BigStartup Blog

BigStartups - New Member Guide

BigStartups — Feb, 11, 2010 at 11:05 AM

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.

News and Resource Section

The News & Resources section provides a place for members to post links to external news stories and resources. If you see something you think would be interest to the community post it here. Members get to vote up the stories which they find interesting and they will be displayed on the front of the news page.

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...

Startup Posts of the Week 12 and 13

BigStartups — Feb, 08, 2010 at 11:03 AM

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.

Obama Shout Out To Zeroing Out Capital Gains On QSB Stock - The President has proposed to reduce the capital gains tax rate on qualified small business stock to zero. Will this help to spur an increase in startup investment by angel investors?

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

Startup Posts of the Week #11

BigStartups — Jan, 24, 2010 at 11:46 AM

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

The BigStartups Three Month Progress Report

BigStartups — Jan, 21, 2010 at 10:34 PM

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

Startup Posts of the Week #10

BigStartups — Jan, 18, 2010 at 11:10 AM

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.

Startup Posts of the Week #9

BigStartups — Jan, 10, 2010 at 1:58 PM

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.

Bring on 2010 - Startup Posts of the Week

BigStartups — Jan, 04, 2010 at 10:09 AM

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.

Startup Posts of the Week #7

BigStartups — Dec, 28, 2009 at 5:08 PM

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?

Launched: Startup News and Resources Section of BigStartups.com

BigStartups — Dec, 22, 2009 at 10:32 PM

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.

Startup Posts of the Week #6

BigStartups — Dec, 21, 2009 at 4:54 PM

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

Startup Posts of the Week #5

BigStartups — Dec, 14, 2009 at 10:26 AM

Over the course of a week I read a lot of blog posts and articles related to startups and entrepreneurship. Many of the better posts I will tweet about in the BigStartups Twitter account @BigStartups Here are some of the more interesting ones from the previous week that stood out.

Splitting equity among startup founders - Originally posted as a response to a question on the Seattle Tech Startups ListServ, John Clyman discusses things to consider when deciding how to divide equity among startup founders.

Action Oriented - Another great post by VC Fred Wilson on one of the most important traits he looks for in startup founders, the ability to be action oriented.

Occam's Razor of Product Development - No where does the the 600 year old principal of Occam's razor that essentially states that the simplest solutions are usually the correct ones hold more true than product development.

3 years of startups is like 10 years of marriage - Seattle entrepreneur Andy Sack compares running a startup to the first decade of being married.

Ideas Don’t Need to Be Complex to Be Good - "Have you ever examined an entrepreneur’s business plan or sat through a pitch and wondered why it has to be so complicated?" Complex ideas do not equal good ideas...

When There's Trouble on the Hill, Lawyers and VCs Should Take a Back Seat to Startup Entrepreneurs and Their Investors - Bill Carleton provides more of his take on current legislation being debated on the hill that would effect startup funding and argues that the interests of entrepreneurs need to be put ahead of VC's and lawyers.

Finding My Passion via The Founder Institute - Richard Luck's motivational post about finding your passion in your ideas.

5 tips to find a great domain name - Five great tips for trying to decide on a great domain name, by domain name generator Nomaine.

Show your Ability to Execute Through Bootstrapping - "If you wish to impress or prove something to your investor in a cheap way, start bootstrapping your business. Investors are not only looking to your bright ideas toward your business but they are also looking at how your will execute that idea."

If you saw any startup related posts in the last week that were worthy of a mention, but not listed above, add them in the comments section.

Older startup posts of the week:

Startup Posts of the week #4

Startup Posts of the Week #3

Startup Posts of the week #4

BigStartups — Dec, 07, 2009 at 1:43 PM

Here are some of the interesting posts we've found from across the web this week.

10 Reasons (Some) Entrepreneurs Underperform by James Randel
Some good advice to think about before you take a leap and start your own company.

