Free Start-up Idea, Syndicating feed management….
Two years ago I created my facebook account for work, and of course work being a “fun” event for most of my friends (Since I work in the car enthusiast media space), I naturally developed a nice variety of friends, family, customers and co-workers as friends on Facebook, but my family often comments “why are your updates always automotive?” and I feel a little weird complaining about a bad day at work to my family when so many customers are my friends as well. But then I added Twitter and separated my personal twitter from my work twitter.
But now things get complicated. If I update my personal twitter, and it updates my facebook status automatically (much to Darin’s annoyance). And I set up the AutoStream blog to update my AutoStream twitter…okay, so that’s sorted. But then I created a nice little scooter website that was updating my personal twitter, but I gave access to that to my buddy Karan, and suddenly Karan’s posts were apearing as my posts. Hmmm….. To make matters even more interesting I decided to join 2008 and get a Tumblr account so I could be cool like Emil, only to realize it probably should update SOMETHING, so maybe I should have it update Shinkaze.com which auto-updates Shinkaze-Twitter which auto updates ADAMBRUCE-Facebook?…….
it’s getting dificult to manage and IÂ have to actually make a flow chart just so I know what updates what.
It would be super nice (and slick) if someone made a tool that would allow folks like me to organize what updates what and when. (yea, oddly enough I don’t like getting twitter updates after 11PM…..gets annoying). So I’ll chalk this one down to “Get your free Start-Up idea here” because I sure don’t have time to build it. Here is what your 13 Slide VC pitch deck should look like.
1.) Cover: Feed Syndicatr <- notice the hip “de-E’ed name”
2.) MISSION: To own the headline management market.
3.) SUMMARY: We have a mission and a team that is taking us there. Why? We discovered a large problem and solved it with a product that has this amazing technology inside. We’re going to market and sell it to these customers, with these advantages over our competitors. In particular, we’re working towards these milestones over the next few quarters. In conclusion, this financing is a great investment opportunity.
4.) TEAM: A developer, a sales/biz-dev guy and a designer/product manager, more is waste.
5.) MARKET: 150M people actively using social media sites and services
6.) PROBLEM: Feed syndication is a nightmare and the more active you are the bigger the headache it becomes.
7.) SOLUTION: A Product that allows people to syndicate feeds via a simple flow chart. Make a Myspace/Facebook widget that monitros on the social network side and a spider-pinger that monitors the public sites like twitter and tumblr.
8.) SALES: Basic service for free, full analytic and up-time monitoring for $5/month
9.) MARKETING: Nab a short URL for the company domain and use that as the default link shorten-er. Allow people to choose other url services though if they choose, but you would be amazed by how few people mess with the defaults.
10.) COMPETITION: Everyone eventually, build a good SWOT and assume you’ll be copied 3 months out of the gate by a crappy competitor and 6 months out of the gate by someone decent.
11.) MILESTONES: provide dates for: Build it, test it, rebuild it, launch it, premium feature launch
12.) CONCLUSION: Huge market, owning the headlines owns the “social thought pattern” of the net, blah blah blah
13.) FINANCING: Maybe $50K if you had someone build it, but VCs like zeros, so add two more so you get some free lunches and invites to the “in” parties.
So please someone make this product so I can pay you $5/month to make this problem go away. Thank you in advance, and I’ll happily take advisory role if you need more ideas.