1) Startup career growth is not about number of people you manage. It’s about number of kick-ass things you get done. [retweet it]

2) Don’t strike fear into the hearts of competitors. Strike uncertainty. It’s a more effective deterrent.  [retweet it]

3) You can lead a horse to water, but it’s hard to lead a revolution.  [retweet it]

4) Startups: Don’t spend the money you’re not yet making to solve problems you don’t yet have. Scale later.  [retweet it]

5) Startups: If you’re raising VC, plan for it to be someone’s primary activity — and prepare for some frustration.  [retweet it]

6) Startups: Not eveything you do needs to lead to money. But, some of it better.  Build a business.  [retweet it]

7) Startups: Iterate on your product. Iterate on your business. Most important, iterate on yourself.  [retweet it]

8 ) The one true secret to startup success: There is no secret to startup success.  [retweet it]

9) Don’t think it impossible for a competitor to do what you are doing. Think it inevitable and plan accordingly.  [retweet it]

10) Startups: If you make sure the next person you recruit raises the team average, magic happens.  [retweet it]

11) An experiment that doesn’t work is not a failed experiment. Experiments are designed to test theories — not prove them.  [retweet it]

12) Startups: Brands are not built by accident. A great brand emerges because someone decided to invest in it or take a risk.  [retweet it]

13) Success provides the sweet joy of making those that didn’t believe in you look silly.  [retweet it]

14) Startups: You can’t get extraordinary results with an ordinary team.  [retweet it]

15) Instead of telling people what to do, try telling them *why* to do. Works much better.  [retweet it]

16) Startups: If you are lost in the woods, running faster is not a good idea.  [retweet it]

17) Startups: Good news about growing pains is that you’re growing. Bad news is that it’s painful.  [retweet it]

18) All startups should blog. You should have something to say before you have something to sell.  [retweet it]

19) Dear founders, you ain’t lean unless you’re an execution machine. Stop reading/listening and start DOING.  [retweet it]

20) Many big ideas start as small irritants.  [retweet it]

In this definition of business, no industry or market is safe, not even the charitable giving sector.  Platforms that facilitate charitable donations are reaching a trend-like status in the world of tech startups.  With a little thought and creativity, these startups are making donations easier, more fun, more transparent, and more engaging experiences.  The mission of these startups is noble and their hard work and support of social ventures and non-profits does not go unnoticed.  However, once you you see the statistics on charitable/non-profit donations and realize that you could be taking a small percentage of that in fees and still mint a few million smackers your genius brain will start thinking of ways to get in on the donation facilitation revolution too.  Here are some stats courtesy of the AAFRC and the National Philanthropic Trust (these statistics only account for giving in the United States).

• 89% of households give.
• Charitable giving accounts for 2.2% of the nation’s GDP.
• Americans gave more than $307.75 billion to their favorite causes despite the economic conditions in 2009
• Electronic gifts to the 187 organizations that provided figures for 2005 and 2006 grew by 37 percent, from $880.7 million to $1.2 billion, and eighty-five of those groups saw online gifts grow by more than 50 percent.

Did you catch that last one?  Electronic giving is growing, and there are three new electronic donation facilitation startups taking advantage of the e-giving trend which, as business processes become increasingly digitized, will only continue to grow.

Quick History

E-giving has been an option for quite a long time for most non-profits with a web presence.  Merchant accounts, PayPal, and other online payment services made the collection process much easier on the organizations, yet integration and some logistics still proved to be a bit difficult.  In addition, the donor could never really know where their money was going, or if it was even going to a real charity (see: fake Katrina charities).  This left the industry ready for a shake-up.  With a straightforward business model based on transaction fees, all the enterprising entrepreneurs had to do was come up with a way to turn the process into a win-win for both donors and organizations.

Fast Forward

3 new donation facilitation startups officially launched this summer, and with no shortage of brilliants minds in the tech startup industry you can bet a few more are on the way.

