Spoiled Little Startups
To me, the word startup is starting to lose meaning. It becomes too much of a buzzword that people started to forget how it all usually began: In a garage, born from a burning passion of one or two people. It was never the millions of angel money or the big buy out. It was never the fastest way of being rich or an overnight success. It was about creative people reaching out their dreams even if it mean letting everything go.
But years of hard work and dedication falls flat in the eye of media, it’s too common and not newsworthy in comparison to massive early fundings, the grand acquisition exit, the so called overnight success or utter failure. These numerous and rather daily news of fundings and acquisitions create a new breed of startups: The spoiled little startups.
The Launch of Nirmana Award, The Start of a Dream
Nirmana Award finally launched :) Here’s some quotes from local media in Bahasa Indonesia
Para desainer grafis Indonesia bisa bersiap-siap dengan penghargaan. Nirmana Award yang resmi diluncurkan di Jakarta, Kamis (16/2/2012) akan menjadi ajang kompetisi sekaligus apresiasi publik untuk dunia desain.
“Kompetisi ini untuk bisa menjadi salah satu wadah yang memberikan keleluasaan bagi para desainer untuk berkreasi terutama di industri desain,” ujar ketua panitia Nirmana Award, Anang Pradipta pada jumpa pers yang digelar di Jakarta pada Kamis pagi.
Selain para juri dari masing-masing kategori tersebut, workshop Nirmana akan menghadirkan tokoh-tokoh creativepreneurship dalam komunikasi pemasaran, seperti Ayip Bali, Yoris Sebastian, Danny Oei, Djoko Hartanto, Arief Budiman, Andi S. Boediman, Daniel Surya, Sakti Makki, Glenn Marsalim, dan Ferly Novriadi.
It will be aired as well in Kompas TV
Saksikan liputan dan wawancara dengan panitia dan juri Nirmana Award dalam program Tekno di Kompas TV. Tekno di Kompas TV tayang setiap Sabtu (23:30 WIB) dan Minggu (11:30 WIB). Dapat juga disaksikan secara live streaming di http://kompas.tv/live/
Wish us luck guys :)
Writing Weekly for DailySocial.net
As you might have seen, I’ve written 2 articles for DailySocial.net recently and it’s been fun. So they offered me to do a weekly column on their english site. I’ll be writing every wednesday about startups, entrepreneurship, ideas, business, well all the topics being discussed here as well. It will be called Simply Business, because I’ll write simple and practical business study from a non-academic point of view (well it’s not like I have an academic background in business anyways). It will be exclusive for the DS so no more double posting to this site.
If you haven’t read my posts at dailysocial, here it is:
Nobody cares about your idea, not even your mom
Yeah I know your mom said it’s nice, but chances are she doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Idea is cheap, I always said that to everybody and I meant every word of it. Just because I have the idea of building Facebook, it doesn’t mean that it’s worth even a penny of Facebook’s $100 billion valuation. Idea is cheap, it’s worthless on its own. Execution is what matters. If you don’t act out on your idea then it will remain as it is: nothing.
Originality is overrated, there I said it. Yesterday I wrote about the clone king coming to town. Not so long ago Zynga the game company giant shamelessly rip-off Tiny Tower and also a desktop game Super Crate Box “heavily inspired” the iPhone game Muffin Knight. These 3 stories are just small examples showing one simple fact: EVERYBODY COPIES!
Sell Yourself, Not Your Idea
I can never stress enough that idea is cheap, it’s worthless on it’s own. Execution is what matters. But what about the guys that can get funding even before they have a product? They’re just selling ideas right? Well, it’s not that simple. When you pitch an idea, you’re not actually selling the idea, you are actually selling yourself. Investors believe in the idea if he believes in you, your history or the cool word for it: Your street cred.
Now, people that can get funding with an “idea” are usually these 3 types: startup/business veterans, famous people, lucky bastards (hey there’s always an X factor). Since luck is something that can’t be explained and not to mention unaccountable, let’s talk about the 2 other types.
