shafqat

Apologies if you've posted on this before/elsewhere, but what do you specifically look for when deciding: team, product, market? Is there one that is more important than the others?

Even though we are not raising, the idea of raising money from someone who is actively part of the HN community is quite appealing. I think that speaks a lot about the character of the investor. Just like investors look at team, I think startups also look at the 'people' side of thier investors.

EDIT: I just saw a similar question cross-posted on your AMA post, so no need to answer here. My bad for not noticing that post first. Great stuff there!

EDIT2: Would love to know why the downvote after my first edit?

Good idea. But how do you make money?

Yes, I've mentioned in previous posts that paywalls for news sites only work if certain criteria are met. There may be more, but these are the ones I can think of:

-Niche (i.e. news about F1 racing that has rabid fans) -Financial (variation of niche, but ones that help readers make money) -Local (without high quality, free competitors) -Incredible brands with strong differentiation in quality (these don't exist. NY Times might be the closest, but even they failed the first time around with TimesSelect)

Just like SendGrid might be in trouble, Twilio must also be wondering what the future will hold.

Would love to see someone from SendGrid and Twilio come here to explain the main differences and the cost/benefit of the two services.

That was my first thought, and we are happy SendGrid customers. Of course, SendGrid has analytics and lots of other features that help get emails delivered...But 2 dollars versus 80 is a huge difference.

Patrick - is Google Analytics or Google Conversion Tracker able to track conversions that may occur across many sessions/days apart.

For example, tracking the conversion from landing page to registered user is easy. But what about the conversion from registered user to paying user. That conversion might occur a week later. Do you know if that is tracked, or does google only count a conversion within the same session.

"For a nominal fee, you may fill out a preliminary MicroVentures funding application and submit your business plan."

Pay to play? Are you kidding? All my enthusiasm got wiped out as soon as I read that sentence.

Patrick - congrats. You represent all that is good about this community!

Question: Does 37signals buy traffic/Adwords? Has that ever been part of the use acquisition strategy?

If you think your sales cycle is 3 months, you should double that estimate. Sales cycles tend to be much longer than us optimistic entrepreneurs think. Just wanted to share our experience because knowing how long cycles really are would have helped us plan a lot better.

That's right- we're (NewsCred) here in Geneva! The scene is small but I love it. Drop me an email and I'll be happy to share details and help.

Yeah, I'd love to read more about the challenges previous companies have faced when trying to sign up local advertisers.

The NewsCred Platform just launched our API, but all how-tos (including company supported wrappers) are on our own site. Feel free to link to them though if you want: http://developer.newscred.com.

What people actually pay for (content or distribution) is largely irrelevant (IMO). The news business was only about connecting advertisers with an audience. As soon as advertisers found a better (and more measurable) way to connect with their target audience, they simply moved on.

Is this free for publishers? How long will it be free?

Twilio has a super simple API to push SMSes out to users, but it costs money. No one seems to have mentioned them in this comment thread, but what are your thoughts on the competition? Do you see them as competition?

Such a simple idea, but very compelling and nicely executed.

How is the pricing determined? Simply based on what the data seller/aggregator thinks he can get?

The "requesting for data" reminds me bit of a more structured mechanical turk.

-Do you have a blog? Starting writing. Share the contents via RSS, Twitter, FB etc.

-Do you have a twitter account? Start following relevant people, get involved in discussions, share your link (don't spam).

-Write to bloggers/journalists who might be interested in covering social networking sites (mashable?)

-Since it's niche, promote your site on every blog, forum, site related to the niche. Again, don't spam but inform others why its to their benefit to join your network.

-Adwords?

EDIT: The site wasnt loading when I tried, so I wrote all of that without visiting the site. But now that I've seen it, I'm not really sure how this is a "niche" social network at all. Confused.

-Some sort of content where existing members can win prizes for referring others?

Love it, idea added. Thanks.

Fair point, but I dont think ideas are worthless at all. Given that he is not building startups to execute on these ideas (and alludes he probably won't be in the future), I thought it would make his case much more compelling if he did share. Maybe a few ideas... or just the headline idea without the detail.

I got into a bit of back-and-forth with him on the blog, but I did agree with his general thesis. FWIW, I think throwing out an idea on HN is not a terrible idea. The feedback and useful suggestions probably outweigh the risk, especially if you are already working on building the business (i.e. past the 'idea' stage).

Interesting, if you skip the startup content, which content do you prefer? (Not being snarky, honest question).

I think he is spot on.

BUT, the fact that he won't share his idea spreadsheet is very disappointing. My comment on his blog:

"While I agree completely with your thesis, this response makes the whole thing a wash in my opinion. Do you really think someone reading your blog is going to steal your idea, build a product, execute and deliver? I'd say the chances are almost non-existent.

Love the fact that you're telling people to share ideas and get feedback and be open, but loathe the fact that you won't eat your own dogfood. Saying it only applies when you show ideas to individuals is weak. But that's just my opinion."

Why no XML as response type?

Shafqat here from NewsCred, one of the startups included in the poll. Interesting results - I'm not surprised only 8% had heard of us. Our consumer site (www.newscred.com) has gotten decent traction and press, but nothing out of this world.

Our main business (http://platform.newscred.com) has no publicity or marketing attached to it. We've just been heads down, working away on the product and iterating with customers using typical customer development strategies. With that said, it's a sizeable business and growing. And some stage, we need to turn the marketing machine on.

But the real question I debate internally is "how important is brand recognition." Obviously it's priceless for the Cokes or Nikes of the world. But for a startup that has a clear path to customer acquisition, has figured out its ARPU and is having success with sales, how much focus should be spent on 'brand-building?'

Thoughts?

After reading all of that, I still don't know what he/you actually did.

Thanks for the feedback - yes, that is exactly what I would like to see as the product evolve. Suggesting other sources/feeds as you mention.

But also proposing related topics that may interest you etc. There is already a bit of cool functionality if you click on one of the blog headers - like this page:

http://vcblogs.newscred.com/feed?url=http//feeds.feedburner....

Hey there - would love to help. I've been doing a bunch of these interviews recently, and it's really interesting and relevant to our core business (http://platform.newscred.com).

My email address is in my profile.

As a tangential question, how else can this sort of information (i.e. "blogs I read" be shared).

Not talking about twitter or delicious - looking for a platform to share a curated set of feeds in a nice, presentable style. A "shareable feedly" would be cool, but I don't think it's possible is it?

Thanks for highlighting this - I actually used this for a while. But I problem was that there was simply too much information, with a lot ABOUT venture capital and startups.

I wanted information and blog posts BY venture capitalists.

Is this useful? For those of you who follow these blogs, how do you do it?

I just got tired of RSS readers. While a lot of news comes to me via twitter, this seems to work well for me.

EDIT: I'm the cofounder of NewsCred and we're experimenting with our consumer site. So looking for feedback in general as well.

Would love to read that... please can you repost if you do find?