Viral Threads ???

I know that I am in the middle of a startup as we speak...so I shouldn't be thinking about anything else right? Can entrepreneurial ideas be spawned from current ventures effectively? Well today was the straw that broke the camels back.. I saw this post today regarding getting Twitter shirts made for the SXSW conference.

I sent an email to Threadless regarding a possible contest for our startup when it launches to kind of help us really let our customers define our brand and be involved right from the beginning. In the email I sent I pointed out how I could bring a new demographic to there site and would be really excited to offer a great prize for the best design. I got back a cordial reply simply stating good luck ... but we already have other contests going on.. I totally understand their stance .. they are a really busy company that is really focused on the users driving the community ...which I agree w/ 100%...no advertisers..

So the dim lit light bulb went off in my head.. What if their was a social driven marketplace for web communities and sites that their users could create and vote for their favorite designs. Think of the viral nature in which people could find out about other sites and more importantly more about the community in that particular community. Think of sites like Twitter , Meebo , Digg , MyBlogLog, Reddit, Search Engine Land, Technorati , the list goes on and on... I know that the communinty made up of tons of other communities could drive different themes for times during the year. Also think of the contests you could have between rival sites: Pageflakes vs. Netvibes or GotVmail vs. RingCentral or Meebo vs. EBuddy , Twitter vs. Dodgeball etc. etc...

The sites themselves would have to sanction the contest's in order to use Logo's for use. As a business owner this would be a no-brainer for me as viral marketing tool...The ability for a community to help define a brand is quite powerful. Plus I like wearing cool T-Shirts...I see implementing the social networking tools as a great bridge to gain traction.

Here is where the rubber meets the road... I do have some close friends that own a silk screen business ...so I made some inquiries on the actual cost and breakdown of this process. It is totally doable and their are margins to be made are acceptable. The question is what business model would I follow.. Do we split revenue w/ the sites? Do we charge an inclusion for sites? or do we have a monthly subscription for advertisers/partners . .. Needless to say I have friends that are extremely talented in web development so I have no doubts on that end... The big problem is how can I juggle both startups... could I implement a Woot style format where it would be a sale a day..to curtail time spent on it.. I think that I could handle the PR/Sales aspect of it..

Just thinking out loud... :)

Ning : My answer to Social Commerce?

Today I watched two video's by Robert Scoble ..The first was an interview w/ Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame and Gina Bianchini CEO of Ning . The second was the actual demo of this new and very provocative service. The reason I bring this up is that I recently wrote about how I could build a "bridge" to other social networks for our new member based site.

This service is unique in the fact that it is a simple, cheap and has a great set of tools like being able to have widgets embedded (meebo/flickr/videos/twitter) . It really allows the community creator to really tailor and be nimble towards his or her own community needs. I really like the fact that I can essentially white label this for our upcoming startup. I can make a private site if I want and the best part is our Web Developer can totally customize it from the original source code.

What I really like about this service is the ability for a relative non-technical adept person can do this quite easily.

I believe that this could be the next evolution in Social Networks due to the extreme niche targeting that can take place.

Community = Web 2.0

After reading a couple of great post's by Nic Brisbourne ..it really got me thinking about organic viral marketing . His first post was about what makes community's succeed. It was a fascinating read especially w/ all of the news this week associated w/ Digg and Flickr and their decisions to ruffle the feathers of their initial users.

"Webforums like the Mobile Monday Yahoo Group are a good and simple example - people post news and questions to the group and over time rules have emerged governing what is allowed (anything to do with the mobile web) and what isn’t (blatant advertising). When the rules are broken people respond with lots of angry posts and if necessary the moderators wade in to sum up group opinion and explicitly say what should be allowed and what shouldn’t. Thus the group has a set of rules, is self policing and thrives because of it. If the self policing failed and the advert spam became to voluminous people would stop participating and the community would fall apart.

An interesting question then is how those rules evolve, and if you are building an online community what you can do to influence that evolution to maximise your chances of success."

By Nic Brisbourne

I am actually in the process of e-commerce/membership based startup that will be leveraging online car community's as evangelists. Our #1 concern was not to force our "service" down the members of these community's. So my first thought to gain some traction was to offer a $5k Shopping Spree for new members that sign up in Lottery. This seemed ok at the time..but I wasn't convinced that this would get us the kind of customers that we want to evangelize for us and to get a handle on our unique business model.... Well as luck would have it I was logged on to me.dium.com and saw a bunch of people crowed around a site called Woot.com . This social commerce site sells 1 product a day...that's it and thousands of people flock to it.. to participate in online banter about the product of the day whether good or bad. The products are priced way below any thing on the net... so that may be a big attraction...but the community is really what drives it. You will typically find 300-400 comments on a given Woot Off!

So this really got me thinking about how we can engage our potential new members in an honest way that really depicts who we are: Bring a Woot style format everyday for individual automotive communities that we advertise in to help us get out our message. We are a site that solves the problem of all car enthusiasts: "Getting the best parts in one place for the best price"

Quote from Nic Brisbourne

"Pre-critical mass there is no natural network value, so your entire value proposition can only be about personal value. That worked fine for Del.icio.us and Flickr because storing bookmarks and photos gives a lot of personal value - it doesn’t work for e.g. review sites, because until there is a critical mass of reviews there is not much value to the consumer."

I am banking that our startup will give that personal value to customer...