How to get started on BigStartups - A quick tour of the BigStartups community.



BigStartups in an online community/resource for startup companies and entrepreneurs, which was created to help members promote their ideas, share experiences, and get feedback from others in the startup community.  The site was launched in November, 2009 and we will continue to build upon the platform as this the rapidly growing community evolves.

Member Profiles

Every member on BigStartups has a publicly visible profile which they can use to promote themselves.  There are several profile types on the site including Startup, Entrepreneur, Investor, Service Provider, Media and Other.

The signup process for the site walks you through the various steps of filling out your profile, but you can always go back and edit any parts of it via the “Edit” link on the top (black) navigation bar when logged in.

There are four main sections of the profile:

• Basic Information - display name, profile type, category, tags, short description, etc
• Interview - A series of interview questions customized to your profile type.  For example “What problem is your startup company trying to solve?”
• Extended Profile - A free form section allowing you to provide additional information including multimedia such as images and videos.
• Recommendations - Other members of BigStartups can write a recommendation for you that will be posted in this section.  Learn more about recommendations...

Points

Within BigStartups points are a type of social currency that allows us to reward members who contribute to growing the community.  You will notice the number of points you have prominently displayed on your profile along with being on the right side of the black top navigation bar.  When we show lists of profiles throughout the site, they get ordered by points, meaning those with more points get more marketing exposure, and click throughs.

To learn more about points on BigStartups check out, What do points do on BigStartups and how do I earn them?

Directory

Whether you are a startup, entrepreneur, investor or service provider all members of BigStartups get listed in our directory.  You can filter the directory by location, member type, tag, category, etc.  By default members are listed by how many points they have.

Member Blogs

Every member on BigStartups has a blog which they can post content too.  You can use your blog to post about what you are doing, promote your product, or share you startup experience.  We will soon provide an automated mechanism for you to syndicate posts from an external blog to your BigStartups blog.  

Posting your blog to BigStartups allows you to get a much larger reach for your content because not only does BigStartups have a rapidly growing readership, but we promote quality content posted on the site externally.  If your posts are high quality and interesting, we will even feature them on our home page.

Question and Answer Section

The Question & Answer section on BigStartups allows members to ask startup and entrepreneurship related questions, and other members of the community can answer.  Whether it’s a question on writing a business plan, marketing a product or you just want feedback on an idea, ask it here.  Questions can also be asked anonymously.

Please be respectful of the community when posting links in this section. Only post links to entrepreneurial and startup relate news topics that this community will find interesting. Off topic, or blatantly promotional postings WILL be removed and posting privileges maybe revoked.

Featured Posts

Everyday we select some of the most interesting posts (blog posts, questions, news links) to be featured posts.  Featured posts get displayed on the BigStartups.com home page, as well as promoted by us on external sites. You also get an extra helping of points if one of your posts gets featured.

From the home page you can subscribe to the featured posts via RSS, email, or follow us on Twitter @bigstartups.

Following, Updates, Notifications and Settings

On BigStartups you can follow members who you are interested in.  By default all new members are following the BigStartups account.  When you follow someone you get updated whenever they make a post.  These updates are viewable on the updates page when you log in and depending on your email settings you can be notified of any types of updates via email too. 

If you have any additional questions about BigStartups feel free to leave them in the comments section of this post...

Each week we highlight blog posts added to BigStartups or linked to from our startup news section.  If you've written or have seen a post you think is worth being highlighted be sure to add it to BigStartups.  We forgot to put together the startup posts of the week last week, so here's the top 10 startup and entrepreneur related blog posts from the past two weeks.

We all start somewhere (i.e. don't blow off the next John Cook) - Treat everyone you do business with and meet with respect and don't blow them off even if you think their non important.  They might be someday.

Should a Founder License IP to a Startup - The Startup Lawyer answers the question, should a founder license or transfer his current IP to a new startup? 

Getting the Size of the Early Stage Note Round Right - Local startup attorney Bill Carleton provides advice on putting together an early stage angel investment round.