Philadelphia based MyDunkTank officially launched early on in the summer.  MyDunkTank does fundraising dares.  A cause supporter signs up, gives some dare guidance, and then unleashes their network of friends to come up with dares and vote on the dares with their money.  Whichever dare receives the most votes/cash is the dare the cause supporter must do.  It’s a win for causes, a win for donors, and a win for cause supporters.  It’s also a win for MyDunkTank as they collect a cool $0.99 + 9% on all payments.

GiveLoop, an NYC-based startup that graduate with the rest of the Summer 2010 class of the Philly-based DreamIt Ventures startup accelerator, seeks to add a layer of transparency and engagement to the donation process.  Donors can donate and then let the organizations know exactly what they are donating money for.  GiveLoop allows organizations to post fundraising campaigns for a specific purpose.  For example, if an organization needs new computers they can have a campaign for the exact cost of the computers on GiveLoop rather than just put out a random call for money from donors.  For their trouble, GiveLoop collects an easy 5% on all donations, plus some other small change for credit card transactions.

Chicago-based GiveForward, a super-recent graduate of Angel EXCELerator, makes it easy for people to raise money from their social circles for specific causes.  Some collect for medical expenses, school related expenses, and even on behalf of non-profits.  GiveForward offers a bit of transparency with in-depth descriptions of causes as well as very customizable pages.  GiveForward skims just 4% and some odd change for the credit card transaction.

For a look into some cool things going on in the mobile industry, check out mgive.org.

It’s All a Good Start

These three startups are doing a great service to the fundraising industry, and they stand to make a decent pile of bones in the process.  In a $300billion + market, there is plenty of space for further innovation and no shortage of accelerators and angels ready to cash in on the dead simple business model that essentially guarantees revenue from day 1.

What was the process that led to the inception of ADstruc?

John: I started my own consulting agency, the JFL Group, in 2007, a boutique firm focused on grass-roots brand building. It was here, that I got involved in outdoor advertising both from the buying and selling side. When working on putting together a campaign for a client, I quickly realized that there was nowhere to begin online. At that moment, I knew this industry needed an easier means to planning and buying outdoor advertising.

In my mind, the thing that actually makes ADstruc valuable as a marketplace and tool are the inventory management/analytics and the customizable private marketplace platform. Did you feel that in order to have continued/sustainable success ADstruc needed to be more than just a marketplace for outdoor advertising?

John: Great question, and yes, without a doubt. As with any company, it is extremely important that we listen to the industry to better understand where there are inefficiencies. A large part of this industry manages their inventory on Microsoft Excel. Building out a comprehensive inventory management software backed with deep analytics – provides an incredible amount of value to our OOH vendors. As ADstruc continues to grow, we will be amassing more and more data – returning it directly to our customers to help them make more informed decisions.

Continued and sustainable success will undoubtedly depend on our ability to scale our marketplace and platform to provide new and unique benefits to our customers.

What methods are you using to gain traction in the advertising industry as a whole, with ad inventory sellers, and with ad buyers? (I imagine your location in NY helps.)

John: Being in NYC is definitely important for us. The proximity to major media buying agencies and OOH vendors enables us to meet with them on a weekly basis. Other methods to gain traction are placing a large focus on advertising and marketing – such as outdoor and online.

ADstruc is still (from the official launch date) less than a month old. What do things look like on a day-to-day basis/what is the main focus right now?

John: As a startup, we have our work cut out for us. We are a small team and will be scaling in a few weeks as we close our financing round. Right now, we continue to focus on supporting our customers as well as aggressively marketing to new business.

ADstruc graduated along with the most recent class of startups funded and incubated by TechStars. Can you briefly describe the experience? Would you recommend an incubator/program like TechStars to aspiring entrepreneurs?

John: I recommend checking out our blog post on the benefits of TechStars.  Additionally, in the beginning of the program, I was interviewed on my early thoughts about the program – it can be found here.

Was there anything about your TechStars experience that made you second-guess your entry into the program/things you disliked about it?

John: Absolutely none. I’d do it again if I could!

