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Comment by asanwal | Hacker News Reader

Arrington says that writing about startups would not be the best business decision, and he is probably right - less people interested in startups than Apple, Facebook, etc as well as a reduced # of advertisers.

How would a "startup-only blog" pay the bills? The Startup Foundry guys - would love to hear your thoughts.

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Paul Hontz here (aka g0atbutt), founder of the startup foundry. The short answer is I don't know...yet. I believe TSF will turn into a profitable business (and based on the investment offers I've received, other people do to). I want TSF to ooze value from every article,video, and pic. After that's taken care of, I believe the perfect revenue model will present itself. Until then we will keep pushing forward.

Paul - Will be good to see what you guys come up with. One branding thought (and take this with a grain of salt as we run one site called ChubbyBrain) is why not lose startup in the name. It gives you room to grow in the future if you decide you do need to change/alter focus. At present, the name The Startup Foundry boxes you in. Just an unsolicited $.02.

It probably wouldn't and that is part of the problem, a lot of things that would be great can't work as a business and shouldn't... I guess they could always go down the paid route, but for it to exist as a free blog and be entirely about true startups I can't see it being a business success like Techcrunch is. They could always try and work out a way to "pray" on the early adopter trend, where every self proclaimed "social media expert" (or whatever they call themselves these days) wants and needs to know about the next big thing before it's arrived and they might be willing to pay for that privilege.

I mostly agree. It couldn't work with the typical free blog business model that's been popular till now (and which worked for TechCrunch initially) because things (advertisers mostly) have moved on.

But.. an organization that went beyond the typical blog role could make money. Consider Chris McCann's Startup Digest. That's building on e-mail right now, but something like Startup Foundry could have fingers in multiple profitable pies: job listings, social events, conferences, angel/VC matching - it just needs the velocity, connections, and brand power to pull it off. (I could be wrong but I don't think it's a coincidence TechCrunch's initial big boom occurred around the time Michael started doing the house parties.)

just a few quick ideas:

sell tickets to conferences through affiliate programs

allow users to create profiles with a job status field, and collect bounty when referring them to hiring companies

collect sponsorships like mixergy, TWiST, etc

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