How to Launch Your Start-Up While Keeping Your Day Job - In an ideal world you can throw all of your effort behind a new startup but most times this doesn't match the reality of having to pay your monthly bills.

The paradox of messaging - Hypios on why paid messaging may actually be more cost effective than free messaging.

Connect and Collect: Two Rules to Win Customer Loyalty. - Moogo writes some advice on how to win customer loyalty.

Two tests to see if your business model works. Telling a good story and adding up the numbers. - "good business model begins with the insight into human motivations and ends in a rich stream of profits"

Learning how to rely on your co-founder at a startup - Damon Cortesi on the importance of being able to rely and trust your co-founders.

VCs Are Not Evil: What Entrepreneurs Need To Know - "Venture capitalists are not evil. That is the message that Bill Bryant, the prominent Seattle venture capitalist and venture partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, had for Seattle technology entrepreneurs earlier this month at the STS (Seattle Tech Startups)"

BigStartups Member of the Week

MogoTix offers simple and affordable mobile ticketing for events of any size. Whether it's a party, fundraiser, or conference, MogoTix makes it easy to publish an event website and immediately distribute mobile tickets to your attendees.

http://www.mogotix.com

Ten of the top startup and entrepreneur related posts from the last week either posted on BigStartups or added to our startup news section.  If you've written or have seen a post you think is worth being highlighted be sure to add it to BigStartups.

Movies that Every Entrepreneur Should See - F3FundIt a resource for European entrepreneurs has put together a list of must see movies for entrepreneurs.  Ranging from Startup.com to Office Space

The BigStartups Three Month Progress Report - A lot has happened with BigStartups in the first 3 months since we launched the site.

Innovation Is Not A Strategy - Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. - Sun Tzu

You’re not going to be very popular - Derek Johnson writes that being a successful entrepreneur requires making the right decisions even if they aren't the most popular ones.

Should I burn my 401K to start a business? - Seattle entrepreneur Mark Maunder discusses the pros and cons of what some people might consider unthinkable, tapping your 401k as seed fundinging for a startup company.

Looking for an Online Advertising Roadmap? Read On... - BigStartups member LeadTail provides a hand list of marketing strategies to help drive traffic to your new business.

Seeking Investment – Raising Capital in a Dowturn - More advice from f3FundIt on how on raising capital for your company during a market downturn.

Key to closing business? Focus on what you can control - There are so many things about making a sale that you can't control, their budget, the economy, their schedule so focus on the one thing you can control.

Great Leaders Inspire Trust - Leadership advice from Ray Silverman, if people don’t trust you to follow through, they simply won’t follow.

Why We Should Boycott ComScore - Jason Calacanis has found a new target after attacking the pay to pitch scam, ComScore and their extortionist tactics they apply to startup companies.

Also some popular questions this week on BigStartups

How do you contact bloggers?

PPC - does content network advertising really work?

What do you think the #1 Underrated Startup City is in the world?

-Matt

I was just realizing that BigStartups.com has now been live for a little over three months now.  The site has been developing very quickly, and it's been a promising start to the grand vision of creating the top online resource for the startup community.

Startup companies, entrepreneurs and others have been joining at an increasing pace, and it appears we will pass the 2,000 member mark within the next couple days.  While 2k might not seem like a huge number in absolute terms, but the initial rate of growth has been much faster than a previous sites I built like ActiveRain, which went on to become the largest online community in the real estate space.  

Traffic to the site has been rapidly increasing too.  Here's the the traffic chart from Compete through the end of December.  So, far we traffic in January has been 50% higher according to our logs.

A local startup community Seattle2.0 maintains a Startup Index based off of several different traffic metrics and we have continued to climb on that, currently at #69 for Seattle based startups through Dec.

More importantly there has been increasing interaction and activity throughout the site.  The Questions and Answer's section is becoming more active with each passing day.  We are also beginning to see a lot of quality startup related content added to the blog posts and news sections of the site.  The amount of content in these area's should increase dramatically with some new features that are in the works (blog syndication).

