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My pleasure. The only follow up point I would make is that if you decide to expand beyond NZ and have built the brand about the localized extension, then you may have some headaches to deal with down the road. Best of luck!

Congratulations on the mashable write up. Seems like a cool app. What wasn't clear to me is if there is some sort of email based alert system to proactively let me know if I was not getting my moneys worth (i.e. an email reminder that I should watch one of my outstanding movies tonight becase tomorrow I cross into the the above average cot per movie bucket). I may have just missed that, but if it doesn't exist it s definitely a feature that would make this type of service a lot more useful for me.

One note about building a business on top of the online DVD category- Netflix is the whole ball of wax. Blockbuster is a very distant second and the rest are all tied for last. This means that you will have limited opportunities to monetize your audience by offering up cost saving alternatives the way sites like mint.com and billshrink.com do in other categories (credit cards, mobile plans, etc).

All that being said- nice work!

I'd say that my overarching goal for '09 is to be a part of the solution rather than wasting time complaining about the problem.

I would implement product feeds from retailers (available from the big affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Linkshare, Share-a-Sale, etc). You would earn a commission on sales generated through these products. Since the model is about generating purchases, it seems to make perfect since to get a piece of that transaction. I am not sure, as a user, that I would pay to maintain a list because there are similar free options available on the web (thinking mainly about wedding registries like weddingchannel.com).

Get the .com if you want to have universal acceptance of the brand. A large percentage of the population assumes that every website is a .com, so if you stick with the .co.nz you will essentially be delivering free traffic to the gifty.com domain owner (since many people will just use the .com out of habit).

Its likely that the domain squatter will want more than you are willing to pay for the domain. You are best off just spending a few hours on the domain registrar of your choice trying to find an alternative name that is descriptive and available.

Yes- it is absolutely possible to build an ad supported business in the current economy. The key is to focus on a niche with a readily monetizable and under-served advertiser base for which you can be the best source of new customer acquisition.

Spend it on tickets and travel to the 2-3 biggest trade conferences in your industry. Make sure to set up meetings with target users/buyers of your product beforehand. This works a lot better in certain industries than others.

Email is actually a pretty poor new customer acquisition tool for all the reasons spelled out by previous commenters. The best use of email, in my experience, is to keep existing users engaged and informed about your company/product.

To answer your original question, we send user emails in HTML so that we can include light branding elements (logo, etc), but design them in such a way that they look like text emails. That is, we don't go overboard with images and tables (most webmail clients default to images off anyway). You will also want to create a text alternative for those precipitants that can't receive HTML.

I just did a quick search on LinkedIn and found the woman who appears to be the current GM of Flickr. She may be able to point you in the right direction:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kakul

These types of distribution deals can be great for your business. Just make sure that both sides understand what is being agreed to as far as the execution. I have had some bad experiences with feature creep when working on white label partnerships like this. That is, we thought we were delivering a white label version of our existing solution as is and the partner thought that they were getting unlimited customization.

Do you think this could be as big as Oprah's book club?

Network like crazy. Investors invest in people they know or who know people they know.

If you don't know any investors or people who know investors, start with your family and friends. They know you and are more willing to take a risk with you than someone who doesn't know you.

I once asked an angel investor when the ideal time was to come and ask him for money. He told me "when you don't need me". If you can do anything to get closer to generating revenue now, even on a small scale, you will be in a much better position when you go to raise money.

Is there any "non-adult" application of your technology/process/methods? If so, one strategy may be to show that this will work with many different types of content and not just adult content. That way you go from being a purely adult oriented company to a technology company with multiple markets, one of which happens to be the adult industry.

For example, the ad network Adbrite operates one general purpose ad network under their main brand and another adult version at blacklabelads.com. They have traditional investors, including Sequoia.

I'd argue that netbooks of the future will look more like the iphone than the ASUS EEE or Dell Mini. As such, Apple is probably farther down this path than anyone (although by a more unconventional route).

I have seen some software development R&D deductions at my previous companies here in the US. I am not an accountant and the definition of what is deductible is pretty narrow. The best advice is to discuss with a tax professional since the last headache you need in your startup is an IRS hassle.

My advice is to do it in-house. Most of my past startups have been very affiliate driven and I have had some bad experiences outsourcing (most commonly that the checks get sent late). The most important thing to an affiliate is that they are paid on time every time.

If you think it will be too much of a hassle, there are several companies that provide this service. Here is one: http://www.webmasterchecks.com/index.html

Check out usertesting.com. I have had a lot of success using their service. For about $19 you get a screencast and talk track of a user trying to complete certain goals (that you pre-determine) on your site. Its not perfect, but it is a great way to get insights from 3-5 users that you can then use to create a larger survey for the rest of your user base.

My experience with surveys is that the more open ended you make them, the less valuable the feedback is. I would try to come up with 4-5 questions tops. Its a good idea to try and figure out what the theme of the survey is upfront (i.e. on core thing you want to be able to figure out from the survey data). Some businesses try to cram too much into a single survey- I have had more luck with shorter surveys more frequently than less frequent long surveys. Also, multiple choice and "rate on a scale of 1-10" questions have worked better for me than open ended text boxes.

