photo credit: nanpalmero

LinkedIn is a social networking website for professionals – and definitely one of its kinds. It has over 60 million members stemming from 200 countries and 150 industries and is still on the path of growing rapidly. The professional networking website connects you to your trusted contacts and also helps you exchange ideas, knowledge and opportunities with a broader network of professionals around the world.

It has a three dimensional revenue model:

1.Upgraded Accounts: Business, Business Plus and Pro accounts provide extra features including lists of who has searched for you and your company.

2.Hiring Services

3.Advertising on LinkedIn – (the largest source of revenue)

LinkedIn was founded in late 2002 by Reid Hoffman, headquartered in Mountain View, California. Last year it recorded the most successful quarter as well. In just six years, the company has become one of the most successful one’s in Silicon Valley and a brand recognized throughout the corporate world. It started recording profits since 2006, and the company’s present value is more than $1 billion.

Impressive, isn’t it? And what is more impressive is the successful startup story behind it;

Reid Hoffman, a Stanford graduate, realized the importance of forming networks and leveraging them when it comes business or work. The entrepreneur is an active investor, funding over 60 startups in Silicon Valley, including Facebook. Hoffman took the decision of leaving his academic life at Oxford behind and returning to Silicon Valley in the 1990’s to pursue his dream of starting a software company, a decision he wouldn’t ever regret.

He landed a Job at Apple (which was his first job) and moved on to working with Fujitsu. After this he jumped into the online and social networking market by opening his first company – Socialnet. The company wasn’t successful and Hoffman accepts that many mistakes were committed and the most devastating one was not having a proper product distribution strategy – how will you get users to come to your website.

Hoffman decided to leave Socialnet and started working with Pay Pal. It was during his work at Pay Pal he learned that the work culture was changing – you can’t do everything on your own, it’s practically impossible and that is when you need specialists and that is how you learn. After leaving his job at Pay Pal, he decided to start LinkedIn and he was really interested in the professional space and how professionals connect with one another. The initial financing was from savings of his previous job at Pay Pal.

He followed a simple policy of first getting users engaged into your product/service and then forming a business model. The company now has three successful revenue models (mentioned above) and is also a Fortunes 500 company.

To get more insight to the story we suggest you visit cnnmoney.com

Willing to take risks, learning from every experience, dedication and never quitting is what made LinkedIn what it is now. Every startup starts business on a small scale but a good entrepreneur will always have a vision to make it grow through successful business models.

Even though we had cash in the bank, we decided to have more cash in the bank. One of the things we need to do is find really cool products. We're building some but we'd also like to broaden out our offering and buy a cool product with a good development team and add it into the service. That's why we went through the process of raising money last year.

photo credit: johnxlewis

Mr. Kevin Rose created Digg.com – a user driven social content website that attracts 38 million visitors each month. After you submit content to the site, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives the most Diggs, it’s promoted to the home page for other visitors to see – a unique concept which caused a revolution in social media.

Digg.com was launched in 2004 and has been a successful in luring millions of visitors. But achieving all this wasn’t as easy. Kevin Rose had a tough time launching Digg.com – a once upon a time ‘startup’.

Kevin Rose worked for a television company and worked on Digg in his spare time to keep costs down. He says “If you are really passionate about something, it is possible to work a fulltime day job and have that side project, but be prepared to make sacrifices”.

At some point net entrepreneurs will have to decide between quitting their jobs and committing to their ventures, but the longer they can work without taking help from investors, the more equity they will maintain in their start-ups.

Some other suggestions for startups from Mr. Kevin are:

•Dispensing with an office – Digg didn’t have one for 6 months
•Renting and not buying server capacity for testing
•Skipping expensive conferences and networking at after-conference parties instead
•Not to design too many features in your startup product initially
•Hiring people from the start so they can see the big picture right from the beginning
•Avoid taking money from unknowledgeable ‘dumb investors

Mr. Kevin also mentions that being worried, tensed and hyperactive about your startup product is perfectly alright. He also had a stressful time after Digg’s launch, ensuring the site wasn’t hacked or taken over by spammers – “it was really scary. I can remember waking up early in the morning because I didn’t know what was going to be on the homepage.”

A lot of advice for startups from the founder of Digg.com himself

For more details visit: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/3358151/Digg-com-founder-boosts-startups
 

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

So you create a Facebook Fan Page and have 200,000 fans in two weeks. How do you get the benefit out of this? Well this is a 100 percent opportunity to become an ‘entrepreneur’ (in good faith).

The dilemma is – can a famous Facebook page become a real startup?

