SocialStartups.com

< img src="http://images.postling.com/0/0e6/g_400xN.198.jpg" />

 Photo credit Katrina Hayday Wester.

Here’s the presentation I gave for DreamIt Ventures 2009′s Demo Day. My speaker notes are at the bottom of each slide. I recommend viewing it in "Full" so you don’t have to squint so hard.

I got 4 questions after my talk:

1. Q: "Are you raising money?" On what terms?"
   A: "Let’s talk about that privately later…"
2. Q: "$9 seems awfully low for a music label with 54 artists. What do you think?"
   A: "I agree, and that’s why we’re building Postling Premium…" (sly smile)
3. Q: "There are a number of social media monitoring companies like Radian6. Do you see yourself partnering with them or moving into that space?"
   A: "Right now we’re focused on the publishing and responding side of social media marketing. Later, I could see us partnering with them or otherwise, as the two are very complimentary."
4. Q: "Do you have plans for other revenue streams?"
   A: "We built Postling in 6 weeks and have only been live 12 days. We’re still listening to our customers and adapting. If there is more that our customers want, we will provide it for them."
    

I’m so glad they asked those questions – it set things up perfectly. You don’t want to give too much away in front of 200 people.

Here’s a crude graph I drew that illustrates the distribution of social media value and the number of people who capture that value.

I think this graph is really confusing, so I’m hoping you all can help me draw a better graph. The idea is that there are a small number of people who are "experts" and are getting a lot of value out of social media. And then there is this gigantic mass of people who have no experience and aren’t getting anything out of social media.

All I know is that this graph is awful. Ideas on how to recreate it to make more sense?

Great journalism by CNET as they pick about what went wrong at the music startup SpiralFrog. In fact, it’s a look at just how many ways you can screw up your company. The overarching lesson should be: always focus on providing value for your customers (or, as Jeff Bezos always puts it, Start with the customer and work backwards). SpiralFrog made the fatal mistake of focusing on advertising dollars and as a result failed to build any lasting customer loyalty or engagement.

Just look at what happened to their traffic after they stopped spending money on paid search ads:

Yup, you can guess the date.

Part Two will be published later today.

 These slides by Josh Porter are incredible if you are responsible for a social website (and aren’t all websites social these days?)

Link to his post and slides are here, if the embed isn’t working for you.