Wallstrip Case Study: Delivering content where it is consumed
written by Jay Parkhill, posted on July 31st, 2007
Why profiled on Startup Review
Wallstrip, which produces short online video pieces covering stocks, is a fascinating and unusual business. Born of the blogosphere, founded by a venture capitalist who says he never intended to run it as a long-term business, funded with seed capital and sold less than a year later, the company fairly screams “test project”. The fact that it was sold to CBS for $5M (as reported by Techcrunch) a mere nine months after launch proves that the test was successful.
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Flektor Case Study: Counter to prevailing Web 2.0 wisdom
written by Nisan Gabbay, posted on July 17th, 2007
Flektor is a unified suite of tools that enables users to create, manage, and share personal media across a variety of Internet sites. The service can best be compared to Slide and RockYou, but with a more powerful toolset for content creation, like video and photo editing tools. Users create “fleks” - photobooks, polls, quizzes, postcards, etc. - primarily for sharing in social networking sites. Flektor was acquired in May 2007 by Fox Interactive (parent company of MySpace). While the acquisition price was undisclosed, TechCrunch reported a $15-20M figure, while Red Herring is reporting a much higher figure due to potential earn-outs. Flektor’s history is rather short, as they began developing the product in June 2006 and exited less than a year later in May 2007, prior to public launch.
I had the opportunity to discuss the company’s successful exit with co-founder and COO, Jason Kay. While the company’s history is too short to write a full case study, there were still some interesting lessons to be shared.
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Reddit Case Study: How personality impacts product success
written by Nisan Gabbay, posted on April 29th, 2007
Why profiled on Startup Review
Reddit is a social news site that was launched in June 2005. As of April 2007, Reddit is generating ~170,000 unique visitors and 1.9M page views per day. The company was acquired by Conde Nast Publications in October 2006 for an undisclosed sum. Reddit is thus far the most successful graduate of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator program, reaching a successful exit with just four employees and $100,000 in total angel funding.
Interviews conducted: Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder. Aaron Swartz, early employee/co-founder via merger with infogami.com.
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Rotten Tomatoes Case Study: SEO drives traffic growth
written by Nisan Gabbay, posted on September 24th, 2006
Why profiled on Startup-Review.com
Rotten Tomatoes is one of the leading movie sites on the web, ranking number 6 according to Nielsen NetRatings for the week of August 20, 2006. Rotten Tomatoes was acquired by IGN in June 2004 for approximately $10M, when it had 5.2M monthly UVs (according to ComScore) and was generating ~$200K per month in revenue.
Rotten Tomatoes is a great story of a company that started out as a hobby, raised a little funding ($1.01M) during the boom, hunkered down during the bust, and managed to make a nice return for its founders and investors. I am personally a big fan of the site and always love to discuss companies started by young entrepreneurs from UC Berkeley (my alma mater).
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