Can you scale social media? - By Mark Evans
An interesting question about social media and how you can scale social media to meet a reasonable ROI

5 Reasons you should count on blog posts by Misty Belardo
Some important things to remember when reading blog posts and marketing your company.

How a web design goes straight to hell by TheOatmeal.com
A humorous look at what really happens when you sign up a new web design client. Web designers will especially appreciate this post.

6 Reasons to Start Coworking by Nic at Evenues Blog
If you work from home, this post will give you some reasons you may want to think about finding a better work environment.

Increase Your Profits by Getting Rid of Difficult Customers by Ivana Taylor
Improving profitability by kicking your difficult clients to the curb is a common mantra amoung some entrepreneurs. Some MBA's would hate this article, but many entrepreneurs have found this strategy to be very effective.

Analyzing Y Combinator by Imran Ghory
Y Combinator is a topic of interest for many startups. Imran takes a detailed approach into the depths of Y Combinator and the success rate of it's companies so far.

Fred Wilson Highlights Public Policy Initiatives Impacting Startups, Including Dodd's Bad Proposals by William Carleton
Senator Dodd's proposals have been causing quite the scare lately among startups. Fred Wilson from AVC.com makes his thoughts known and William discusses the bill in depth. If you're interested in raising capital, this one is for you.

Recommendations are now live by BigStartups
We've launched a new feature this week and want to make sure everyone is aware that they can now request recommendations from fellow entrepreneurs, startups and clients.

Questions of the Week:
Founder Compensation
tooq inc wants to know what is a fair salary compensation for a founder.

How young were you when you started your first business?
Any Lucky Day wants to know how young you were when you started your first business.

How can we help you promote your startup better?
Damon Pace of BigStartups wants to know how we can help you promote your startup better.

Recommendations are now live

BigStartups — Dec, 03, 2009 at 8:07 AM

One of the elements we wanted to create is the ability for startups to be able to request a Recommendation from their users. We've just launched this new feature and you will find the "Recommendations" tab on your profile now. You will also see a a "Recommend" button at the top next to your "Follow/Unfollow" button. See the image below.

We'd love to hear your feedback on this, so let us know your thoughts.

Startup Posts of the Week #3

BigStartups — Nov, 30, 2009 at 11:05 AM

Over the course of a week I read a lot of blog posts and articles related to startup companies. Many of the better posts I will tweat about in the BigStartups Twitter account @BigStartups Here are some of the more interesting ones from the previous week that stood out.

Entrepreneurs, Investors & Lawyers Ask Senators to Protect Startup Financing - William Carleton & Joe Wallin's guest post on Seattle2.0 concerning the unintended consequences of a draft bill being circulated in Congress that would adversely impact startups seeking seed financing. Many great posts by Bill about this bill can also be found here on BigStartups.com and there is now an online petition available to sign.

Are You An Entrepreneur? - Five traits of successful entrepreneurs by Spencer Fry

Building "Brand You" - “Understand that you need to sell you and your ideas in order to advance your career, gain more respect, and increase your success, influence and income.”

Startup Decision-Making Done Right - "If you’re a startup founder, you should be good at making decisions. If you aren’t, you’re going to have a rough time of it – because the better part of your first year or three will be spent making them. You’re the boss, you’re on your own, and you have nobody to fall back on."

Bootstrapping vs. Venture Funding - Mark Davis discusses the pros and cons of various methods for funding your startup and which is more appropriate for various situations.

Trust but verify -Learning to delegate in running a business is often one of the hardest things to learn how to do.

Building and Backing Startups in a Recession - While a recession is hard on the general economy, startups often thrive during a recession, but you have to think differently and adapt.

Google lost a big chance to redefine our preconceptions - Marcello Calbucci writes that Google is making a big mistake by calling Chrose OS, an "OS".

The Definition of Evil: Microsoft's Search Wars Hurt Us All - Microsoft may pay Murdoch to delist from Google. If it happens, it sets a bad precedent. Imagine if all the world's content is exclusive to some engines and we have to search them all to find what we want? Hell!

