Mini-size Me: Web Businesses Think Small
Aspirations. Aim high. Reach for the clouds. Thing big. Take over the world.
Not anymore. More than ever, I’m seeing businesses with small ideas. Niche ideas. Some that have symbiotic relationships with other small businesses. Perhaps there are bigger ideas they haven’t let out of the bag yet? Here are some examples, and why they might be onto something. And why they may not be.
- ShareThis
This site offers a social sharing button. An API. And a Sharebox for users. That’s it. At its core, this is a button. I love it for a few reasons. It offers the publisher reporting, an API and customization. Also, if you don’t want to keep up with every sharing service, ShareThis takes care of it for you. For ShareThis, they own the data on usage of social sharing sites. Business model – perhaps advertising, perhaps sharing data, perhaps a tiered pay model? Who knows. But they got $15 million in funding in March ‘08. Still seems niche and small to me, and it’s dependent on all of the sharing services – which do not yet have a proven business model either. - TweetDeck
This application is a Twitter client. Twitter is still fairly niche, although many are betting for it to go mainstream this year. There are also a large number of Twitter clients out there. And Twitter doesn’t even have a viable business model yet. Yet, TweetDeck closed an angel funding round at $500k. I highlighted TweetDeck, but there are a ton of Twitter piggy-backers, like Qwitter, who’s only feature is notification of tweeps that stop following you. That’s about as niche as you can get. - Plinky
One of the newest entrants into the micro-blogging arena (kind of), Plinky managed to get a lot of hype before finally making its premise known yesterday. They ask a question each day, and you provide an answer. They basically just prompt you for something to write about, and allow you to share your response on the social grid. This managed to get a $1.5 series A.
Is this niche company phenomenon due to the recession, or is this a bi-product of Web 2.0? I think both. There’s no question that a bad economy triggers more start-ups. Enter Web 2.0, and we have all of these opportunities for apps with symbiotic relationships. If you can run a small business and make a little more than you made working for someone else, why not do it? As long as these businesses are reasonable to support with small teams, they have a good chance to bring in more than they cost.
But the risk is high. Twitter, and even the major social networking sites still don’t have proven, viable business models. If these businesses fail, the ecosystem of apps that are dependent on them also fail.
I love the idea of these small businesses, although finding the apps you want becomes difficult in this crowded app environment. Enter twitdom.com to solve that problem, too.
TTFN. I have to go start a micro-biz 
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