10 Startups is a web consulting firm located in San Francisco, California. Like many good things, 10 Startups originated as a joke. Joe said, "Nine out of ten startups fail, so why not build ten of them?" We laughed. Then we started thinking.
Of course, we thought, we'll need a fallback plan in case all our startups tank. (Per the footnote below, the probabilty of success may only be about 65%.) Anyway, we'll need some kind of cashflow so we're not just going for broke in the meanwhile. So we thought: Why not make it a consulting firm as well?
We do web programming, design, consulting, system/network administration, the whole gambit. We'll even build you a whole startup if you like. If you've got ideas, we can help make them happen. And hey, if you don't have ideas, we might just share some of ours—we've got plenty. See our contact information below.
The 10 Startups Countdown
| number | site | launch date | description | status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | introducit.com | August 20, 2005 | Originally Matchgoddess.com, a dating site with a twist: users could act as matchmakers for other users and get rated on their performance. Discovering the high cost of marketing in the online dating sector, we evolved the site into a social-network and put more emphasis on matching people up with friends, music, and books. | Interesting. It's got a good number of users, but not a great deal of returning traffic. We're letting it coast for the time being. Actually, the Myspace Picture Link Generator is arguably the most sucessful outcome of this so far — and it was actually created for marketing. | |
| 9 | NetRuling.com | July 16, 2006 | One of those dead simple ideas that you just have to do. People put up two sides of a dispute and users vote on which side is right. There's comments, too. | Quite well. People definitely enjoy it and that's a success of its own. However, its not growing at the speed that HotOrNot, for example, did. We have some ideas for it, but mostly regard it as a nice little toy. | |
| 8 | Yacht6.com | September 18, 2006 | A social experiment. Our target audience joins uber-exclusive sites like aSmallWorld.net. Would they join a site where the membership requirements are more to the point? | The very limited exposure it has received has generated a steady trickle of invite requests -- now they're for sale, $10k a pop. So there's actually potential in it, though we are not focusing on it for the time being. | |
| 7 | paperspot.org | September 27, 2006 | A community driven news site for higher academia, similiar to Digg.com. We are starting with the PubMed biomedical article database as the "stories". Paperspot also has a social networking component. | We did not begin this project ourselves, but rather partnered with a group that had done the initial work and needed to get it launch ready. This site still has potential, if we can sort out the rough edges and get over the "critical mass" marketing hump. The project is on hold for now, as many of the core team members are busy with other endeavors. (Mehdi has become CEO of Adoptic, while Jacob, struck by a lightning bolt, created Vector Magic). | |
| 6 | qiraz | February 24, 2007 | A Turkish Facebook clone. | Most of the work for this site was completed before Joe took up a job with Spock (see intermission, below) at the beginning of the year. Significant interest was shown, but important improvements and marketing initiatives were slow-coming, as both founders were quite busy. It now appears that Facebook has made serious inroads into the Turkish market. | |
IntermissionDuring the year of 2007, Joe took up an engineering position with Spock while Sez finished school at the University of Chicago, and subsequently took up a position with Boxbe. Boxbe is an email filtering service that allows you to create a whitelist of friends: those on the list get through to your inbox, the rest have to take a captcha test. Optionally, you may allow advertisers to pay you to get your attention, which of course gives them every reason to make sure they send you relevant offers. Boxbe relaunched recently with a greatly improved interface -- Sezgi implemented the design. Spock is a people search engine which launched publically in August, 2007. When Joe started, Spock was a private beta site with negligible traffic, maintained by about a dozen employees. The site now receives more than a million unique visitors per month and the company has more than doubled in size. It has appeared in countless news articles, blog posts, television segments, and radio shows. |
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The Return | |||||
| 5 | January 28, 2008 | iFlipr.com, iCalcLoan.com, iCheckName.com, BarCheck.net, RushMsg.com, ... | A bunch of iPhone/smartphone apps. | In the first month, over 7000 people signed up to use our first app, iFlipr.com, an iPhone web app for flashcards. This prompted us to build a bunch of other iPhone apps, which are also doing quite well. We'll probably build a bunch more and put up an umbrella site. | |
| 4 | - | Coming soon | We've got a big idea. | On hold while we work on #5. | |
The 10 Startups Team
Joe, President and Chief Engineer, from the University of Chicago, class of 2004. In addition to his wide ranging experience, he's been a computer junkie since the tender age of seven, and knows approximately everything tech, including: how to build a PC from spare parts, unix system administration, network administration, C, Perl, Python, and Ruby on Rails. He mainly focuses on the "back end stuff." Here's his resume: [pdf].
Sez, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Chief Designer, a fellow Chicagoan. Sez is one of those incredible, rare people who couple an analytic mind with fantastic artistic sensibilty. She picked up CSS, HTML, Unix, and the Gimp in under a month, and immediately went on to produce some stellar designs. Lately, she's been getting more into programming side of things, which is getting Joe a bit worried about what could happen to his position.
Interested in joining our team? Send us your resume, including a cover letter describing in painstaking detail your plan for saving the world. Ahem, tell us your availability and what interests you in 10 Startups, Inc. We'll shower you with stock options. Hey, we might even pay you.
Services
- Consulting/Research → Pick our brains on anything from open source to Internet marketing. Contract based or informal sessions. NDAs and Non-Competes are fine as long as they are clearly worded.
- Website Development/Engineering → We employ the hottest technology and work efficiently to quickly produce top-quality results. Fixed price contract quotes are available upon request. Check out our sample standard website development contract.
- The Whole Shebang → We'll do everything but your legal work! If interested in this service, we suggest you begin by scheduling a one to two hour consulting session.
Contact
Need a little web programming, consulting, or even a full-blown startup? Drop us a line!
| inquiries@10startups.com |
* Having taken statistics in college, we both know this is nonsense. The relevant expression is:
1 - pn
Where p is the probability of failure and n is the number of trials. Plugging in n=10 and p=.9, we arrive at a overall probabilty of success of approximately .65, or 65%. Of course, since we're exceptional, our odds are actually better.