Republished from Seth Goldstein Online: Now’s the Best Time to Startup a Web Business — Email is Dead… Twitter Ate It

2008 November 8

by Adminstrator

Digg founder Kevin Rose says this is the best time to launch a company, even if the economy is going to hell, venture capital for web startups is drying up, and consumer spending has stalled.

“I believe it’s going to be a great time to start something new,” said Rose, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. His argument: There is less competition and noise in the marketplace and it’s easier to get press. “Funding for consumer internet companies is going away and that means there’s going to be a lot of opporunity for everyone.”

And if you choose to take the plunge, he has a few tips, which mainly boil down to one theme: Be cheap.

“When Digg launched, I had a day job. It was something I worked on at nights and during weekends,” says Rose.

And instead of dishing out tens of thousands of dollars for a fulltime developer, Rose outsourced it to a guy through Elance, and paid one-third of what he would have spent on somebody in the U.S.

“[Outsourcing] only works up to a certain point . . . When it comes time to add multiple servers you absolutely need to have talent that’s been there before,” says Rose.

And when it comes to PR, do it yourself. Aggressively communicate, he says, and Tweet your heart out.

“I really believe that email communication is dead,” said Rose. “Twitter is more of a real-time communication.”

Kevin Rose on Surviving the Downturn: Be Cheap | Epicenter from Wired.com.

I was going through my emails this morning and reading my feeds that are sent their by a great little app called FeedMyInbox.com. I came to the feed from the Epicenter blog at Wired.com and the above post caught my eye.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, and all round Web 2.0 god, says now’s a good time to startup a Web company. Though this might be true, for reasons he explains in the article, people need to be cautious when doing this, especially when the economy is in an economic downturn. The margin of error is much greater and the consequences can be much worse.

That being said, The end of the article Kevin Rose says something very interesting, something that I’ve been pondering for a while:

“I really believe that email communication is dead,” said Rose. “Twitter is more of a real-time communication.”

Twitter really is the wave of the future. I use it on a daily basis to keep up on the news, through following tweets from CNN, MSN and other reputable sources. I also keep up on what’s going on in the Technology and Web community by following people like Rose and other luminaries in the professions surrounding the industry.

The great thing about Twitter is that it doesn’t involve a lot of reading. I can get the gist of most posts in the 140 limit that twitter allows users to tweet. If there is a link, often if my interest is peaked I go to the site and read more.

What Twitter really does well is give me an avenue to keep up with people and information that otherwise would be too cumbersome and bothersome to read. It would take me a lot more time to go to each of these sites and blogs to read the posts than just getting a synopsis on Twitter.

In the above article, Rose says that PR is key to the success of your business. Twitter is a great tool for this PR. I have many tricks that I use to integrate Twitter in to my business game plan.

Please feel free to drop me an note with any question you might have. I’ll be glad to enlighten you.