
Don't fear to start your business with a few bucks - ivan
http://ivansuchy.blogspot.com/2007/06/dont-fear-to-start-with-few-bucks.html
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sharpshoot
No offence - but job items isn't a business. If you have relegated the price
of a listing to zero. Where else do you provide any value?

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ivan
No problem Sumon, than twitter isn't business, del.icio.us isn't business,
digg isn't business, reddit isn't business and most of VC's today investing to
things which are not businesses :) Btw where is the value of your
demomyapp.com.

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sharpshoot
Twitter is growing to scale - they can monetise that scale later through
advertising. You can imagine a number of possible ways for monetisation of
twitter later - its just kind of compelling for now. They will figure that out
i'm sure.

Digg has the attention of hundreds and thousands of users which is when
advertising becomes a great business model as you can target specific users as
you can track what they have dugg and what they have contributed. Reddit
likewise - attention.

DemoMyApp - which we're not concentrating on has no value at present but it a)
solves a problem b) if pushed can aggregate the attention of those who wish to
showcase apps and those who wish to find out about them. Only then will it
have any value what so ever. There are proven advertising models around that
early adopter audience including sponsorship/ ad sales to web
hosting/investors/ etc. Its not exactly a megabuster - so we're not really
focussing on it.

Is job items being pushed to scale? With so many job listings sites on the
internet - why does a free one provide any value to anyone. Is it targetted?
or is the software good? I'd argue to make it a business model you should
charge people to create their own listings sites using the technology. I see
value in the software not the site itself.

As for the comment about VC's investing in things which are not businesses -
thats because you are confusing the role of investment. Investment is required
in times of negative cashflow to augment the burn of building to scale.
Sequioa understood that the traction shown by YouTube would mean that it would
be cashflow negative for a while before building an audience which could be
monetised for that attention. Doesn't mean its not a business - just needs
capital to become one. Same can be said for RockYou, Slide, and whoever else.
Its about scale then you can leverage scale as ad dollars shift away from
traditional to social media.

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ivan
Ok, I accept your opinion.

