How to win as a second mover

More strategy.

Startup Founder's Workbook

Steve Blank has produced a startup founder's manual, with a companion workbook at Zoomstra, here. This workbook consists of a set of checklists with progress markers that would make a dandy first stab at Startup::Declarative.

Zoomstra

Another platform for monetizing content: Zoomstra.

Gabriel Weinberg's flowchart

Startup strategy - codified.

Another dark pattern: Sambreel

Nice strategy: plant browser-resident malware ("Drop Down Deals", etc.) that modifies each page the user sees, then zap the host's ads and show your own. [Atlantic]

CRM for the Web

Open data permits better management of the customer relationship.

Voting record tracker

This isn't so much a startup idea as a "something I could do" idea - given a list of proposed legislation, tag it with the purposes of each bill, then use http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes to track votes.  Do statistical analysis to cluster Congressmen on like voting (this is probably kinda boring given the Republican lockstep lately).

The reason: Paul Broun (Arkansas-R) says science is Satan's work ([e.g.]) - so how do we find his voting record on science-relevant legislation?

Update: Oh.  We look at votesmart.org, of course.

Research sites / searchable databases

Really, any area of interest can turn into a searchable database.  I should really be able to get this kind of stuff done in my sleep by now.  Specifically, I was thinking of DIY hardware - sourcing things like sensors and so on.

The basic process would be:

1. Get a basic semantic picture of the domain (i.e. what items are of interest? What attributes distinguish them? Who is active in the area? Who blogs about it?)
2. Crawl the Web by means of link following, search term identification, and so on.
3. Find the valuable data sources and determine the database schema that best encodes them.
4. Scrape data on a periodic basis into your database, and make sure you have keyword-rich databases available.
5. Provide some kind of commenting/forum functionality.

There are, of course, lots of this kind of thing out there - they all suck.  A small community of devoted fans can make or break this; you can become the definitive guide to a very small domain.  Monetize with ads and with sales.

Getting Real

I'm reading Getting Real (37signals's ebook) and - while it's written in a very minimal style - it's got some great suggestions.  I'd really like to get started writing some candidate workflows.

Another landing page selector

Here's a code-free landing page builder that gives you the ability to let customers select a pricing model preference during their interest registration.

Dark, dark

SOPA as a ransomware virus.

I should note - again - that I have no intention of writing a ransomware virus or instituting any scam to make money.  It's just that a pattern language for business structures should be able to describe these as edge cases - not only in terms of how they work (both technically and from a business process perspective) but also how they use peoples' expectations to propagate.

Speaking of dark patterns

Here's a great one: Roulette Bot Plus.  It's simple: in return for Paypal donations from your winnings, these guys will give you a free roulette-playing bot for online casinos.  It allegedly takes advantage of the fact that their random number generators aren't actually random, which is pretty darned plausible!

But it turns out it's actually a scam by some of the online casinos.  It'll look like it works for a while, then when you put your actual money into play, it'll go all-in and unfortunately lose.  Ah, well - better luck next time!

On the one hand, I'd love to play with bots of this nature now that I don't live in the States (of course, my bank is still in the States...). But at the same time, this scam fascinates me.  I know there are lists of scam patterns (like dark patterns) but it remains a goal of mine to encode them in a machine-readable and -executable manner. (Yes, I'm working towards humanity's demise.  Ha.)

Leanpub self-publishing

Since I'm kind of embroiled in writing book-like things lately, here's a way to monetize them on a really small-scale basis.  Worth a shot.

Business plans

This was the post to SP that made me think I was getting outside the box over there: an outline of a standard business plan.

Repurposing, a little

It's been bothering me for a while now that my Semantic Programming blog has some startup-type information in it.  So I'm moving all that over here - back dated to its original date of publication.

The idea of most of that is Startup::Declarative, a semantic domain for my Decl language that describes the structures of a startup business, its business processes, actions to be taken, strategies, and so on.  A full declarative specification for a business is, in fact, its business plan - in machine-readable form.

Since this blog is about startup ideas, I've decided it should be about startups in general. I may end up specifying some of the ideas formally or something, if it should ever get that far.