You’re quite right that we didn’t focus on communicating our revenue model while building Blog Friends. This was a deliberate policy: we knew that revenues were a relatively long way out for us, and we didn’t want to set the wrong expectations amongst our community (including our investors).

However, the very fact that we required a good deal of runway before being able to focus properly on monetisation was clearly a big challenge for us, and a risky aspect of our strategy—though I’m sure you’d be the first to agree that it is one faced by the vast majority of C2C web-based startups. Had we hit our growth targets of 100k users by the end of 2007 (5x the 20k we actually reached by that point), we were confident we could have raised the startup round that would have given us the runway and confidence to trumpet our business model to the hills.

We have learned a huge amount from our Blog Friends experience, and we have our users (and our critics!) to thank for that in large part. We are now seeking to build upon that learning, and upon our budding Buzzspotr location-based messaging platform, to refocus the i-together business plan around new—and more familiar and quickly realisable—revenue models.

Manoj,

I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “I do not really understand why funding would ever kill a startup” means, but I think you are saying that a *lack* of funding doesn’t kill a startup. If so, I struggle to follow your logic… We all need money to live and pay the business’s bills, and it is notoriously difficult to focus properly on contracting work and build a startup—without outsourcing, at least—at the same time. And it was not realistic for us to outsource Blog Friends’ development as it was so original and complex from technical and usability points of view.

You’re quite right about the importance of communicating the pain that a service resolves, and we always strived to do that with Blog Friends—to let people know that it was a great way to find really interesting blog posts by others and (optionally) to connect with an interested readership for your own blog posts. However, we clearly could have done a better job of communicating those benefits if they weren’t clear to you, a user. I’m sorry we didn’t make our value proposition crystal clear for you.

It’s amazing that you are bootstrapping for under £500—congratulations, and the best of luck with edocr.com!

edocr is:

YouTube for business pdfs
iTune for business pdfs –
Amazon for business pdfs –
Google Search for business pdfs – (perhaps a bad analogy)
Speed Dating for business pdfs – picked this up from someone at webmission08 kick of at HSBC (who said this)…

Drop me a line if you got any more suggestions!

The only thing I would add is that we did have a quite exciting business model, we felt, of charging blogging influencers and would-be blogging influencers for stats on the effectiveness of their posts across specific demographics and also for “boosting” the reach of their posts into view of readers who they otherwise wouldn’t reach. However, we needed decent funding to rearchitect the Blog Friends platform outside Facebook, and in a modular and API-based manner, and then to build the extra feature sets needed for monetisation.

Finally, I just had a very interesting conversation with some guys who are at the heart of the online ad industry about the monetisation potential of Buzzspotr as a white label service. The game’s not up for i-together just yet.

That’s not to say that there isn’t funding to be had in the UK, whether seed vc (there are 5 obvious funds that focus on very early stage investment that I can think of) or angel. And there are obviously some great initiatives going on to support and kickstart the start-up environment, e.g. seedcamp, opencoffee, web mission, etc. But in relation to angel specifically they’re not obvious and easy to find, and they’re just not as abundant in number as elsewhere (and it’s angel that most of us very early stage outfits need). And the angel groups don’t seems comfortable with what they see as more speculative consumer internet propositions (particularly as they want to see the monetisation mapped out). They’re much more comfortable with hardcore tech, life sciences, etc. So it means that the higher-risk consumer propositions that could turn into something big can get sidelined (or just not done in the first place), hence why there’s isn’t as much consumer internet innovation coming out of the UK as there could be.

So this feels like it’s a reflection of where we’re at with the investor ecosystem here. I’m confident that the situation’s getting better, but in the near-term I think we’ll see more of these stuations. And maybe us UK start-ups just aren’t yet that good at sourcing funding, so room for improvement all round.

Hope this exposure gets the i-Together team the coverage that will help to flush out some additional funding, so that they can push these things forward.