A few years ago I asked myself the following question: What would I hate for a competitor to do?
I think it's a helpful exercise for entrepreneurs to get a fresh perspective on the business they are building and prevent optimising for a local maximum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hil... ).
As the founder of BetaList one of my fears was that someone would 1) create a list of startup directories that would become the go-to resource for startups, 2) grow their audience, 3) provide founders a paid service to have their startup submitted for them, 4) gain control over an ever-increasing influx of startup submissions, 5) start their own media publication, 6) outcompete my business, BetaList.
So I decided to build that potential competitor myself rather than have someone else do it.
That's what I planned anyway. Halfway through I realised that journalists much prefer direct contact with the founders, and there's not much value in submitting your startup in bulk. It's way more effective to find a few key publications and go for the personal approach.
Still left me with this big spreadsheet and nice domain name though, and there's tons of people asking me for these kind of lists. Especially startups that want to get featured on BetaList, but aren't eligible for one reason or another. We used to send them a Google Doc with a bunch of links, but now we can send Submit.co
That's all :)
@marckohlbrugge Great strategy, Marc! In your case, not only a product is a point of interest, but also a story of its creation. Thank you fo sharing it! :)
@marckohlbrugge So that's why you didn't want to partner with Startuplister :)
But seriously, Great list and thanks for putting it out there for all to use. Since you mentioned a while back that you were working on something similar, I've been sweating bullets.
@crixlet Reason for not partnering was because 1) I like to build a relation with the startups we feature, so having someone else submit the startup go against that, and 2) we already get more submissions than we can comfortably handle so getting even more would only complicate things. (Something we're working on.)
No reason to sweat bullets by the way hehe. For us this is just a quick side project. BetaList remains the primary focus.
@marckohlbrugge Wow, that's an exercise from which all startups could benefit. I'm going to try it with the team tomorrow. Great mindset, Marc.
I noticed there were a lot of blank fields. Is this a dynamic list you'll be updating? Thanks for the helpful share!
Just saw @Marckohlbrugge tweeting about this and immediately saw the potential value of an online overview where to get press coverage for your startup. Marc has already proven his value for startups over and over again, for example with his other business Betali.st. Keep it up!
@joshdance Like Aaron mentioned it's indeed just an embedded Google Doc. Reason for using Rails is because I intended to build something myself, but then later I realized I could just embed the spreadsheet.
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