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Startup Blog Network Progress Report

April 8, 2008

As you may know, we are in the process of launching a network of ’startup blogs’ throughout the country.  Aaron is busy working on the WordPress MU theme for the network and we hope to have it completed sometime this week.  Scott and Mike are putting up a couple of new servers for the network and they promised those would be in place either today or tomorrow.  Randy has been busy contacting entrepreneurship programs at colleges and universities around the country and I have been following up with conversations with interested parties.  While there has been lots of interest, there have been even more questions so I thought I might list some of the answers here:

Question: What are the benefits of joining the network?

Answer:  The Startup Blog Network (SBN) provides technical support. For example, members of the the network receive a) managed blog (theme, CSS and customization), b) managed infrastructure (servers, load balancers, firewall), c) managed backup systems (remote and onsite), d) technology support (PHP, Rails and Linux engineers on staff), e) customer service (9am-6pm full-time support resource).

Question: Is that it?  I can get that at WordPress.com or TypePad.com!

Answer: The Startup Blog Network also provides an opportunity to work as a loosely organized team or community.  For example, each author is asked to interview one or more entrepreneurs each month (if you aren’t talking to an interviewing at least one founder of CEO each month you likely aren’t a good fit for the network or your startup community).  Assuming we have 50 authors in the network, the network should have ‘access’ to more than 50 entrepreneur’s each month.   In a non-networked blog community each of us might ‘link’ to an interesting interview an author wrote, but in a networked bog community (i.e. Startup Blog Network) we could share ‘access’ to the entrepreneur allowing additional members of the network to create their own original content related to the founder or CEO. For example, say you have a founder who just launched a really exciting Facebook/LinkedIn mashup. He lives in Boulder and David knows him. David could schedule a window on the shared calendar (i.e. in Backpack) whereby the founder could agree to be generally available via phone. David might video the first interview focusing on the business model or local angle of the story, post the video and write a short post about it on his blog. Next I could call the founder and do an interview from a slightly perspective, focusing on the LinkedIn story. Another member of the network might connect at a later time talking about the Facebook tie-in. Does this make sense? As a network we could offer each other access to a far greater pool of interesting people to talk to. Additionally, we could offer a publicity seeking CEO or founder access to several important/widely heard voices in a very short order. Of course not every member of the network would be interested in all of the available people, but surely 10% of us would be interested in something at any given time.

Question: Okay, that sounds good, what else?

Answer: Another idea we had for the Startup Blog Network was to create some sort of editorial calendar for the entire year to coincide with various events. For example, during the first quarter we could schedule stories on companies presenting at SXSW, during the second quarter we could cover companies in the social networking space, during the third quarter we could cover companies that are venture backed and so on. The idea being we could generate a calendar and distribute that to various PR outlets so they could promote their various clients to us based on that schedule. We don’t have to go crazy – simple quarterly structure.

Question: Can we make any money?

Answer: No one is going to get rich, but surely the associated benefits to our goal of promoting entrepreneurship outweigh our need to make money.

Question: Yea, yea, whatever, how do I make money?

Answer: The Startup Blog Network is constant working to find and place appropriate advertisers so that our members don’t have to. Specifically, the top four positions (125×125 ads) are sold by SBN with 25% of the ad revenue being remitted to the author. The bottom two positions are sold by the author with 75% of the ad revenue being remitted to the author. Note: if you don’t have the time or ability to sell your ads we can place them into inventory and sell them for you at the standard rate.

Question: Okay, so who will own the network?

Answer: We hope to have at least 50 authors (i.e. one for each state) and after consideration for the investors and founders our goal is to distribute 25% of the network to the authors (approximately .5% for each state).  Again, don’t quit your day job!

 

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog, Startups 

Comments

2 Responses to “Startup Blog Network Progress Report”

  1. BrianSoule.com Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    Is it possible to join the network while using one’s current website?
    i.e. http://www.Souleblog.com

  2. Alexander Muse Says:
    April 8th, 2008 at 6:39 pm

    Sure, give me a call tomorrow or go ahead and fill out the application.

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