Older startup posts of the week:

Startup posts of the week. #2

Startup posts of the week #1

What do points do on BigStartups and how do I earn them?

BigStartups — Nov, 23, 2009 at 11:13 AM

Points are a type of social currency that allows us to reward members who contribute to and grow the BigStartups community. 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.

Below is a partial list of things that ways you may accrue points on BigStartups.

Filling out a complete profile

The more complete your profile is on BigStartups, the more informative and useful it is to others. The more fields filled out, and the more complete items like the about section and interview questions are, the more points you earn.

Adding Blog Posts

You earn points by posting good quality, startup related blog posts to BigStartups. If you posts are interesting to the general startup community they can earn a boost by being featured on the site. Posts may continue to earn points as they are interacted with, while the points maybe removed from spammy content.

Commenting

You get points for interacting with the community by commenting on blog posts.

Asking and Answering Questions

You will get points for asking startup related questions in the Question & Answer section as well as helping to answer other peoples questions. If you have a startup/business related question you want to ask the community, don't be shy.

Inviting Members

The quickest way to earn additional points is by referring new members to BigStartups. You will not only earn some points when they join but will be rewarded with a bonus of 10% of all the points they earn. Multi-Level marketing at it's finest :)

Promoting BigStartups

If you help promote the site externally, we’ll reward points for that. If we miss what you are doing to help promote us, drop us a line and let us know.

Member Recommendations 

You can write recommendations for startups of members of BigStartups that you've worked with in the past. Points are awarded for both the person writing the recommendation and the person receiving one.

Submitting Startup News

Submitting startup related news and resources to your News Section will earn you points. The more highly rated and discussed the news item the more points you earn.

Lots of Exciting Changes to BigStartups.com

BigStartups — Nov, 21, 2009 at 2:25 PM

This has been a pretty exciting week in the brief, six week history of BigStartups.com We saw a burst in signups, with nearly 150 startups, as well as dozens of entrepreneurs, service providers, and investors creating profiles. A large number of fairly significant changes to the site were also rolled out.

Redesigned Home Page

A redesigned home page was launched, to more effectively highlighting startups and other members. This was a big contributor not only to the burst in signups, but also to the number of people clicking to the profiles and our members websites.

You can view the top new members, as well as top members over time ranges (day, week, month, etc). Profiles are ordered by points, which are members receive by completing profile, posting content, asking/answering questions, referring new members, etc.

Profile Interviews

It’s often hard to figure out what to say when filling out a profile about you, your company or service, so we added a series of interview questions as part of the process. These questions are tailored to the profile type. For startups these questions include things like “What problem is your startup solving?“, “What is your solution to that problem?” and “What makes your startup stand out from the crowd?”

This helps you create a more in depth profile and allows us to more effectively highlight you. If you haven’t filled out an interview you can do it from the “interview” tab of editing a profile.

Fans to Followers

We replaced the ability to become a fan of another BigStartups member with the ability to simply follow them. By following someone, you receive notifications when they make a new blog post, ask a question, or post over types of content. By default new members are following BigStartups, so you will get updates from us.

Twitter Lists

We also set up Twitter lists on the @bigstartups account for members, startups, startup organizations, etc. As people create profiles, we’re adding them to the appropriate lists, so make sure to follow us on Twitter for updates.

More to come...

We embrace a very iterative approach to building a site where we get something up and keep on improving it based off of feedback. There is a lot of cool improvements coming over the next couple weeks to help us more effectively promote our members so keep an eye out.

-Matt

Blogging=Promotion

BigStartups — Nov, 18, 2009 at 7:50 PM

At BigStartups.com we realize getting exposure for your startup isn't an easy task and want to help startups in that process. The question is..."How do you separate yourself from your competition?"

