
Startups That Started As Blogs - morefranco
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3015976/why-these-5-successful-startups-started-as-blogs
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jmduke
Surprised to not see Moz on here: while I think they were technically a
consultancy at first, their chief export for quite a few years came in the
form of incredibly valuable blog posts. My favorite is the 91-point eCommerce
conversion checklist:

[http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-
optimi...](http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-
optimization-91-points-checklist)

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dasil003
I sort of put 37signals in that bucket as well even though they did a lot more
consulting, their blog was pretty huge in the very small standards web
community of the early Zeldman era.

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joshdotsmith
Amy Hoy has spoken a lot about this. I think we're about to see a wave of new
startups that focus first on info-products that involve blogs at some stage,
then later pivoting into a SaaS product.

This is exactly what I'm doing right now. Everything works as one big
marketing funnel from tweets/pins/posts to free downloadable content and one-
off landing pages, to single page apps, to e-books and videos, all the way up
to SaaS. I have to come to love the term Amy uses for these: e-bombs. Finding
customer pains and dropping e-bombs on them is a really lean way to learn a
ton quickly, build an audience, and even make money.

If you get really good, you can make it into a repeatable process that works
over and over regardless of your domain experience. That said, I still think
it might be a little difficult for me to do this for, say, theoretical
physicists. I'm personally inclined to partner up with domain experts rather
than trying to do it all myself as a lone technologist.

Great examples in the post. Now let's see some more! I've seen Moz and
37signals mentioned. Who else are we missing?

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Vekz
Wufoo.com not on the list. Was launched out on success of their blog
[http://www.particletree.com/](http://www.particletree.com/)

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bdcravens
Seems like most of the comments on here aren't getting it. The article isn't
talking about products that were discussed on a blog; it's referring to blogs
that pivoted into a product.

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jere
How is "Dalton Caldwell express[ing] his distaste for Twitter's decision to
restrict its API" a product?

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ibudiallo
How about stackoverflow? It was slowly introduced with coding horror.

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elchief
and joelonsoftware

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applecore
I'm surprised there's no mention of Mint. Their blog played a big role in
their pre-launch strategy.

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catwell
Deezer was originally a blog called Blogmusik. It was streaming music
illegally and was shut down following a trial by the French equivalent of
RIAA, then re-launched as Deezer.

EDIT: I realized that Deezer is not well-known in the US. It is a major music
startup competing with the likes of Spotify and rdio in the rest of the world.

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pushkargaikwad
Ideally we want to say "Businesses that started as blogs". SEOBook is a great
example, Aaron started it as a blog in 2005 where he used to put daily seo
news, then he slowly converted it into a business and is now offering tools
and there is a paid forum. SEOMoz is another such example.

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tannerc
Are we counting straight-up professional bloggers too? Kottke, John Gruber,
the whole BoingBoing team, etc.

Makes you think, doesn't it? Maybe blogging was a little bit bigger than it
was made out to be just a few short years ago.

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rrhoover
There are several examples of startups taking a blog-first approach. While I
was writing this, I found it surprising no one else was talking about this.

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RickyShaww
The evolution of blogs. I'm quite fascinated by the efforts and sh!t load of
works the have put into it.

