Startup Review

One of the best tech blogs was http://www.startup-review.com. Unfortunately it shut down. I prefer thought-through reviews as opposed to quick post about another investment raised as if that was a milestone.

This concept of "anonymous matching/crush matching" was the basis of eCRUSH. The founder did an interview on Mixergy http://mixergy.com/ecrush-ranker-clark-benson-interview/ Here are some additional links: http://www.startup-review.com/blog/ecrush-case-study-why-timing-the-ma… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECRUSH Maybe there are some lessons you can glean from the eCRUSH story that will help you out.

I don't know how huge a success has to be to qualify, but they had revenues $5M - $10M / year at one point, I'm assuming that is from meet me. It's not match.com, but not too shabby: http://www.startup-review.com/blog/hotornotcom-case-study-mixing-free-…

The problem with traction interviews is that they rarely explain what really put them over the top. i.e. This is how Reddit gained traction: "Reddit seeded the initial content on Reddit almost exclusively through the efforts of the Reddit team in the early days. For the first few months of Reddit’s life, Reddit co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman scoured the web to find interesting articles to post to Reddit. They were able to create the illusion of more contributors by submitting articles under different user names. As Reddit developed a loyal readership (due to the content hand-selected by the team) other users began to submit links, although the Reddit team was still responsible for 80% of the submitted links for many months. " http://www.startup-review.com/blog/reddit-case-study-how-personality-i… So for months, 80% of the content on Reddit came from just two people using several fake accounts. It wasn't SEO, it wasn't design or a specific feature, it was misrepresenting themselves and their product to the public. Now, clearly that worked and they went on to do some neato stuff. The ends seem to have justified the means in the hearts of Redditors. But when you read an interview like this with Jimmy Wales where he says he doesn't know how or why his site took off, that's pretty hard to believe. Perhaps he just doesn't want to be forthcoming with some of the things he was doing. Understandable, it just means you won't get much out…

Does anybody else think this logic is crazy? I believe Facebook's two major financing rounds were for $13M and $25M (see http://www.startup-review.com/blog/facebook-case-study-offline-behavio… Given those numbers, they couldn't have taken that much money out compared to what they would be able to take out in a $6B acquisition. We're talking like a 1:500 ratio. And they may not "need" anyone right now, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't sell at that price or that they don't have real risks to their business. There is always risk in moving forward, and in their case, I think there is a whole lot of risk. Their perceived valuation is tied up in (a) continual increases to their traffic; (b) continual dominance in the college age group; and (c) longer-term, in their creation of real earnings. Any perception that they will not deliver on any of that and the offering prices will immediately drop off that ridiculous multiple. Firms like Google may not care about their earnings, but I think other firms like Microsoft, Viacom, and Yahoo do, and if those firms fall by the wayside, the ultimate sell price is going to go way down. Of course, they could IPO too. But they should do it quickly while they are still hot.