Tag Archive for 'business models'

Inside a start-up success story

Published
by
Andrew
on November 5, 2009
in Low Priority
. 1 Comment

From the persistence paid off file of start-up stories:

Our first big retail break was landing an account with Stew Leonard’s, the four-store Connecticut grocery chain. For months we bugged the buyer via phone. He ignored us. To get his attention, we decided to bring him breakfast one day.

We woke up at 6 a.m. and dressed in Bear Naked T-shirts. We borrowed china from Kelly’s mom, which we used to display fresh fruit, our granola, and Stew Leonard’s brand of yogurt. We were the first car in the lot at the chain’s headquarters. After we climbed the stairs to the office, the receptionist told us the buyer was on vacation. We were deflated!

But then, as we were walking away, we recognized Stew Leonard Jr. “Stew!” we yelled. “We brought you breakfast!”

He seemed impressed by our youth and enthusiasm and asked us into his office. He said he was used to brokers pitching 55 products at a time and that it was refreshing to meet young kids so eager to sell a bag of granola. After talking with us for two hours, he said he wanted to help us out. He decided to place our granola in his stores.

The full Bear Naked story is over at CNN Money, it’s full of great insight into the reality that sometimes pure enthusiasm and excitement can be enough.

Seed funding possibilities

Published
by
Daniel
on July 10, 2009
in Low Priority
. 0 Comments

Five different possibilities. I think all of these could be worth applying to in a month or two if we go for-profit. They generally offer a small amount of funding in exchange for equity. Hat tip to Ryan for pointing this out to me.

Who should we speak with for insights on for- vs. non-profit?

Published
by
Greg
on July 7, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 3 Comments

List them here!

March 22 2009: Emily is here!

Published
by
Joey
on March 23, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

Emily Kostic, brand new CoPress team member!

Our apologies for getting this post up a bit late. We did hold our regularly scheduled conference call on Sunday (even if only 5 people were there), but the post is just going up now.

Of course, the big news was that our new team member, Emily, was on board for her first conference call. Woot!

Organization & Operations

Daniel has been on a much-deserved vacation the last few days so Adam took both topics. Which was largely a discussion of how to fix up our Web site. We know the content kinda sucks, and we’re going to work to make it better. Hopefully our re-adoption of Basecamp will allow us to work on this efficiently.

Editorial

We’ve got a lot of posts in the pipeline, including some guest posts for this week. So look out for ‘em on the blog. (Oh, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite college journalist for the UWire 100).

Financial

Our accounts haven’t changed very much. With so many new clients, we’ve had a few late invoices, but nothing we’re really concerned about — it does take some time for educational institutions to cut a check.

This, however, has lead to people wondering what our current financial status is. Which means we need to investigate online options for sharing our current financial state.

Long-term, Joey’s been working on developing a plan for an ad network. We’re brainstorming all kinds of crazy ideas to create a system that will be unlike any that’s currently in business. (Naturally, we’re liking a lot of the stuff coming out of RevenueTwoPointZero.)

Community

We’ve started to talk about a CoPress-sponsored BarCamp sometime in late May. This is still very tentative, and it does seem like a lot of us will be attending NewsInnovation Philly.

Hosting

We’re not going to be closing our beta period (for the time being). Woot! We can handle more clients for some time to come. Miles couldn’t be on the call, so we didn’t get much more that that.

Don’t forget, we’re all about radical transparency, so if you like, you can listen to the entire conference call below.

 
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Weekend of Deep Thought

Published
by
Daniel
on March 15, 2009
in Low Priority
. 0 Comments

This weekend was a powerhouse of forward thinking pieces on the future of news. From Steven B. Johnson’s “Old Growth Media and the Future of News“:

This was obsessive behavior, I admit, but not entirely irrational. It was the result of a kind of imbalance: not a chemical imbalance, an information imbalance. To understand what I want to say about the future of the news ecosystem, it’s essential that we travel back to my holding pattern outside the College Hill Bookstore — which continued unabated, by the way, for three years. It’s essential to travel back because we’re in the middle of an epic conversation about the potentially devastating effect that the web is having on our news institutions. And so if we’re  going to have a responsible conversation about the future of news, we need to start by talking about the past.

[...]

To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.

[...]

In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987.

[...]

I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it’s important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.

Continue reading ‘Weekend of Deep Thought’

TWiC idea: roundtable discussion of monetizing online

Published
by
Daniel
on February 6, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

Would anyone be interested in taking part in a roundtable discussion for monetizing online for an upcoming This Week in CoPress? I’m split as to whether we should talk about what’s working now, or have a “crazy ideas” discussion. On a conference call with Anthony, David and a couple others a month or so back we had a lot of fun talking about how location-based advertising might apply on a college campus.

Donation ideas

Published
by
Joey
on January 28, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

Just to prove that I’m doing my job: Check out some ideas to get donations.

L3C

Published
by
Joey
on January 28, 2009
in High Priority
. 2 Comments

Intersting alternative to 501c3 status: L3C. I think we might be too late to catch this boat (since we’ve incorporated in FL), but an L3C can operate as a for-profit and accept donations like a 501c3.