One way we believe you can do this is by actively blogging on BigStartups.com. Not just micro-blogging on twitter, but actually blogging and putting down more than 140 characters about your business. Put your thoughts, ideas and experiences down in a blog post and share it with the rest of us. We're all going through similar struggles and experiences and think you may be surprised at the feedback you get.

It doesn't have to be difficult. You can simply blog about ideas for your business, new improvements you've added, thoughts on other startups or get in depth about raising capital and your challenges in your business. Share your experiences and thoughts. We'd love to hear them and help in the process if we can.

Remember, BigStartups.com is a site to help you promote yourself. It's not simply a directory of startups, but a place to get your ideas out there and highlight what you're doing. So start blogging and start promoting yourself. It's easier than you think and that's why we built BigStartups.com

13 Scariest Things About Running A Startup

BigStartups — Oct, 30, 2009 at 1:21 PM

Just in time for Halloween, we wanted to put together a list of the scariest things about running a startup. If you have any other ones to add, leave them as a comment.

Here are some extra's:

Happy Halloween from BigStartups.com! Feel free to add to our list in the comments section below.

BigStartups.com launches social network to bring the startup community together

BigStartups — Oct, 28, 2009 at 9:54 AM

Seattle, WA - October 28th, 2009 - BigStartups.com has launched a social network to bring startups, entrepreneurs, marketers, developers and investors together. The site promises to help startup companies promote their business, pitch ideas, connect with resources, get answers to their questions and learn from others.

"After working on and founding several startup companies over the past 12 years I've found there’s a lack of a community to bring entrepreneurs together with marketers, developers and investors." says co-founder Matt Heaton. "Up until now, networking in the startup community has mostly been offline and therefore locally based. We believe it's time to change that environment and help entrepreneurs succeed no matter where they are located."

BigStartups.com allows startup companies, individual entrepreneurs or various startup resources to create a profile and interact through a variety of tools. It currently provides a question and answer functionality, community news feeds, directory of startups, a blogging platform and will integrate with popular social networking sites to provide further exposure to it’s members.

"Starting a company is not an easy task. It gets much harder when you're learning everything from scratch and don't have anyone to bounce your ideas off of because you are not based in San Francisco, Seattle or Boston." says co-founder Damon Pace "Our hope is that entrepreneurs all over the world will be able to learn from other entrepreneurs, market their companies and pitch their ideas equally.”

About BigStartups.com:
BigStartups.com is a new social network for startup companies founded by Matt Heaton and Damon Pace. Matt Heaton is also a co-founder of ActiveRain, the largest social network for real estate professionals, and Timu.com, a social networking platform for amateur sports teams. Damon Pace is the founder of HomesDiscovered, a real estate lead generation company and IncredibleAgents.com, the largest real estate agent review site.

For more information about BigStartups.com, please visit http://www.BigStartups.com or contact Damon Pace at (406) 962-5627. You can also email questions to Damon Pace using the contact form.

BigStartups Interview - Lani Rosales, AgentGenius

BigStartups — Oct, 20, 2009 at 10:28 AM

Our third BigStartups interview is Lani Rosales of AgentGenius.com which she helped found along with with her husband Ben Rosales. AgentGenius is an online magazine focused on real estate technology, social media and web 2.0 tools. Often times online publications get discounted as being true "startup companies". Even if they are launching an application they go through all the same business challenges as others startups.

So briefly tell us about AgentGenius? What inspired you to start this venture?

AgentGenius.com was founded by Benn Rosales who needed an outlet for his opinion that was not associated directly with his brokerage and quickly realized the potential for expansion and immediately began drawing out a brand, bringing on writers and quickly blossomed into one of the most widely read online real estate magazines in America. The inspiration was to have a place where people of all walks of life in the real estate industry could gather and help improve the industry through education and discussion.

What was your and Benn's backgrounds before founding AgentGenius?