The Love Industry
Since today is Valentine’s day, it would be appropriate of me to play along with the mainstream world and celebrate love in some way. Since I’m not good at making poetry or some sort, I’ll just do a case study regarding The Love Industry in the digital era [Bummer]. I’m not much of a fan of dating site like Match.com and eHarmony because it just wouldn’t work in Indonesia. People use Facebook to search dating opportunities so vigorously that there’s no other market for a specialized dating site. But one site caught my attention: Badoo.
Badoo started at 2006 as an online network for meeting new people (they refused to be called a dating site). They are very successful building a massive 130 million registered users with over $100 million in revenue per year. It’s the 4th biggest social network in the world. They only took about $30 million in funding and doesn’t need anymore rounds until now. Let’s analyze them step by step and see what made them successful.
The Power of the Crowd: Kickstarter Story
10 years ago, the thought of getting hundreds of people to fund you for your personal project may be considered impossible. But nowadays it’s happening more and more on Kickstarter. The site helps creative projects from making documentary movies, band project, video games, computer or smartphone accessories, you name it. The concept is dead simple: You post your project at Kickstarter, set the sum of money as a goal and ask everybody to pledge. Of course you need to provide incentives for people so that they’re willing to part with their hard earn cash. If the goal is not reach, all the money will be returned to the original pledgers.
It hit its first groundbreaking record by gathering USD 942, 578 for LunaTik, an accessory that can turn your iPod Nano into a watch. That’s almost 1 million USD! Their second try at Kickstarter is also an Apple accessories, although the numbers is not as groundbreaking as Lunatik but it’s still exceed their goal by 300%.
Article Recap and stuffs
Since this is saturday and I’m not really in the mood to write something serious, let’s just do a recap on what’s the most popular article in Rajasa.com since the relaunch (January 25, 2012).
At first place we have The Clone King is Coming to Town. I posted it on the Startuplokal mailing list and it got a couple of interesting discussion. The Samwer Brothers are indeed controversial so no surprise here.
The second place goes to Asian startups doing mobile social apps for the global market will fail. This is a 2 part article, the first one was meant to ignite discussion and the reaction in Startuplokal mailing list is quite interesting, at least good enough to do a follow up post.
The Business of Humor
I love distractions, I watched a lot of CollegeHumor videos and have spent countless hours wasted on 9gag. These time wasters are a blast to enjoy and are in fact serious money maker. Humor is an industry, an industry that most people took for granted.
CollegeHumour made USD 4.2 million in ad revenue the first quarter of 2008, Icanhascheezburger.com generates about seven figure sum in advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales in 2010. Humor is a serious business indeed. Which is why I got super excited at the relaunch of Malesbanget.com and the recently launch nyunyu.com. Let’s discuss them a bit further
4 Questions To Ask Before Making a Startup
I hear a lot of stories from people making new things and creating cool digital stuffs an all, which is great. But sometimes they create something just for the sake of creating it, which is still cool. The problem arises when they want to turn their little project into a startup. Doing projects is cool when you want to learn about new stuffs but not all projects are suitable for a startup. Here’s 4 questions that need to be answered before creating any startup.
Continue reading
Nobody cares about your idea, not even your mom
Yeah I know your mom said it’s nice, but chances are she doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. Idea is cheap, I always said that to everybody and I meant every word of it. Just because I have the idea of building Facebook, it doesn’t mean that It’s worth even a penny of Facebook’s $100 billion valuation. Idea is cheap and implementation is everything, if you don’t act out on your idea then it will remain as it is: nothing.
What’s even more funny is that a lot of people think that their ideas is so precious that they keep it to themselves, refining it for months and maybe years to actually find out that the idea suck. Keeping an idea is dangerous, because you as the idea inventor will be bias towards your own creation. You will always think it’s a great idea but the real problem arises as soon as you tell your idea to someone else. People will start asking questions like what problem does it solve? How to you gain initial traction? What value can you give that is different than others? These questions are good to challenge and refine your idea. Which is why it’s always a good idea to tell everybody about your idea.