While mobile payments are still in development, or are waiting for a bit more consumer comfortability (mobile payments, in this case, refers to using the mobile phone as a credit/debit card in a store – not using it to transfer finds i.e. Venmo, or PayPal Mobile) a number of different apps, such as CardStar, have been developed to facilitate the transition from tangible wallet to the mobile wallet.  CardStar, available as an app for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, stores loyalty/discount/membership card information and allows merchants to offer their customers special deals and discounts when they use their cards through the app.

Having seed the success of mobile commerce, customer engagement, and the deal offerings of ShopKick, FourSquare, and Groupon, $400k seems like a small price for Verizon Ventures to pay for what could result in excellent returns in the near future – especially considering the 2,000 merchants and 1.4M app downloads since its launch.

statistics from VentureBeat

Other Notable Deals:

• Sequoia Backs Inkling. Inkling, a startup on a mission to digitize textbooks, took a Series A round of financing which included VC powerhouse Sequoia as well as few other notable tech funds.  Inkling is jumping right on the opportunity presented by Amazon’s Kindle, the iPad, and other subsequent e-readers and tablet computers.  By adding new levels of interactivity to textbooks, Inkling will surely find a permanent place in higher education.  The major hangup in the future for Inkling will almost undoubtedly be about price points for the digitextbooks.

• Google Acquires Like.com. Four years after launching their new visual search startup, the team behind Like.com is set to join Google in a deal many are speculating is worth over $100M.  It is most probable that Google acquired Like for their technology and work on visual search and image recognition.  As for now, it seems that Like will continue to run as a ecommerce focused search website which also powers a smaller network of sites in the fashion vertical.  Some speculate that the move was also meant to take a stab at Facebooks “ownership” of the term “Like”, but that all seems quite incidental and unlikely.

• PlaySpan takes a $18M third round. Notable investors this round include Vodafone and Softbank, and the cash is anticipated to be used for marketing and building international traction.  This new round is definitely a large vote of confidence in the future of social gaming and virtual goods.  It if always interesting when companies can start charging money for what essentially amounts to nothing of intrinsic value for the consumer.

• Groupon Takes Their Show International. The golden boy of group buying has acquired clones in Japan and Russia.  With a small bit of rebranding, Groupon has begun their march toward world dominance in daily deals.

Let me know what you think of CardStar as the Deal of the Week.  Disagree?  Make your case for who you think it should have been!

As a service I love Groupon.  After all, who doesn’t want to save a little money and try out a new restaurant, store, spa, etc. once in a while.  As a business I love Groupon.  The business model is built in, you take the money straight from the consumer, and the margins are well proportioned.  Many businesses love Groupon.  They have seen upswings in sales, more customers, and some have really been able to build loyalty with these new customers.  There is SO MUCH LOVE around Groupon and this whole daily discount deal craze.  With so many reasons to by bullish, why would I be bearish?  Well…

Anyone Can Do It

In a recent interview on TBI Vinicus Vacanti, co-founder of daily deal aggregator Yipit, gushed:

“These companies are extremely inexpensive to run. You just need a sales staff, the technology is very trivial, and you start making money right away.”

Anyone with a business sense and some basic WordPress skills could cobble a website, open a PayPal account, and start selling deals.  While Groupon does have the whole industry pretty much at their mercy, you can expect many new clones to go niche and also ditch the one deal per day model, opting for variety and volume over careful curation of deals.

You’re Only as Good as Your Last Deal.

The one discount per day model has worked to Groupon’s detriment in both leaving many business waiting to be featured (subsequently relegating them to set up campaigns with clones) and missing out on certain target markets.  The deals featured tend to be focused more toward women with frequent spa, salon, and fashion boutique discounts, leaving the male demographic hungry for deals that may be perceived as more masculine.  This has been addressed largely with the introduction of personalized deals (which will also make a decent sized dent in the queue of businesses waiting for their group buying debut), yet even targeted deals can miss and leave the deal-hunter running after their prey elsewhere.

White Label.

