NOTE: This is an archived post from ideablue.com
Today’s economy is keeping us business owners on our toes. The financial recession has reached the web industry, which has resulted in a rise in many internet startups folding and venture capital firms drastically pulling back on investments. Within the last three days (including today) there have been 15,600+ layoffs in the technology industry alone. According to TechCrunch, in the tech industry, since August 27, 2008 there has been a reported 131,000+ layoffs, that’s 963 a day or 10 every 15 minutes.
TechCrunch Layoff Tracker
Fortunately in 2008 I was lucky enough to start an investor funded internet startup here in San Diego (http://www.socialsimple.com/). We are all very excited to be developing an innovative social networking platform that utilizes social analytics and user permission data to deliver a more personalized user experience throughout the web.
To stay ahead of the curve and adapt to today’s market, we are shifting our business model and committing to new priorities. We are moving from an investor-based startup to a client services company and taking on our investor as our first client. Yes, that’s right ditching the guaranteed paychecks for a “Project” based revenue. This may seem a little off to some, especially those who are bootstrapping their business and are struggling to find investments.
Our decisions to do this came after a Lunch 2.0 event hosted at a local startup just like us. The event was at their nice spacious office a block from the beach (just like us, excluding the “spacious” part). The following week, we learned the entire company was laid off the same day due to investors pulling out. Well, we are in a similar situation, if our investors pull out, well, its time to bust out the resume again! Where did I put those shinny shoes and fancy ties?
We have built such a great top talent team who has an unmatched commitment to helping change our modern web to a more personalized web experience. Although, I am a new entrepreneur, business is business, corporate or startup, it’s about ensuring growth and long-term stability. This gives us the ability to try to survive independently if the roof falls in. I am not a serial entrepreneur, from the start it was a risky to leave a stable executive job at a large successful Fortune 40 corporation.
It’s a game of chess and to protect your king, strategically moving your pieces, and planning out all the next possible moves.
To adapt, we are now offering tailored web services and already have clients who are eager to embrace the new and emerging trends and technologies in web. We are not going to take on the world and be a “full-services” agency. To keep to our core competencies we are specializing in eBusiness and Social Media. We’ve taken down our old ideablue.com website and now our website is a network of Ideablue employees and blog contributors.
One of the biggest changes which will have a big benefit to the development community is we are working to make our existing social media application platform into an Open Source project. Our investors and myself have been highly impressed with what our team has developed, a platform for rapid application development with a robust modular/API architecture. I’m starting to sound like a sales guy, in truth, I’m just excited to get the community involved.
We are firm believers in success through collaboration.
Subscribe to our blog for more updates as we have some great ideas planned to write and collaborate on. I’ll also keep you guys posted on what it’s like turning your investor into a client (not an easy task).
Johnny Negretti
CEO, Ideablue Networks
