written by Jay Parkhill, posted on October 16th, 2007
Jumpstart Automotive Media is a vertical advertising network focused on the automotive market. The company represents automotive web publishers for advertising sales and offers a suite of services for advertisers and publishers around that core business. Vertical advertising networks have received significant attention and investment recently, so Jumpstart’s story is timely. The company was founded in 2000 and acquired in May, 2007 for $110M in cash and earn-outs.
Interview conducted: Mitch Lowe, CEO & co-founder
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Tags: Case Studies, Ad networks, Business services
written by Jay Parkhill, posted on September 9th, 2007
Many consumer Internet companies leverage the scale of the internet to offer cost savings over local brick-and-mortar businesses. StepUp Commerce instead uses the interactivity of the Internet to help local businesses compete against internet companies and big-box retailers. Likening itself to an internet-era yellow pages, StepUp helps local retail businesses increase visibility and advertise current inventory to web shoppers. StepUp, which was founded in 2004 and acquired by Intuit in September 2006 for $60M, charges retailers an annual fee to place their businesses and inventory with leading search engines.
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Tags: Case Studies, Lead generation, Business services
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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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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written by Nisan Gabbay, posted on June 28th, 2007
Like everyone else these days, I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and the F8 application platform. I thought I would share some of my research notes here, but this was not meant to be an exhaustive analysis. As of this writing, there were 18 Facebook apps (not developed by Facebook) having 1M or more users. These were the apps that I analyzed to draw my conclusions. In addition to my personal review of the app, I also e-mailed interview questions to the creators of these apps, some of whom responded - big thanks to David Gentzel (Food Fight), Blake Commagere (Causes), Dan Peguine (Honesty Box), and Zachary Allia (Free Gifts) for sharing their tips with us.
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written by Rob Finn, posted on June 3rd, 2007
Why profiled on Startup Review
Loopnet is a leading online marketplace for real estate brokers, agents, buyers, and investors to sell and buy property. Founded in 1995, the company IPO’d in 2006 and has grown to feature more than $408 billion in properties for sale and 3.2 billion square feet of space for lease as of March 31, 2007.
Interviews conducted: Rich Boyle, CEO; Patricia Nakache, General Partner at Trinity Ventures and investor in LoopNet.
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written by Jay Parkhill, posted on May 13th, 2007
Rare companies like YouTube show what happens when entrepreneurs stumble on the right idea at just the right time, but I suspect that most companies miss the time window slightly and have to adjust. Elance is an interesting study in how to adapt when the market isn’t ready.
Elance is an online agency that matches technical, design and other professionals with businesses needing such services. Project “owners” post their requirements and service providers bid on them. The company was founded in 1999, currently receives 130,000 unique visitors per week, and matches 2,500 projects with service providers every week.
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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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written by Nisan Gabbay, posted on April 15th, 2007
Why profiled on Startup Review
The eCrush network is comprised of several major sites (ecrush.com, espinthebottle.com, and highschoolstyleboard.com) that offer flirting, matchmaking, quizzes, romantic content and social networking type features to teenagers (age 13-19). The sites receive over 1 million unique visitors per month, and rank as the 10th largest dating site in the US according to NetRatings. The company has been profitable since 2002, and generated $1.4M in profit in 2006. The eCrush network was acquired by Hearst Media in December 2006 for an undisclosed sum, rumored to be in the $8-12M range based on my sources.
Interviews conducted: Clark Benson, co-founder and seed investor of eCrush
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This week’s case study was co-authored by guest writers Deepak Thomas and Vineet Buch.
Deepak is an MBA student at the University of Chicago. He previously worked at Oracle for 10 years in engineering and product management roles. He is currently looking for summer internship opportunities at early-stage Venture Capital firms. He may be reached at deepakthomas (at) gmail.com.
Vineet Buch is a Principal at BlueRun Ventures, where he focuses on consumer Internet, mobile services, and enterprise software, and on BlueRun Ventures’ investments in India. Immediately before joining BlueRun in 2005, Vineet co-founded Riya. Vineet authors his own blog, Venture Explorer.
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