The founderShack office is abuzz with enthusiasm as we near the end of our first week of existence. It feels like months have gone by – and given the pressure cooker that was startupweekend, you could argue that it has. We are making rapid progress on the design spec, and have high hopes of a soft launch in four to six weeks. Sharpening up the revenue model is the biggest challenge (what a surprise) and in part for that reason I headed out to SFNewTech last night to see what some of the recent launches looked like, and how they were addressing that problem. The demos were from Yield Software, AdCause, MightyBrand, Twittfilter, Lil’grams, and PixelPipe.
I was particularly struck with MightyBrand, which is taking a dashboard approach to showing how your brands are being discussed throughout the social web. It aggregates conversations from blogs, twitter, digg etc. into a single view – powerful looking stuff, and something I would seriously consider paying for ($24 - $99/month). The demo was generally well done. Ryan chose the other presenters and sfnewtech as the example brands to follow, which was a nice touch. The one really down element to his presentation was his response to the tone indicator. The “overall tone” indicator was perhaps the most visually appealing of the specific features of MightyBrand, a red to green indicator that claimed to show how positively or negatively people were conversing about your brand. However, when pressed on the details Ryan could only say that it was a “crude” implementation, and that it was “not very accurate”. He needs to come up with a better answer to that question – or better technology behind it – perhaps both!
The other demo that particularly interested me was AdCause, but for a totally different reason. Obviously Andrew is new to demoing his product, which came through in his demeanor – he appeared pretty nervous – but that didn’t bother me. What did bother me was that the whole selling point of AdCause - an ad network for twitter - was its connection to charities. As you create a campaign you select what percentage of the revenue goes to which charity. That was pretty simple and frankly a great idea. However, it came out during the demo that people could select 0% as one of the options. To me that invalidates the whole selling point of the site. If I’m going to be more inclined to click on an AdCause link it will be because of the charitable aspect, but if I think that the person running the campaign is keeping all of the revenue, I lose that motivation. To make this idea function well, Andrew needs to put in a minimum percentage being donated, I would think that 10-20% would make sense. That would dramatically improve the concept.
Alright, back to work on the founderShack spec. Though I wasn’t able to remain long last night, it was great to see so many people from StartupWeekend!