I continued to make changes on a very frequent basis to keep improving the underlying platform. For example I changed the blog section of the site to add voting and post ranking similar to the news section earlier today.  This will help the members "bubble" the top content up for others to see.  Many of the changes have been made based off of member feedback and suggestions.  So, always let us know what you think, or if you see something that could be improved.

Sorry, if this sounds like a toot your own horn kind of post but I get really excited to see a project starting to take off :)  Especially one that went from conception to launch in under a month and has grown organically with zero advertising spend or major PR push (yet).

-Matt Heaton

Here are a dozen posts related to startup companies and entrepreneurs over the last week that stuck out in my mind and I thought were worth sharing.  All of these posts get pulled from the News and Blog Posts sections of BigStartups.  If you want to be featured in next weeks Startup Posts of the Week, be sure to add your posts in one of those sections.  

Why do most VCs say "No" - most of the time? - VC Gerry Langeler explains for VC math and why companies, even ones that might have a bright future get turned down.

Startups & Social Equity - There is a strong correlation in societies between the level of innovation and equality.  How startups maybe able to effect social change more than governments.

Who owns what? How to split equity in a new startup company - Damon Cortesi talks about the thought process that he and his co-founder went through in deciding how to split equity and choose titles in UntitledStartup.

iPhoning Your Way To Retirement 70 Cents at a Time (Ignite Seattle Talk) - A great Ignite talk that I saw in December which has now been posted online.  Budding entrepreneur Eugene Lin gives a talk on his search for riches as an iPhone application developer.

Why I feel like a fraud - Jason Cohen discusses the self doubt that him and many other entrepreneurs feel when building a new business, particularly one in a category that didn't really exist.

Business Owners: Spend Money On Loyalty Not Advertising! - "This is not a post about the future of newspapers or other local media. This is a post on reality and what this new economy and the emerging technology have created for the local business owner."

Developing the ability to sell a Strategy - Developing the ability to sell a strategy and have your client see it's value makes it an essential skill to any designer.

11 Surefire Ways to Make Your Startup Fail - Here are just a few ways to completely and utterly dig your startup into the ground, as such read them, and do what you can to avoid them.

A Startup is Not a Smaller Version of a Large Company - Companies go through several distinct stages of growth where they have to operate differently. Trying to run a startup like a scaled down larger company is usually a recipe for failure.

Mechanical Turk can be Magical - Steve Murch of BigOven.com talks writes about the magic of Mechanical Turk and crowdsourcing platforms in general to cheaply and effeciently complete large tasks.

We need an independent invention defense to minimize the damage of aggressive patent trolls - "Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No!"

How "hard" should your startup's technology be? - Learning to innovate using existing technology. There's no need to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.

SEOmoz's Venture Capital Process - An amazingly detailed post on the process SEOmoz went through trying to raise venture capital. Certainly a must read if you're considering raising VC.

Existence vs. Essence: Sartre and Camus on Marketing - By Two approaches to marketing explained using the teachings of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus

Ideas are a dime a dozen - Brad Inman (founder of HomeGain, Turn Here, Inman News, Vook, etc) writes about how there are very few original ideas, almost all ideas are spun together from other peoples ideas.  It's the executions that makes the difference.

Personal Phone Numbers For Business, Yeah That Was A Mistake... - When starting a previous startup I used my personal cell number on a number of business documents.  Six years later, I'm still be haunted by it.

5 New Year's (Re)Solutions for your Business - Sjoerd of Moogo has five New Years resolutions to help grow your business.  "Take Down The Christmas Decorations", "Grow Online Weight", "Quit Smoking", "Keep in touch with your friends", "Spend More Time with the Family"

Ask the attorney: Founder vesting - "My two friends and I are launching a new venture, and we have agreed to split the stock ownership equally. The problem is that I’m not sure how committed they both are. What happens if one of them leaves in a few months?"

Using the One Page Strategic Plan for Your Startup - "Last week I wrote about how unimportant business plans are for startups, particularly in the tech industry.  Investors are just not reading them.  But planning is still important, so what can you do?"

Where does VC money come from? - Another great VC related post, by Gerry Langeler, the Managing Director with OVP Venture Partners. Knowing where VC money comes from helps you understand what motivates VC's to give it to you.

