The NY Tech Meetup has become the venue for presenting new start up ideas in NYC. Here is a distillation of a few learning moments at last nights event (August 3, 2010).
Market Publique: Long Tail Application’s Win
www.marketpublique.com
Market Publique is an excellent example of a “long tail” strategy, coupled with a passionate entrepreneur. It’s a winner. It carves out a nice clean market from the “head” of the long tail, or the established market leaders in the category. In this case the category is person-to-person online sales, like eBay. Market Publique adopts an already well-understood methods from online stores and then applies it to vintage clothing. There is no learning curve for the new user; they simply see eBay on steroids for vintage clothes – if vintage clothes are your thing, you’re sucked in. The site offers sophistication unique to vintage clothes, a personal vetting process for sellers (“no Dudes”) and superior product presentation. All of these simple features are beyond what generalists like eBay could offer. Market Publique is a simple retail play and potential big winner.
TurnTo: Keep it Simple
www.turnto.com
TurnTo offers social shopping, which should be simple. Kinda like Facebook meets Yelp meets CNET. The basic idea is consumers personally advise each other on purchases in a social network. Social shopping should be so simple that it’s transparently part of Facebook or whatever social application the user has — and I think that may be the intention. However the demo presented was overly complicated and it’s not clear why consumers would reach outside their current social network to engage with a new tool.
Social shopping has a certain Holy Grail aspect to it and gives this company momentum. Just a small audience of loyal users could make it a valuable company with a nice equity multiplier, simply for gathering and selling data on consumer shopping behavior at the store level. However, as a mass-market application, it’s way too complicated. I would also be afraid of the prospective liabilities of recommendation engines, like Yelp’s recent problems with accusations of extortion. This looks like it could be a system that is easily manipulated or abused.
Disclosure: This business was previously pitched to me.
Philo: Originality is for Suckers
www.playphilo.com
Philo reminds me of the early AOL chat applications that simply followed along with TV. The difference with Philo, 15 years later, is that the same application has all sorts of slick graphics and gameplay built into it. Somehow those features make this social TV watching – it’s still not new. The tenuous state of television production and distribution presents a good opportunity for Philo. Philo is a natural application for a TV distribution play, like integration into a cable company or Hulu. There’s plenty of possible upside for this company. The idea is simple and executable. Is the idea protect-able?… that could be the big question.
Indaba: Know Your Market
www.indabamusic.com
Indaba gave a demo that was like drinking from a firehose. There are so many rich features in this application that the demo deserves a much longer look. Indaba allows for collaborative music production and joint publishing online – that’s a lot to ponder right there. What made this demo most special was the Q&A. An audience member challenged the business model based on their extensive personal market experience. The CEO threw it right back at the questioner with detailed examples of successes, not only answering the objection, but also nailing home to the audience that “these guys know what they’re talking about.” What I saw: Indaba is already doing deals in a treacherous market, has cobbled together some great looking software, is talking to the right people, and has serious momentum. What more could you ask for when given your 15 minutes of startup fame?
Microsoft: Sometimes Innovation Doesn’t Matter
www.bing.com
At the end of the event, a product manager from the Microsoft Bing group gave a demo of new features available in Bing mapping. The most important thing to understand about this demonstration was that this is not a startup. This is a venerable 800 pound gorilla of tech companies, fighting to not be made into a distant memory by a new class of 800 pound gorillas, namely Apple and Google. An audience member asked, “why doesn’t Google do this?” The answer may be even simpler than anyone imagines: maybe they’ve already determined it’s not a good business. This is obviously fodder for a longer post, but the point remains: just because you can do something that gets people to “ooooo” and “aahhh” doesn’t mean you have a product or a business. But if you’re Microsoft you can still blow millions seeing if you actually have a product and sending shockwaves through the market.
Another great meetup … thanks Nate!
