OwnLocal (YC W10) makes newspapers money with Web 2.0 tools | Hacker News Reader

OwnLocal (YC W10) makes newspapers money with Web 2.0 tools

thenextweb.com

71 pointslloydarmbrust25 comments

“In rural America, small businesses would rather the Internet didn’t exist, but it does."

This is the sort of generalization that leads to countless missed opportunities in the largest parts of America. Aside from the obvious advantages of nearly instantaneous electronic delivery and communication to businesses separated from customers by greater geographic distances, rural communities have a history for adopting technology faster than urban centers; they just don't make as big of a deal out of it.

If you want to see an example of this, visit a farming expo; those guys have had GPS in tractors years before you had it in your car and they have more robotics and telepresence than the majority of "modern" urban offices.

Yeah, farmers are really good about adopting this technology because they have to--the competition is fierce in farming and the industry is constantly challenged to do more with less.

Contrast that to the tire shop who fixes the farmers' tires, or the local florist and they will likely not have a computer in their store.

We're not going after farmers (yet) since they don't need websites or lead generation; however, the other businesses in their communities do.

I worked on a farm all throughout my teens and can fully vouch for this, they adopt technology fast and truly understand capital outlay far more than the majority of small to medium enterprises (at least in the UK), as they pay for the majority of investment out of their own money rather than taking risks with other peoples money, there are however some things that distort this such as the EU CAP subsidies and regulations which lock out other markets, so they are operating in a little bit of a vacuum

It however provided a good grounding for me as you worked 60-100 hour weeks at harvest time and it was physically exhausting but mentally boring, nowadays what I do is physically easy but mentally exhausting, both however are difficult in very different ways but necessary for a healthy economy.

There is a huge opportunity for startups that manage to bring small businesses to the web. It's a large, virtually untapped market.

We couldn't agree more.

Can you elaborate a bit? What kind of small businesses are you thinking?

We're usually all about sharing, but we have a few important puzzle pieces coming out in the next few weeks and I'd hate to spoil the surprise.

A lot of brick and mortar "mom and pop" stores have practically no presence on the web outside of a yelp page.

It is interesting that major brands, rather than mom-and-pop brick-and-mortars, have latched on to advertising and creating brand/business pages on Facebook so strongly.

Not really. It's major brands, by definition, that spend a lot of time investing in and developing their new media presence.

But the barrier to entry to having a presence on Facebook, vs their own website, is so much lower.

Think of any business that still advertises via local means. Local news papers, local radio, local flyers.

Lloyd, I wish you guys the best of luck. Quick question: Why'd you change your name to something that's just a few letters different from your main competitor? I think OwnLocal is a better name than Seeing Interactive, but it's awfully close to ReachLocal.

Wouldn't [anything]Local be awfully close to ReachLocal? I don't see any particular reason why they should avoid the word "local" just because a competitor uses it.

We knew that Seeing Interactive didn't say anything about us, so we started searching for a name that really spoke to what we were doing.

In looking through a lot of our internal documents and wiki we found the phrase "own local" a lot--as in, we want to help newspapers own their local markets again. We were hooked and began negotiations for the domain name immediately.

This looks pretty neat; I am unclear about one thing tho: Reading the TNW article, I got the impression that OwnLocal would help local papers with their web presence, social media blogging, all that, and I assumed a news publishing platform (I think I was way off here) as well as ad sales and generating revenue on the web.

When I visited the site, I saw only ad-related products. Am I missing something, or did I misread that article (perhaps it is just an ad company). I salute your effort to assist local papers either way, they can use all the help they can get, but I wonder: is this a newspaper publishing platform, or mainly an ad platform?

unrelated note: http://ownlocal.com/products/local-hero/ lightboxes aren't working in the "screnshots" section (osx.6 ff4, chromium).

In a nutshell, we're a one-stop shop for small businesses to get online. We work with small business customers through their existing long-time relationships with local groups and publications.

I think I understand now: it's a company that helps small media companies make money advertising on the web; nothing to do with journalism. I was waaay off, thank you. :)

The biggest problem with journalism right now is how to pay for it. We help solve that problem.

(As a side note, it works really well for bigger media companies too.)

Typo on http://ownlocal.com/products/web-builder/ : "wantt"

Fixed. Thanks.

How saturated is this market? Is there room for more? Are there niches?

Interestingly, this topic comes up fairly frequently on HN. Any time an article mentions local web presence, the conversation shifts to how much local business websites suck. It appears that OwnLocal has set their sights on this market.

> How saturated is this market?

There are plenty of local development shops, but the quality and value varies greatly. On one end, you've got your "brother's, cousin's, best friend" who designs websites on weekends using FrontPage 2003. On the other end, you've got seasoned web developers who would prefer to focus on larger, national clients, because local clients don't have the budget to do a web presence correctly. In order to sell to this market, you need a refined "product", not ad hoc development. So from that perspective, I'd say the market is not terribly saturated. It depends on how broadly you define the market.

> Is there room for more?

In my view, yes, absolutely.

>Are there niches?

Every category of small business has its own set of needs. Professional services (attorneys and accountants), food and dining, healthcare professionals, auto repair... name a service, and you could consider it a niche.

Exactly. We want to commoditize this industry.

I don't know much about you guys, but I'm really pleased that you made it in to Y Combinator. So many people like to sit around and jaw about this problem, but few are tackling it. Best of luck!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com