Founder Benn Rosales had been a practicing Realtor and CEO of Single Pointe Realty for several years and prior to jumping into real estate was a mover and shaker in the marketing industry having held positions with enterprise companies such as Apple and Kroger. New Media Director Lani Rosales was Single Pointe Realty's marketing director since its inception and prior to that studied English Literature and Spanish language at the University of Texas in Austin.

You maybe one of the most prodigious users of social media and networkers that I’ve ever seen. Is Mountain Dew the source of your special powers?

For me, social networking is a natural extension of my personality, I've always been a social person and tools like Twitter allow me to be in many places all at once. The source of my special powers is not Mountain Dew (I literally quit that habit this summer, I'm not kidding), rather it is my drive to have my hour of personal time every day to tool around on our personal humor site. Really, that is a huge motivator for me- I'm laid back, content and easily amused!

What have been the hardest part about being an entrepreneur, we know it can’t be all fluffy clouds and unicorns?

Oh no, being an entrepreneur is all fluffy clouds and unicorns and kittens and candy. In my mind. No, really, the term "blood, sweat and tears" is completely applicable and the life of an entrepreneur (pre funding) is that of non stop work, literally. We don't take a lot of personal time and we don't do much more than work but honestly, it's our passion, so it's easy to stay devoted and focused. It's kind of like being a parent- you don't question it, it is simply a wonderful part of your life despite the fact that it poops on you sometimes.

What are the top three pieces of advice you would have for someone thinking of undertaking their first startup?

First, I would say surround yourself with people smarter than you are before even telling anyone about your idea. Network, network, network. Secondly, don't quit your day job until the promise of more money coming in than going out has been achieved... potential money is not good enough. Thirdly, remember that success is mostly the ability to recover from a long chain of failures and falling down over and over again is normal.

What is your favorite startup or entrepreneur that you hope to emulate?

Mark Cuban, hands down. He is innovative, open to new ideas, consumer focused, smart as hell and funny. He knows how to work the press, work an audience, work a team, work a board room and most importantly how to turn a profit. Anything he touches turns to gold and he's so likable, he's easy to admire.

What are the most important social media tools or networking strategies for new startup to leverage to promote themselves?

Blogging is the cornerstone of any social media strategy. Twitter is the tool that mobilizes people the most quickly to either click a link, go to a party or give feedback. Facebook is a great tool for corporate branding and interaction without the furry bunnies of Twitter's chat-like environment. Linked-In is the most important professional tool as interaction on Linked-In is a permanent snapshot and remains professional and people that reach out or respond to you are willing to do so with their profession on their sleeve.

Everybody wants the big name tech bloggers to write about their startup company. Is it really that important? Any strategies you recommend to get their attention?

Big name tech bloggers are pitched thousands of products, people and ideas every day and they are very hard to reach. The best way to achieve this status is either through persistence, getting to know them personally on Twitter if they're receptive to that or (my favorite) spending a realistic amount of time reaching out to smaller bloggers and starting on a grassroots level. Just be realistic and know that 10 small time bloggers may be your most loyal fan and even friend and talk about you for ever and ever while the big name tech blogger will pay 10 seconds of attention to you that will be shoved off of their front page by the end of the day, so think about the long-term strategy.

What are some of your favorite blogs that you follow on a daily basis?

Oh good Lord, I read a LOT of blogs. The tech industry standards that I enjoy are Mashable.com, TechCrunch.com and even Web-Strategist.com. Marketing blogs that I like a lot are BrainsOnFire.com, ConvinceAndConvert.com and TinyGigantic.com.
Real estate blogs that I never miss are RealCentralVA.com, MyTechOpinion.com, and TheRealEstateBloggers.com. For fun, I compile everything from around the webernet that I find funny (and sometimes inappropriate) on our humor blog, HookedOnInterwebs.com and love ICanHazCheezburger.com and CuteOverload.com which are like brain candy for me! I'm a Lit Major, what can I say, I read too much and it's not in print form!