[nostrademons]

Enterprise (or paid small-business services) always comes back in style in recessions. Look at 2002: the two big IPOs were PayPal and LoudCloud/Opsware. It's because ad spending - and particularly, ad spending in unproven mediums - tends to fall dramatically when money is tight. It's the first thing to go, well before productivity enhancements.

Of course, this means that for entrepreneurs starting companies now, consumer may be the way to go. It'll take a couple years to ramp up, and by then, the field has been thinned because investors only want to invest in enterprise startups. So there's more chance of the surviving companies getting the consumer attention they need to survive.

Sucks for people (like me) who started consumer web startups in 2007, though.

[ph0rque]

> Sucks for people (like me) who started consumer web startups in 2007, though.

Do you have anything you're working on now, Jonathan?

[trevelyan]

I don't understand why this is supposed to be a bad time to monetize through the customer. Maybe it's bad if you are relying on getting advertising revenue from indiscriminate advertisers in the mass market, but....

We're doing something consumer focused and are close to breaking even on content costs after about a month in beta with less than 500 users. We're planning to increase our ad spending significantly, and I couldn't care less if our customers spend less money overall as long as we are their best option for the product we sell them.

I could see this being a problem if you have to position yourself as a cheaper, better alternative to established competitors to survive, but the issue there is more about branding than business model; can you move from being a low-cost play into being a premium brand if you need to cut revenues to compete in a crowded market?

Just build your product into the best product it can be and you'll change the market. Let others worry about competing with you and focus on giving people tons of value for the money they give you. As long as the market exists, you'll do ok.

[nostrademons]

Our problem was really that we were a "vitamin": something that was kinda-sorta-tangentially-useful, but didn't solve a clearly-defined, pressing pain point. Which is really my screw up and not the economy's fault, but the point is that a strong economy can mask these problems ($500M valuation for Slide?) and let entrepreneurs get away with startups that really shouldn't exist.

I suspect that there are still many entrepreneurs in a similar boat - as recently as a month ago, there were "Critique my startup" posts that presented startups that really weren't all that useful, and YC has funded a couple that in their present form are pretty weak.

[nostrademons]

Right now, I'm pulling pieces out of GameClay, polishing them up (including writing docs & tests, and code cleanup), and releasing them as open-source. I expect to be done with that in a week or so, though. Then I'll either try my luck in the salaried job market or start another startup.