Differs from the normal startup stories you so often hear about - they don't have funding, they don't have much in the way of private cash, they're not ridiculously young, and it's taking them a while to get traction. They're basically going it totally alone on a wing and a prayer. Kudos to them.
A very nice backgrounder on the Redbeacon team that won TechCrunch50 this past year.
Most impressive item for me (besides the talent, prudence, discipline, and perseverance of the founding team, which is evident): having the willpower to defer VC funding until they can do it on terms that are reasonable for the founders (a lot of startups use this strategy now but to be able to do it after drawing interest from 19 VC firms in the wake of the TC50 win is commendable). Also, their realizing that getting premature VC funding can actually mess up a company by skewing its goals toward premature expansion.
These guys have a business model that will live or die by whether it can scale well, and that challenge still lies before them. But what they have done so far is really the perfect picture of a highly disciplined lean startup that is done right.
I must say, I am growing weary of the "fail" theme. It is just not in the spirit of an entrepreneur to be focused on failure and I wish those who write about them would stop beating this theme to death. Founders have better things to focus on, as do those reading about their ventures.
As this is part 2 of a 4-part series Dickerson is doing for Slate on the character of risk in America, I can understand his particular focus on "failure".
There's certainly a networking and pedigree advantage to be had:
"Social marketing is just starting to bubble up and everybody wants in. But only ex-Googlers needed to apply to invest in MyLikes, a social marketing ad network which just raised a $630,000 seed round. The company, which was founded by two ex-Googlers—former Google Apps product lead Bindu Reddy and former AdSense tech lead Arvind Sundararajan—took money only from 11 other ex-Googlers."
How risky is it to be an entrepreneur?
10-30% chance of sucesss. On the surface this might seem like bad odds but we are talking about businesses that have the potential over a life time to be worth over 10million dollars.
And so the expected value of starting one is 0.1 * 10million = 1million.
These figures are arbitary but it's more to illustrate the point that they aren't that insane to start one.
The thing about entrepreneurship is that if you fail you can always try again. Try 12 times and that puts your probability of success to 70%. Assuming the trials are independent, but they are not most entrepreneurs will succeed in 4 tries.
Yes some people will fail no matter what cause it's a probability. But it doesn't negate the fact the more you do it the higher the probability you will win.
This was a good summary of RedBeacon. They are bright guys, and work extremely hard. They had the same TC traffic bump and have been working to gain traction in the cities they have launched in. Looks like they are starting to go in the right direction.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/redbeacon.com/
Where they fall short IMHO is that the existing market is being satisfied (personal referrals, yelp, yellow pages, craisglist, angie's list, service magic, etc.) and their offering is not compelling enough (at least now) to customers/service providers for them to switch conventions. If they want to succeed they will need to hire an armada of sales people to compete with their rivals one customer at a time.
They have done an A job in getting press, but frankly they have all the press they need. Not sure how much runway they have left, but I'd like to see them focus more on getting local traction instead of all the ego boosting press.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadMost impressive item for me (besides the talent, prudence, discipline, and perseverance of the founding team, which is evident): having the willpower to defer VC funding until they can do it on terms that are reasonable for the founders (a lot of startups use this strategy now but to be able to do it after drawing interest from 19 VC firms in the wake of the TC50 win is commendable). Also, their realizing that getting premature VC funding can actually mess up a company by skewing its goals toward premature expansion.
These guys have a business model that will live or die by whether it can scale well, and that challenge still lies before them. But what they have done so far is really the perfect picture of a highly disciplined lean startup that is done right.
I must say, I am growing weary of the "fail" theme. It is just not in the spirit of an entrepreneur to be focused on failure and I wish those who write about them would stop beating this theme to death. Founders have better things to focus on, as do those reading about their ventures.
(especially seeing as it is dead center in an arena Google could easily want to expand into)
"Social marketing is just starting to bubble up and everybody wants in. But only ex-Googlers needed to apply to invest in MyLikes, a social marketing ad network which just raised a $630,000 seed round. The company, which was founded by two ex-Googlers—former Google Apps product lead Bindu Reddy and former AdSense tech lead Arvind Sundararajan—took money only from 11 other ex-Googlers."
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/13/mylikes-raises-630000-seed-...
This is a big assumption. Same entrepreneur, same personality, more or less same skills, same contact networks... It can hardly be independent.
Sure.
> same personality, more or less same skills, same contact networks
Absolutely not. The process of becoming changes your personality, your skillset, and who you know.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot lower than that. Especially if you count success as exiting with fuck-you money[1]
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck+you+mone...
Where they fall short IMHO is that the existing market is being satisfied (personal referrals, yelp, yellow pages, craisglist, angie's list, service magic, etc.) and their offering is not compelling enough (at least now) to customers/service providers for them to switch conventions. If they want to succeed they will need to hire an armada of sales people to compete with their rivals one customer at a time.
They have done an A job in getting press, but frankly they have all the press they need. Not sure how much runway they have left, but I'd like to see them focus more on getting local traction instead of all the ego boosting press.