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New Year’s Resolution: Blog A Lot More!

December 30, 2008

One thing I’ve learned from all my time doing SEO, monitoring web traffic and blogging is that when you stop blogging, people stop coming to your site!

So, as SpringStage is set to really take off in 2009 I’m committing to writing a lot more on this blog, getting more deeply involved in the Fort Worth startup community and generally bringing people together.

As you can see from the image below, I was blogging a lot more during October!

Fort Worth Startup Blog 203A Blog Stats 2014 WordPress
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startup Profiles |  

Startup Profile: Mixng - Bringing it All Together

October 20, 2008

I caught up with Justin Coleman, founder of local startup Mixng for a quick Q&A over email:

What’s the one sentence pitch for Mixng?

Mixng is an all-in-one social experience for those people who are tired of having numerous accounts for numerous activities and for those who are just getting into the social internet.

Elaborate a little bit on that and give us some details

Basically, Mixng is social networking, social news, social messaging and an aggregation tool. You can manage and keep in touch with friends, upload and view photos, chat with friends, share and discuss cool news items, message publicly with friends and strangers and follow your other online profiles in one spot.

I see it as a tool for two different groups of people: social internet veterans and newcomers. Veterans who are fatigued by the immense number of varying social websites and utilities can come to Mixng to simplify that. You can tell your friends to join Mixng with the promise that they won’t have to join 6 other sites to see EVERYTHING your doing online. They can see what you think is cool online, see your pictures and talk with you under one roof.

As for newcomers, this is a great way to experience what the social internet has to offer. Want to test of social networking and online photo storage without having to sign up for multiple profiles? Cool, we can help you there.

Our name Mixng, is short for Mixing, means that we are not only mixing people, but mixing these different technologies and tools into one simple to use utility.
Some of Mixng’s primary features are:

  • profiles for every user
  • photo albums
  • an aggregator to pull in information from websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg
  • a messaging tool that enables you to have public or private conversations with friends and strangers
  • a feed that monitors all your friends activity on the site and keeps you updated
  • a content sharing tool that enables you to submit, vote on and discuss cool online content with your friends and peers
  • emailing your friends
  • groups for people of similar interests to come together and discuss and share cool content

We have many more features in the oven that will help to make Mixng that much more of a comprehensive experience. We just felt that our intial feature set were the essential elements to what could be considered the online social experience.

Are you funded? If so how?

Mixng is privately funded by a family member of mine. I approached my uncle with the concept of Mixng and did a simple pitch and he agreed to help us out. We took only $10,000 to cover basic development, hosting and domain costs. Obviously, we will need to approach Angel/VC investors in the near future to keep growing Mixng to where we want it to be. $10,000 got us a working concept. Something we can let people use, work on and show to potential investors so they can see what we are really thinking.

What’s your business model?

As of right now, our main business model is to offer paid ‘Pro’ Mixng accounts. We will supplement these paid accounts advertising throughout the site. The ‘Pro’ accounts will offer users a number of exclusive features and benefits such as: early access to upcoming features, customizable profile pages, no advertisements and a few other things I can’t get too into at the moment. We are also working on a few other features that could lead to more and varied monetization opportunities. We want to avoid advertising as much as possible, because we feel it detracts from the sites design and the experience users have. Our main goal is to provide a free product that people love and use and then give them the opportunity to add other features to it if they feel the need to.

Have you officially launched your beta… how many users to you have?

Mixng Beta will be launching within the next 1 - 2 weeks. It will be a private beta for around a month or so we can monitor things on our end to make sure the code and databases hold up to an increased load. Once we are comfortable with everything, we will open the beta up and run with that for a while. As of now, the only people using Mixng are me, my team and a few close friends who are bug testing for us.

You’re 19 right? Give us a little background on yourself and what prompted you to launch a startup… what about the rest of your team?

I was 19 when I came up with the concept and first started the planning of Mixng. At the moment I am 20 years old. I am originally from a small west Texas town called San Angelo. I was a military kid growing up (lived in Italy and Maryland to go with Texas). I’m now a Junior at the University of Texas at Arlington majoring in Communication Technology with a minor in Information Systems. I decided to start Mixng almost a year ago after working with some high school friends on a website called Tekshout.com (no longer running) when I realized that I wanted an all-in-one experience.

I think the thing that sparked the idea was that I had had a bad day and when I came home to check all my online profiles, Firefox had lost all my saved passwords and I had to enter about 10 username/password combos into all of those websites. So I said then and there that I would try to solve my problem by creating something that offered what all of those websites offered in one simple location.

I actually put my team together through Facebook because I was visiting home in San Angelo at the time. My main partner is a guy name Sushil Raghav who did all of the development of Mixng. I handled all the design aspects of it. And then the other partner is Graham Michaels who is handling advertising/marketing matters.

We are all first time startupers so it has been a fun and exciting experience for all of us.

Want to profile your startup? Send an email to startup-profile[at]blj.otherinbox.com

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startup Profiles, Startups |  

Startup Profile: Nectar - a fresh look at you

September 10, 2008

Quick Facts:

  • Nectar is the hub for your personal brand online.
  • Founded by Dave Onkels, Josiah Platt, Brett Tilford, Caleb White and Charles Williams
  • Funding: Personal savings and sweat equity, no outside funding
  • Business Model: users are charged a flat fee initially based on the design they choose and its exclusivity (each design is limited in the number of times it can be used), and then a monthly hosting fee that includes domain and email forwarding
  • Anticipated Launch Date: October 13th 2008 12:00pm CST

I’ve been speaking with Dave about the project over the past few weeks and am excited to get a look at it when it launches. The Nectar team spent the past weekend in a 72 hour hackathon to give development a big boost. They have a great post over at their freshly launched Nectar Blog, outlining the effort. They also put together a great time-lapse video of the entire weekend, which I’ve included below.

Here is a quick Q & A I did over IM with Dave:

What is Nectar, really?

In the past, people used business cards, resumes, and word-of-mouth testimonials to define who they are and what they stand for – or said another way, to create their personal brand.

Fast-forward to now, where our activity on the Internet, to a great extent, establishes our reputation and is what delivers our first impression. Your brand is comprised of personal media in the form of web sites, blogs, photo galleries, videos, music, comments, reviews, chats, and shared items. Yet as personal as this media is, it’s spread across the Internet only to be found by the select users part of a similar community or through deep Google searches.

We believe you can shape your personal brand online to better define yourself, convey your personality, and share your talents. Nectar delivers exactly that solution by providing a personal brand hub created by the world’s best designers and communicated using the most elegant and simple of all interfaces.

Who will be the average Nectar customer?

For the next 12-18 months it will be medium to heavy social media users / bloggers / and freelancers outside of the design industry (assuming a professional designer won’t want a pre-designed site)

How did the Nectar team come together?

I had been recruiting writers for a content publishing project and was approached by Josiah - after doing some research on him I realized I needed to see if he’d be interested in talking with me about my vision for personal branding… we met and hit it off smashingly - he and I met with the rest of his Fuor agency team and got them on board with the project

We consummated the deal with a formal partnership / LLC last month.

 

What was the most/least fun part of the hackathon?
I think the most fun was the mind-meld / absurd humor that came from late nights.
The least fun for Josiah and Caleb would be some of the initial development hurdles… they had to write some new javascript to implement the design the way we wanted.
Would you do it again?
I’ll have to quote Caleb on that one…

If you are working on a startup here in the metroplex, take a cue from these guys and get to work!

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startup Profiles, Startups |