Startups That Started As Blogs
fastcolabs.com
Startups That Started As Blogs
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#2Surprised to not see Moz on here: while I think they were technically a consultancy at first, their chief export for quite a few years came in the form of incredibly valuable blog posts. My favorite is the 91-point eCommerce conversion checklist:
http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-optimi...
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#3How about stackoverflow? It was slowly introduced with coding horror.
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#4Wufoo.com not on the list. Was launched out on success of their blog http://www.particletree.com/
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#5Are we counting straight-up professional bloggers too? Kottke, John Gruber, the whole BoingBoing team, etc.
Makes you think, doesn't it? Maybe blogging was a little bit bigger than it was made out to be just a few short years ago.
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#6I'm surprised there's no mention of Mint. Their blog played a big role in their pre-launch strategy.
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#7Surprised to not see Moz on here: while I think they were technically a consultancy at first, their chief export for quite a few years came in the form of incredibly valuable blog posts. My favorite is the 91-point eCommerce conversion checklist: http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-optimi...
I sort of put 37signals in that bucket as well even though they did a lot more consulting, their blog was pretty huge in the very small standards web community of the early Zeldman era.
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#8Seems like most of the comments on here aren't getting it. The article isn't talking about products that were discussed on a blog; it's referring to blogs that pivoted into a product.
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#9Amy Hoy has spoken a lot about this. I think we're about to see a wave of new startups that focus first on info-products that involve blogs at some stage, then later pivoting into a SaaS product.
This is exactly what I'm doing right now. Everything works as one big marketing funnel from tweets/pins/posts to free downloadable content and one-off landing pages, to single page apps, to e-books and videos, all the way up to SaaS. I have to come to love the term Amy uses for these: e-bombs. Finding customer pains and dropping e-bombs on them is a really lean way to learn a ton quickly, build an audience, and even make money.
If you get really good, you can make it into a repeatable process that works over and over regardless of your domain experience. That said, I still think it might be a little difficult for me to do this for, say, theoretical physicists. I'm personally inclined to partner up with domain experts rather than trying to do it all myself as a lone technologist.
Great examples in the post. Now let's see some more! I've seen Moz and 37signals mentioned. Who else are we missing?
Re: Startups That Started As Blogs
#10Surprised to not see Moz on here: while I think they were technically a consultancy at first, their chief export for quite a few years came in the form of incredibly valuable blog posts. My favorite is the 91-point eCommerce conversion checklist: http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecommerce-conversion-optimi...
Yeah - we were a blog first, then a consultancy, then moved into software in 2007. Glad you like some of our old posts!