Daily deals and group buying have become a source of tangible advertising revenue for traditional media.  While companies like IncentRev have pioneered the discount deal business model for traditional media (previous to the existence of Groupon) it is only a matter of time before they figure out that they can either partner or license some daily deal software and farm out ad sales to their ravenous sales team.  These solutions allow newspapers to collect money directly from consumers, as well as penetrate local markets that Groupon is still a bit “meta” to penetrate.  White label group buying software has no discretion, and could also be easily deployed by businesses looking to build customer loyalty by posting weekly discounts.  If there is any company that could take the Groupon model hyper-local and snag a decent slice of market share it would definitely be Gannet, or perhaps even ClearChannel.

Groupon, LivingSocial, and the like are here to stay for a while. Daily deals and group buying are not going anywhere either. Like any fast-moving startup, Groupon has probably already been down this road of thought and has formulated plans to pivot and address each of these concerns, and that’s great. Their international roll-up and impending plans for China are more than an excellent start.

I don’t dislike Groupon, but I do feel that until these perceived issues are addressed, there will be a lot of little slivers of market share left where there could be a complete pie sitting on Groupon’s table.  I’m bullish on group buying, and bearish on Groupon (even after they put up an $11M day yesterday, thanks to GAP.) – expect me to backtrack and change my stance in about two months when Groupon drops an anvil on our heads with their next piece of business finesse.

photo from nickjohnson

The creation of WyckWyre exemplifies a growing trend amongst offline businesses to innovate and creatively solve problems while diversifying their offerings into the digital space.  WyckWyre is more than just a job board, offering restaurants complete hiring management solutions.  The service takes out the headaches of hiring, and allows eatery owners to spend less time recruiting and more time doing what matters.  WyckWyre’s introductory video describes the service exceptionally well, and shows that the service is much more than just another monster.com for restaurant jobs.

The oft used adage “Necessity is the mother of invention” held true in the creation of WyckWyre.  Julie Lovelass, Maines’ Director of Operations for Restaurant Results, often sat through meetings with restaurant owners helping them develop supply-side solutions to optimize their operations and results.  Due to a high turnover rate of employees in the hospitality and dining industry, Lovelass was constantly finding herself faced with questions regarding personnel and new hires.  Further research from the National Restaurant Association confirms a 113% employee turnover rate.  For just $99 restaurant owners can find qualified and quality applicants to fill open positions in their restaurant.  So far, WyckWyre clients include many local restaurants, resorts, cafes, and eateries.  Bringing on a national chain or decent sized regional chain, while not essential, could really give WyckWyre some meaningful traction and launch them to the forefront of the restaurant job recruiting industry.

Thanks to TGBBJ.com for the initial report.

• Google’s acquisition of Jambool. This deal ultimately provides additional support, specifically in the area of social applications and virtual currency, to Google’s rumored impending social platform debut.
• The India based travel agency MakeMyTrip (MMYT) took a trip into the public on Thursday (August 11th, 2010) and saw shares jump up 89% during trading on the same day.  Not only is this an impressively successful IPO, but it also lends support to the growth and continued success of online travel planning services (see: PCLN)

While the other deals this week, including the many not listed above, are very exciting and represent significant innovation across a variety of industries, the week’s Deal of the Week goes to WePay.

The financial services and transactions industry is among the most lucrative to be in, in part because of its easily implemented, dead simple, and highly profitable business model of transaction fees – both flat rate and percentage based.  With such a business model, the company can begin to see revenue as early as day one.

WePay takes the traditional online money transfer model of services like PayPal and applies it to groups.  The service allows groups to easily pool funds or split costs on anything and everything, and they make it extremely simple.

Here’s the Deal

WePay accepted a second round of funding worth $7.5 million, led by Highland Capital Partners with participants including August Capital, who threw down $1.65 million back at round one.  As far as plans for the money go, it is reasonable to assume that WePay will be bringing on more help to continue to develop and iterate on their already remarkable platform.  It may also be safe to assume that a chunk of the new money will be put toward user acquisition and driving new loyal membership (read: a steady source of transaction revenues), something that WePay has (perhaps) been a bit less effective than the would like in doing.

WePay has set themselves up in a lucrative industry and has pioneered a solution to an all too common problem.  There is certainly a place for them in the online money transaction market, right alongside the industry giant PayPal.  WePay has a real shot at success, provided that they can continue to poach users who have a group payment problem, and show them how simple it is remedied with the WePay service.  With payment volume up 80% and over 1000 new groups created for the month of July (source), WePay’s path toward industry leadership looks promising.

