I'm surprised. Not everyone here is blindly worshiping the big startup god. I see so many posts here about new websites that do mildly useful things, but where's the revenue stream?
I'm the maker of an art community (ArtGrounds) and a multi-user painting program (Sketcher), and I know how hard it is to make money on ads. Even when I had thousands of daily visitors (the site is seeing a slow decline), I was still making pocket change. And even then, it was nigh impossible to get people interested in renting their own private Sketcher rooms.
Part of it is probably that I don't understand marketing, but the thing is that, in most cases, you must have a very compelling product that's available nowhere else (at least at that quality level) in order to sell it. And there must be demand.
Contrary to popular belief, you can't really create demand artificially. All you can do is tap into people's itches, and scratch them. "I wish I could stay in touch with all my friends" becomes Facebook. "It's so impractical to have to tell everyone where I'm going in case they need to call me" becomes the cellphone.
There's more to it than that of course, but looking at all these trendy startups, it seems that they don't even care about the basics much of the time. The products just seem awfully superficial and simple.
I'm the maker of an art community (ArtGrounds) and a multi-user painting program (Sketcher), and I know how hard it is to make money on ads. Even when I had thousands of daily visitors (the site is seeing a slow decline), I was still making pocket change. And even then, it was nigh impossible to get people interested in renting their own private Sketcher rooms.
Part of it is probably that I don't understand marketing, but the thing is that, in most cases, you must have a very compelling product that's available nowhere else (at least at that quality level) in order to sell it. And there must be demand.
Contrary to popular belief, you can't really create demand artificially. All you can do is tap into people's itches, and scratch them. "I wish I could stay in touch with all my friends" becomes Facebook. "It's so impractical to have to tell everyone where I'm going in case they need to call me" becomes the cellphone.
There's more to it than that of course, but looking at all these trendy startups, it seems that they don't even care about the basics much of the time. The products just seem awfully superficial and simple.