Are You Hiring the Right People at the Right Time? - "The most important component of a startup is the team. Not only do you need to hire the right people for the job, you also have to hire them at the right time."

UntitledStartup.com - The Anti-Stealth Mode Startup - Some startups like to operate on "stealth mode" before launching a product, and then there's UntitledStartup.com who is operating in "anti-stealth mode".

If you liked these posts and want to see more great startup content throughout the week, be sure to check out our featured posts section and follow @bigstartups on Twitter.

Happy New Years everyone and here is hoping that 2010 will be a great one.  Below is a list of some of my favorite startup and entrepreneur related blog posts over the previous week. All of these posts get pulled from the News and Blog Posts sections of BigStartups.  If you want to be featured in next weeks Startup Posts of the Week, be sure to add your posts in one of those sections.  

The Entrepreneur’s Time Paradox (Your New Year's Resolution) - Great post by Marcelo Calbucci about how the great entrepreneurs value their time. Can you do exactly the same things you did in 2009 but using just half the time?

Nine startup dreams and industries Google crushed in 2009 - Google seems to be trying to stick there fingers into about every pie out there, and in the process has left a lot of collateral damage in crushed dreams and hopes of young startups.

Forget Clicks... Start With Bounce Rate When Evaluating Your Online Advertising - The most important metric to look at when trying to optimize online advertising is not CPM or CPR but how well you are converting those clicks once they reach your site.

2010 Technology Predictions - The Startup Whisperer (Matt Hulett) provides us with his technology and startup predictions for the coming year.  Including what three Seattle startups he thinks are going to be acquired.

How Important are Business Plans for a Startup? - Why spend time creating a lengthy business plan when nobody is going to read them, particularly investors.

Pacific Lake Partners raises $35M fund to back young entrepreneurs’ buyouts - An interesting concept, a fund to provide capital to entrepreneurs who want to buy and turn around existing startup companies.  

Startup therapy: Six questions to ask yourself regularly - Jason Cohen also believes formal business planning is over rated but suggests six questions you should asking yourself all the time to evaluate how things are going.

The meaning of words on the web: facebook "friends" and hypios "connections" - Within application, changing a single term such as "friends" vs "connections" can have an enormous impact on how your app is viewed and used.

Venture Funding Roared Back In the Fourth Quarter To Nearly $15 Billion - After a lackluster year VC funding of startups was $15B last quarter up 113% from a year before.

Engineering Your Way To Marketing Success - “This software should really make the user feel like they just killed an effing lion!”

Dogging the Competition? Be Careful. - More marketing advice from Caleb Mardini, be careful with how you talk about your competition, it might just end up hurting you.

There was a lot of interesting posts to wade through to choose the startup posts of the week this time around.  Lots of links to great posts have been added to our new startup news section.  Here are some that stood out.

Launched: Startup News and Resources Section of BigStartups.com - In case you missed it we launched a startup news and resources section of BigStartups allowing members to post and share external links.  Lots or really interesting and useful stuff already there, check it out.

10 Small Business Lessons From Zappos -  The most viewed item in the news section so far.  Stories of Zappos, the online shoe retailer, and how they have pioneered a new way of doing customer service, using social media, and selling products online are now all over the business and trade media. 

Four keys to innovation while staying focused on today's revenue - Often times it's hard to both incubate new ideas and stay focused on generating revenue at the same time.  Some tips on how to accomplish this. 

There's a difference between a feature and a product, between an idea and a company - Zillow's CFO, Spencer Rascoff argues against the notion that web 2.0 technologies make companies cheaper to launch and grow.

Optimize Your Homepage for Results Not Search - Too often people focus on SEO and optimize their site for computers instead of people.  This can be a particularly counter productive behavior when it comes to your home page.

Picking Your Co-Founders (What's luck got to do with it?) - Spencer Fry provides some lessons he's learned in choosing co-founders throughout several successful startup ventures.

Social Media in the Year 2010 - 2009 seemed to have been the year of social media, but what changes does 2010 bring?

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition - While failure to get product/market fit right maybe the number one killer of startups, underestimating your customer acquisition costs maybe a close second.