The only thing that makes me the slightest bit nervous for WePay is that it is still, from what I can tell, only a web play.  With the recent success and buzz surrounding mobile payment platform Venmo as well as the rise and perhaps imminent dominance of the mobile device for web access it stands to reason that WePay would do well to put together a mobile app – and quick.  Thankfully, these tech companies are always about ten steps ahead of the commentary and WePay will most likely make me look like a fool for making such suggestions when they do go public with their mobile app.

WePay will continue to surprise and satisfy hot off the news of this funding.  For the near and even mid future, WePay looks like it will remain independent, as any others in the online financial transaction niche either have the resources to compete (read: PayPal) or the knowledge that WePay is in this one for the full marathon.

Display advertising outside of the internet, that is advertising via billboards, newspapers, magazines, etc., has seen dramatically less revenue with the growing reliance on the internet for information and interaction and an ever increasing ability to selectively ignore advertising in general.  When declining revenues are paired with the increasingly irrelevant and inaccurate metrics used to formulate a valuation of the advertising space the market becomes ripe for bit of a revolution and democratization.  It stands to reason that, by making the process more public and even subjecting part of it to a bidding system, the owners of the advertising space will be able to at least sell their inventory more consistently and collect some revenue, albeit a portion of the potential revenue had the market never stagnated and declined.

ADstruc has stepped into the display advertising market, specifically dealing with outdoor ads including billboards, mobile billboards, wallscapes, light poles, transportation stops, columns, and any other imaginable surface upon which advertising may be stuck.  ADstruc facilitates the sale of ad space with a listing based system, taking the form of either more traditional “classified” type listings or auctions.  For their trouble, ADstruc takes a 15% cut on the fees collected by the seller.

At this point it would appear that ADstruc is just an eBay clone focused on selling outdoor ad space.  Fortunately, the brains behind ADstruc focused on building an excellent and comprehensive product from the start, resulting in two other key features.  ADstruc features a completely unique ad inventory management system, allowing sellers to upload and manage their inventory as well as collect and analyze data on sold units.  The inventory management system is available for the super-low price of just $1/unit/month.  ADstruc also gives ad space sellers and brokers a white label option, resulting in completely custom private sale setups for approved buyers in a completely custom branded marketplace.

ADstruc is a graduate of Boulder, CO based TechStars and officially launched on August 6th, 2010.  According to the @adstruc twitter account, the startup is based out of New York City which is as good as a spot as any for finding outdoor ad sales reps and brokers willing to tap into a new sales stream.  Placement in NYC should also greatly assist ADstruc in continuing to build a product which seamlessly integrates and iterates the subtle nuances and innovations in the outdoor advertising market.

This will definitely be a fun startup to watch.

Here’s How it Works.

BuzzFeed teamed up with Groupon-like local deal service Tippr to deliver their selection of unique deals.  BuzzFeed/Tippr offer the deal at about a 50% discount.  Deal hunters buy the deal and share it like mad in hopes that others will buy and the minimum quota will be filled.  Assuming enough orders are placed, customer’s credit cards are billed and they receive their discount voucher.

Here’s Why it Makes Sense.

The true essence of BuzzFeed, as is the case with many other web startups, is not contained within what is available to the public.  The real value lies in the technology powering the back-end of things.  At its core, BuzzFeed measures and analyzes viral content across the web and implements strategies to make the content even more viral and engaging.  It has a number of high profile clients already who have subjected their content to BuzzFeed’s algorithms and have received the “viral lift” courtesy of BuzzFeed’s popular community and network of participating websites.

Thus far, BuzzFeed has been largely a B2B play, which is no doubt a large market and one willing to pay for viral promotion – especially having seen BuzzFeed in action.  However, the size of the consumer market is much larger, one of the quickest ways to create cash flow is to sell tangible products.  This is not to say that BuzzFeed is in desparate need of cash, they aren’t, but an e-commerce play just makes sense especially with such a well developed and active community.

Here’s Why it Might Will be Successful.

