awesome mobile sites.
JS will be the language of choice where we can create apps that run on mobiles, web, and even TV.
As long as the browser can't access certain aspects of the phone such as contacts and gps we will still have apps - but I def think we'll use mobile web more than apps in the long run.
I went through the same thing except I quit my job almost 4 years ago. What I will say is that ups and downs are part of the startup. The success of most startups and businesses is determined how much the founders are willing to endure until they find that secret formula, but in most cases it wont come over night.
Many of my friends have startups that looked like they were done, but turned into great successes.
If I were you I'd do the following:
1. Look at your traffic sources where was your traffic coming from before?
2. Audit your product to understand if there are things you can do to bring previous visitors back, and bring their friends with them (social integration).
3. Look for other opportunities to monetize. If you're strapped for cash look for other ways to make money like consulting gigs.
Realistically you are just getting started, so if you have it in you just keep pushing/learning/iterating.
I fundamentally agree with this article. I think there are two factors at play here 1) Modularization of everything we purchase. Freelancers/contractors give business flexibility to scale up or down as they need to. 2) A continuation of the erosion of loyalty to a corporation.
Our parents generation spent 10-20 years at a job. Our generation spends 2-5 max.
In my view this is great especially for the US because it means that more people get paid for the value they create as opposed to wasting a company's time/money by clocking in from 9-5 and just waiting for Friday to roll around.
"Our parents generation spent 10-20 years at a job. Our generation spends 2-5 max."
I wonder if in some ways we're getting just as much done in those 5 years vs the 20 earlier generations spent. Perhaps there's a set amount of work at which people tend to move on (or get laid off) and we're just reaching it faster?
Maybe you focus on connecting the couple and wedding planners? This way the planners can be the central point and you don't have so many moving parts?