strategy

MySpace Case Study: Not a purely viral start 

Why profiled on Startup-Review.com

In less than 3 years time, MySpace has become one
of the top 5 most visited sites in the US, racking up 48 million unique
visitors and 27.4B page views in June 2006. While it will probably
never come close to the profitability of Google, eBay, or Yahoo, it has
the potential to be the Internet’s next “platform” company. It has made
for particularly interesting case study material for leapfrogging early
social networking leader, Friendster.

Interviews conducted: I interviewed several people
who were close to MySpace in the early days, although no longer with
the company. I would consider both of these to be excellent sources. I
have also spoken to a number of people in the social networking
industry – product managers at competitors, MySpace service providers,
etc. I am also a board observer at a company that competes with MySpace.

Key success factors

Gave users more control over their MySpace pages, enabling a higher degree of self-expression and communication with friends

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 capitalisti 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.

Investor/advisor Fred Wilson reports that he met founder Howard
Lindzon on blogs, and Howard told me that he met the show’s producers
Adam Elend and Jeff Marks the same way. Fred, Brad Feld and others
invested $600,000 and the production team was sent off with a mandate
to produce a short video every business day for less than $1000, and to
cover high-flying stocks with humor.

Interviews conducted: Howard Lindzon, founder and Adam Elend, founder/producer

Key success factors

Build the distribution mechanism into the content itself

Adam stressed to us that it is not enough to create content, post it
on YouTube and hope that people will like it. From the beginning,
Wallstrip was designed around the idea that (flukes and one-hit wonders
aside) content should reflect the community it is made for, delivered
to the places where the community can already be found, and should
encourage viewers to pass it around.

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Redefine your business(Step 8):