Zach Coelius

Fred Wilson, as usual, has a great post on the USV blog about why companies fold.   In the post he has a gem from Dick Costello:

"My friend Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, describes a startup
as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they
are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful deal as figuring
out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you
find the one paved with gold."

I can’t agree more completely.  In every new startup I have been involved with (four so far) we started the business thinking one set of things and came out the other end with a very different creature on our hands.  There is no better way to learn where the opportunity lies in business then the process of executing on ideas and iterating.

Reading the rest of post I have to also emphatically agree.  Triggit has followed those lines almost exactly.  We’ve kept a very low burn over the last two years as we iterated on our business to find the alley paved with gold.  And lately I am feeling pretty good about the alley we are on… 

We met Brad Feld- who writes one of my favorite blogs- at Blog World.  Seems like a nice guy.   He posted a great youtube video today on his blog.   Its a great parody of a lot of the startups out here that build traffic but never think about how they are going to monetize their audience. 

It turns out that every audience requires different strategies and tactics to monetize.  Some audiences are worth more then others. Thats why porn sites, social networking sites, and youtube have huge traffic numbers and make very little.  On the other side of the continuum search engines, financial sites, specific niche content and lead generation sites can make great money.  The trick is to make sure your building the right audience. 

Bill Burnham has a great post about the twisty road Stratify- just sold to Iron Mountain- took from its initial bubble funding to now.  The changes in business models were huge.  Well worth a read if you are into this sort of stuff.  I wish Bill would post more (though I can understand why he doesn’t).  He has some great insights.