We have two kinds of people here;

1.Intentional – who form a Facebook page or open an account with Twitter before launching a website (bona fide startup.

2.Unintentional – who form a Facebook page, get massive number of fans and then decide to launch a website with the same idea

In both cases, the biggest question is whether the popularity of a Facebook Page can be easily harnessed to build a standalone website. The obvious advantage is that Facebook has a huge number of users who are very active (Trust me – Facebook is extremely engaging). If a user becomes a fan of your page, then updates you post on your page will automatically show up in the user’s profile. Building an audience through Facebook is comparatively easier.

Now the problem is that users might be reluctant to visit your website when they can get all updates from Facebook (user friction)

It will be a long way before a Facebook page can turn in to a sustainable and profitable business.

Econsultancy explains the topic elaborately in this post by citing an example of Secret London

As a standalone website, Secret London will have to convince its users to visit and use yet another website. That means far more

PS: My friend launched a Facebook Fan Page yesterday and has above 300 fans already – she is already thinking on the same line

photo credit: Jakob Montrasio

Considering the recent world scenario, we think of China either when Copenhagen Climatic issues come up or its recent tiff with Google regarding hacking and censorship. And rightly I believe. Keeping all the issues behind, China still recorded a magnificent growth recently.

An American Entrepreneur in China (Calvin Chin) wrote a guest post in TechCrunch about the startup Culture in China. He recently also attended the World Economic Summit in Davos (Switzerland).

Calvin Chin talks about how the Chinese Government has put stability on the top – with the goal of lifting millions of people out of poverty (and yes at the cost of freedom of information). He believes that in China emphasis is laid on stability which allows big decisions to be made quickly.  

Many tech startups in China know that the stability of the government is paramount for economic growth (despite the freedom to operate is limited). As soon as the government legislation changes, they don’t sit and whine but work towards doing the best they can in the existing framework. For example; when the government decides to censure microblogging sites, startups use the existing infrastructure to set up a microblogging site that screen Tweets. The lesson here is that as a startup founder – you don’t have the time to sit and cry over spilled beans but instead react to the situation by taking full advantage of what you have.

There are many lessons a startup can learn from startups operating in china. The article on TechCrunch provides a great insight to this matter.

The thing is while the majority of Chinese netizens really don’t care that much about what’s going on outside of China, the ones who do care, people who would start companies, people who want international news, all know workarounds to use services they like or read about sensitive topics from other perspectives

photo credit: cloudzilla

Entrepreneurs agree that shows such as The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den are changing business culture – for the better. “Entrepreneurial” reality TV shows have become popular because they reflect all the problems, issues and situations a startup or small business owner may face.

Reality-Business TV offers an insight into the highs and lows of starting a business and there are quite a few lessons startups can learn;

Don’t overvalue (or undervalue) your business – sales and profit are different

Study Competition – Know about your competition as much as you know about customers

Diversify – New markets, new distribution channels or new verticals; explore all possible avenues

Perfect Your Elevator Pitch and Presentation Skills – it will help communicating with investors, clients, employees etc

Forget your ego – an over-inflated business ego will ignore the ‘cost’ and ‘risk’ realities

Further information on what a startup can learn from business reality shows is provided in the article below:
http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/banking-lending-credit-services/13641763-1.html

Whether you are a start-up seeking investment (think Shark Tank) or an established business in need of a re-launch to abate failure - these shows deliver what could be considered a 50 minute master class in how to succeed in business.

How does Israel—with fewer people than the state of New Jersey, no natural resources, and hostile all around—produce more tech companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, Japan, South Korea, India and China combined? Israel has transformed the challenges it has faced into assets that form the key of its ‘culture of innovation’. Adversity of all kinds, have forced Israelis to be resourceful, to do more with less, to innovate and be global from day one. There are quite a few parallels we can draw between Israel and startups; passion, resourcefulness and persistence being the most important ones.

1. Passion – something you should feel as an entrepreneur, for the startup life, for your company, for your vision – is all-encompassing
2. Resourcefulness – know how to get information and results you want
3. Persistence – keep fighting till the end

Israel is an apt synonym for the global impact a startup business can make despite having “enemies” with massive resources. Senor and Singer from Start-Up Nation have written a book on lessons a business/startups can learn from Israel.

Throughout Nation, Israelis are a frank-speaking people who are willing to explore the world, to learn from those experiences, and to be persistent with implementing ideas in business. Managers at Intel Israel, for example, are credited for changing Intel’s strategic decision to no longer seek increased processor clock speed and instead create new processing paths.

Read the book summary and this itself will give you some good idea of what lies beneath (in the book)