Q&A: Dave Scott of Marketfish on his 'global domination' strategy - Dave Scott, founder of Marketfish has already achieved world domination as the world champion Risk player. He discusses parallels between running a startup technology company and managing your armies.

Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications - Some great advice and lessons about iterative development and rapid deployment.

Privacy Theater: Why Social Networks Only Pretend To Protect You - People sometimes take privacy of their personal data for granted on social networks, it might be time to think again.

Also be sure to answer the latest questions in the BigStartups Q&A section, What are your business new years resolutions?

As part of the continued effort to make BigStartups.com a great resource for the whole startup ecosystem we've added a brand new News and Resources section to the site.  Members can find and add links to external news and resources that they think will be useful to others.  Over the last two days, I've been posting links to the best startup related resources and news that I've run across recently.  There's some good stuff there, you should check it out...

Voting

If you like a particular news story/resource click the "vote" button to rate it up.  Links with the most votes will spend more time being highlighted on the main news page, and you can also view the most highly rated links in the last week, month or all time.  We will also be tweeting highly rated links from our news section on the BigStartups Twitter account (@bigstartups) and will provide other methods to subscribe to top links shortly.

Points

Of course members get points on BigStartups for submitting quality news and resources.  The more highly rated and discussed the item is, the more points you get.  If you don't know what points are on BigStartups check out this primer, What do points do on BigStartups and how do I earn them?

Posting Guidelines

When posting links to news and resources be respectful to the community.  This is a place to news and resources related to startups and entrepreneurs.  Don't spam links, post content that is too off topic, post blatantly self promotional content such as a link to your website etc.  Inappropriate links will be removed and may result in your posting privileges also being taken away.

Posting Bookmarklet

You can also add an easy to use "bookmarket" to your browser toolbar to make submitting news, resources and links very quick.  It can be found here.

Of course let us know if you have any suggestions on how we can improve this service.

I'm a little late at getting this weeks list out, but there are some of my favorite startup related posts over the past week.  If you have seen any great posts you think we missed, please submit them to the brand new, News Section on BigStartups (more on that soon)  You can also follow BigStartups on Twitter (@BigStartups) for lots of great startup related links tweeted daily.

How Much Is Content Worth? - Anthony Stevens weights in on whether market forces are actually going to force companies to start charging for content and data.

The Great Abdication: Consumer Internet, Venture Capital, and Angels - Why VC's don't like to invest in early stage consumer Internet companies.

Lean analytics: Questions VCs should ask (and you’d better answer) - "VCs are in the business of separating the soon-to-be-dead from the fledgling successes. There’s nothing quite as good at doing this as the cold, hard light of analytics."

Take Care of Your Most Valuable Asset - Caleb Mardini writes about the "pervasive problem in that while an entire organization may be devoted toward turning prospects into customers, little is done to keep the customers that have already bought in."

TechStars is coming to Seattle 2010 - TechStars a mentor-driven, 3 month long "startup bookcamp" will be coming to Seattle in fall 2010 with local entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack as the Executive Director.

Sleep all day, Tweet all night: The evolution of social media and its effect on our priorities

Take guidance from VCs, not orders -  Why is it that CEO's often rely on boards to make decisions when their role is to provide guidance and approval.

The Entrepreneur Balancing Act: 5 Ways to Have a Healthier Family Life - You maybe busy worring about features, customer, competitors and burn rates but don't forget about the most important thing in your life, family.

How Convertable Debt Works - Convertable debt is one of the most common types of funding for early stage startups.  A discussion of how it works.

A Startup’s Twelve Days Of Christmas -Phil Reed's top dozen lessons for entrepreneurs based off his experience running two highly successful startups and a few failed ones.

Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets - If you’re competing with the big guys and are worried about them stealing your ideas, it’s the same story—it boils down to execution. As Eric Ries says, “If a startup can’t innovate faster than a much larger competitor, stealth isn’t going to make the difference —they’re toast”

Older startup posts of the week:

Startup Posts of the Week #5

Startup Posts of the week #4