Nisan Gabbay of Sierra Ventures recently contacted me with respect to his new blog, Startup Review. According to Nisan:
Startup Review will be a blog that profiles successful Internet start-ups in a case study format. The case studies will analyze the key factors that made the companies successful, with an emphasis on strategy and product decisions. Each case study will also have sections discussing launch strategy, exit analysis, and links to other good analysis on the company.
I don’t think that there is a good forum where people can discuss what made certain companies successful, particularly the less publicized success stories. Sure there are whole books written on companies like Google and eBay, but what about the more modest success stories in the $10M – $2B range? My goal is to highlight lessons learned from companies like Rent.com, HotorNot.com, or Greenfield Online.
I took a look at his site and he has some great posts on companies like MySpace. If you are interested in going more in-depth to understand how certain companies got off the ground and made it, I suggest subscribing to his site. As for my two cents, it would also be interesting for Nisan to dive deeper into some more high profile failures in the market so others can understand the many things that can go wrong in a business. I have found that digging into your failures and doing a post mortem on why your company lost a sale or a customer, partner, or employee can be more illuminating than just understanding why you succeed.
Hi Ed,
Thanks for helping to get the word out on Startup Review. At some point in the future I will profile failures because as you mentioned, there is plenty to learn from them. I have led with successes because during my conversations with entrepreneurs that seemed to be what most interested them.
If Startup Review builds a large enough following I think there are plenty of directions it could go to expand the content … so stay tuned.
Thanks again,
Nisan
Guys,
I agree that this is a great idea and that the profiles are good. I guess that, over time, Nisan will start to see some patterns emerge – at that point he has a book on his hands.
I think it’s always useful to get the consumers views on these things – in this case, what makes a company win or lose. As an entrepreneur myself, I know that I see my company/service in a way that is quite different than the way my customers see it. It can sometimes take a long time for people inside an organization to really figure out wat drives their business (speaking from experience). One possibility might be to intervioew the CEO and then pose some similar questions to one of his customers. I think that might be another interesting case study.
With a very short partial-content feed there are zero chances I am going to read that blog.
I still can’t understand why people would start a blog, and then destroy its RSS feed. If one is afraid of syndicating thiefs, put a copyright notice at the end of each post.
The chance of me subscribing to a blog is about 20 times bigger if the blog has a full-content RSS/Atom feed. I read 200 blogs/day, and less than 10 are partial-content. But they are THAT good.