The BuzzFeed community is extremely vibrant and active.  They thrive on the popular, the unusual, the embarrassing, and the ridiculous things people do on a regular basis.  The diversity of the viral content that flows through BuzzFeed on any given day creates a sort of culture and air of spontaneity – as users can never really expect what interesting photo, video, or otherwise might be the next to make its way into the meme-stream.  Couple the spontaneity with completely unique and seemingly ridiculous selection of products and you can expect people to act on impulse and fork over their CC digits for a piece of the action.  In addition, it stands to reason that an engine that can predict and select viral content could also do the same for products.

Tell me what you think.

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Besides being a novel resources to watch other people’s web activity, discover new information or websites, and perhaps even be a decent source of traffic if utilized strategically, Mabzy’s real value lies in the data being created which will surely give interesting insight into user habits and web trends.  @zacharycollins, teen technologist and founder of Mabzy (as well as twtbase and yazzem) describes the process of creating Mabzy as almost accidental.

“Mabzy was an accidental idea I ran across after working on a few ideas”, says Zachary.  “I didn’t really know what I was creating at the time, but knew I was having fun creating and using it. Now after users are coming back everyday and checking in to all these various websites, I’m seeing the power of the data being collected and how this data could be used to offer powerful tools for websites, developers, and most importantly, the user.”

In addition to offering  users a fun way to share their web activity, Mabzy has hinted at exploring more ways to reward their loyal users beyond points and badges.  The Mabzy website makes mention of a Mabzy store in which users will be able to redeem their check-in points for different items.  While the idea of earning points and getting cool free stuff is appealing from a user perspective, it certainly necessitates that Mabzy begin to produce a stream of revenue which can, at the least, sustain an inventory of goods for the Mabzy store – unless all goods sold in the store were virtual.  In TheStartupist’s recent interview with Zack he mentioned that Mabzy is dedicated to building revenue streams which will integrate perfectly with the product, and also provide value for users.  Perhaps the most obvious immediate income would come from a websites willing to buy the right to be featured as the “check-in of the day”, receiving loads of traffic and being gaining real estate on user’s profiles with a special badge.  Advertising in this way provides a win-win situation for both the advertiser and the user, as well as the platform itself.

As is the case with many new social web applications, there have been a group of critics challenging the necessity of yet another social bookmarking/sharing app.  In defense of Mabzy, Blippy and Swipe.ly were largely criticized when the were launched yet both have raised significant capital as well as solidified their position within the social web.  When asked to address his critics, Zack had this to say:

“Honestly, critics are my favorite. They make me want to work even harder. I usually don’t make a big deal if someone critics my projects, but I like to work and work to prove them wrong, or even improve on what they find has no purpose. But to defend Mabzy, I just have to say, look deeper into Mabzy. Don’t look at it just as points and badges, but look at the data it’s collecting and how it can be used.”

Mabzy, still in its early days, has not been without a few hiccups.  One issue that may become prevalent in the future is check-in abuse or gaming the system.    Much like it’s influencer FourSquare, Mabzy does not actually require users to be present on a website to check-in.  While this potential issue could be remedied by moving the platform to a strictly distributed check-in button that would run alongside other social sharing buttons on blogs and websites, Mabzy’s team feels that they can come up with other solutions to recognize and prevent system abuse before they become a significant issue to the community.

It will certainly be interesting to watch Mabzy grow, and see how the rest of the social web reacts to it as a new player.  I expect Mabzy to fare well and experience steady growth as it gets older, knowing that Zack has compiled a good bit of knowledge from his past ventures which he can leverage into Mabzy to make a truly interesting and innovative social sharing application.  Zach seems to be just as optimistic:

“I am more than excited [to be building Mabzy]. I’ve worked on many different projects in my life and now I have the chance to take everything I’ve learned and fit it into Mabzy. If you look at what I’ve done, you can notice I’ve fit a lot of it into Mabzy.  I can’t wait to see where Mabzy goes.”

To learn more about Mabzy check it out on the web at Mabzy.com, follow my activity, or follow Mabzy on twitter @followmabzy.

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