As far as the audience for your survey, unless you have a very large user base you should send it to everyone. Responses rates on surveys tend to be pretty low and you want to make sure you have enough data to draw conclusions from.

The Amazon Associates program has a bunch of limitations on how affiliates can promote Amazon. Their current stance on the mobile channel is not unique in that regard.

Totally agreed. There are probably elements of quality control and disambiguation as well. How would it benefit Amazon to have dozens of Amazon iPhone apps, likely of variable quality, available to consumers? Seems to make most sense to have a single branded application from a business and user experience perspective.

Two techniques I've used in the past:

1) Figure out the "regular" job that is most directly related to what your startup does and say you do that. For example, I have largely been involved with ad supported startups, so most of my relatives think I work at an ad agency.

2) If you have big clients, partners or vendors that you think your relatives have heard of you can say something like, "I work with company X". The fact that you have some relationship with a company they have heard of is typically good enough for them to think you are doing something right.

That being said, your non-technical family members are also a great audience on which to practice refining your pitch. If you can figure out how to explain what your startup does to your family, then you can surely explain it to users, clients, investors, etc.

The most unfortunate thing about child identity theft is that about 55% of instances are perpetrated by parents or other family members. Basically, folks that have burned through their own credit and have moved on to ruin their kid's credit as well.

Seems like a really cool utility, particularly the image editing elements. I will definitely use this app.

It would be great if I could automatically syndicate my uploaded photos out to other services/locations where my friends and family are already expecting to see photos from me (like my blog, tumblr, facebook account, etc). I guess I could probably use the email sharing to accomplish that, but it would be great if I could pre-load all the posting information for these other locations (typically it is just a dedicated email address) and tell the app where I want to post the photo as part of the upload process.

The closest thing I have seen to what you are describing is Amazon's new iPhone app. Users take a picture of any item, then the pictures are routed to Mechanical Turk where a real person tries to match the product in the picture with the same or similar product in Amazon's inventory. It works for Amazon because they have a large, low cost workforce in Mechanical Turk workers and a massive inventory.

A service like you are describing would likely have to be people powered in the same way as Amazon's iPhone App. I could imagine the revenue model working as either a revenue share on sold good the way Amazon does or as a marketplace for furniture shoppers and interior decorators/designers (i.e. you post some photos and a budget and decorators/designers bid to get the business of helping you find the right furniture, etc). Not sure how lucrative either of these models would be.

The site seems easy enough to navigate and the messaging is straight forward. I don't know enough about the tea market to know how big the niche is (although there is a ton of search volume on Google Trends for tea related keywords, which is a good indicator).

Regarding monetization- I noticed you are using adsense. Your content is so ultra targeted that you would probably make a lot more money with affiliate or revshare deals than with adsense. Here is a list of tea related affiliate programs (I have never used any of these and am not affiliated with them in any way, just thought it would be a good starting point).

http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and-drink/te...

Online ad spend is continuing to grow year-over-year and accountable channels like search and performance/affiliate marketing will be the largest drivers of that growth.

The brand dollars are the ones that get thrown out of the window in an economic downturn. But companies still have to acquire new customers when the economy is bad and they are very likely to double down by spending their ad dollars on accountable media channels to hit their numbers.

Startups that are building targetable/monetizable audiences will be just as likely to make an ad supported model work now as they would have been able to a year from now. Startups who believe that they will be able to just grow a really big general audience and magically monetize it with high price CPM ads from big brands are the ones that are in trouble.

Thats a great idea.

Just the idea that you could bring a lot of value by only displaying content that is truly related to startups. For example, you are pulling in the straight TechCrunch feed, but in reality only a small percentage of TechCrunch stories are really relevant to startups. One potential way to improve on the sites that inspired your site is by creating some filtering system to only show the relevant stuff. I know Guy Kawasaki has said that AllTop is targeted to folks who don't know how to use feed readers (i.e. non-techies). But an audience for a startup related news is probably already grabbing the feeds for a lot of these sites. So, you could make the user experience better by filtering out some of the "other stuff" either programatically or by hand. Anyway, hope this is helpful.

Same experience here- Yahoo generates higher quality users in both paid and organic search, but Google's volume is significantly higher. The volume gap seems even greater (in Google's favor) in organic search.

FWIW- I did a ton of research on friend to friend sharing in a previous gig. I found time and again that site based currency (like your points) was the most attractive motivator to encourage users to refer friends to a site. If you do incent users, you'll want to make sure you have suitable fraud tracking system since users will go out of their way to figure out how to game the system.

Your site design is really clean versus other flash game sites I have come across in the past. Nice work!

Seems like a site like this will live or die by the curation. Its not clear to me why I would visit your site versus Hacker News since the community here culls out the startup related posts from the sources you have listed on your site already.

Also, "startups" is a pretty broad topic and there are lots of sites which aggregate startup related content. It seems like you could be more successful by picking some aspect of startups and focusing on aggregating content related to that specific aspect.

As far as video, vator.tv has lots of startup video content. I am not sure about pictures, but sites like slideshare.com have interesting startup related presentations.

Google Alerts is super helpful for tracking mentions of your company on the web. You should also check out search.twitter.com for mentions of your site/brand on twitter.

I haven't been as successful with using Google Alerts for broader industry news. There are too many false positives unless you are in a very niche category.