We’re starting to talk about some of the things that we’ve been working on with MyAd.com. One of my favorite features is the Example of a display case Display Case, which lets you put items you’ve posted on MyAd in a widget on your own site. Many businesses have a site that doesn’t get updated very often. This is an easy way for a business to show what they have to offer on their own site.
We’re experimenting with linking back to blogs who reference a business on mypages.com For example, a business that listed itself recently was Hammy’s Pizza. It’s in the Portland Pizza category.
Redeye VC: Deja vu has a nice write-up on Zillow offering “Make Me Move”: A homeowner can easily post a Make Me Move price without exposing any personal information. Zillow then enables interested buyers to contact the owner through an email anonymizer. It’s a feature that I wish we had when my wife and I were looking for a new home. We knew - from driving around and around - that there were certain houses that we would be interested in. In retrospect, I wish we’d done the simple thing of leaving a letter on the front steps saying “if you ever sell ..” ...
Nisan Gabbay has an excellent analysis of the site at HOTorNOT.com Case Study: Mixing free and premium services My wife and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary a few months ago. I’m happily married, so I haven’t visited HotOrNot in years. I was fascinated by the description of the dating service, which I don’t think they offered when a friend first told me about the site. “Thus HOTorNOT was able to fill some pretty basic human needs in a way that no other online service had before. This would later translate into financial success once HOTorNOT offered its premium dating service because their cost of customer acquisition was so low - zero. The largest cost associated with operating a traditional online dating site is the cost of customer acquisition, which even for successful sites can be 50% (or more) of revenue. Because HOTorNOT attracted users with its free rating service, it could offer its dating service for the low price point of $6 per month. This is a price that traditional dating sites can’t compete with because it generally takes $15-$30 to acquire a subscriber for a traditional dating service.” ...
There’s an excellent summary of how FaceBook came to be and what its possible valuation might be at: Facebook Case Study: Offline behavior drives online usage - Startup Review Blog
It’s good to see that MyPages is changing to be more interactive. Portland Yellow Pages and Portland, OR Guide by MyPages.com Something neat is the ability to link to specific businesses: BodyAware Massage - MyPages.com
Do you use Netflix? Did you ever use Netflix? I did and ended up cancelling after a few months. The problem was, I didn’t want to dedicate 2 hours of my time to watching a movie. 200 hours/month or more of time surfing the net was OK but hey, that’s another story. Having access to a huge supply of movies didn’t change that. There just weren’t that many movies that I really wanted to watch. ...
My Great Lesson in Cash Flow is a nice article on the importance of cash flow in a start up. No deep lessons but just emphasizing that you have to watch the cash, watch the cash, watch the cash …
Pete Cashmore of Mashable writes that Jobster has relaunched as a social networking site for job seeking. Theory is that you can connect with people and add faves. You can add tags to other users, which has interesting implications: who’s going to be the first to be labeled “brown noser”? “Meet Your Future” is their slogan, which has Big Brother-ish overtones to me. Though I suppose they don’t actually have pictures of a McDonald’s fryer or a Wal-Mart cash register. ...
Bill Burnham has a nice summary of what Google Base in general and the real estate section in particular might mean for vertical web sites like Trulia. It’s not a lot of fun competing in a section where Google is competing. I can vouch for that first hand.