I recently attended the NewTech Meetup at DLA Piper in Palo Alto. I, like most of the attendees, enjoyed Guy Kawasaki’s presentation on his startup, Alltop. Alltop claims to be the world’s largest magazine rack. It is basically a categorized RSS aggregation of popular topics–from autism to macs to wine–a la your typical Netvibes, iGoogle, Feedburner, and so on.
This post isn’t about Alltop; it’s about how Kawasaki can make Alltop a success based on his entrepreneurial merit.
You see, Alltop is unlike many startups; it forgoes the customability of modern news sites, the personalization, and the silky AJAX. Everything: gone! Alltop is minimalistic. It’s ultimately acting as a stripped-down, pre-setup RSS reader. In an age of personalized, delivered-straight-to-your-screen, up-to-the-minute social media, this is an awfully large step back for the iGoogles and Netvibes of the world.
Three aspects may prove to be Alltop’s saving grace: simplicity, philanthropy and Kawasaki’s charm.
Personalized dashboard sites such as iGoogle and Netvibes are fantastic, except they take work to set up. They require account registration, searching of feeds, and organization of content. Alltop removes this barrier and most likely has a comprehensive enough listing for you to find high-quality blogs that you did not previously use or know about. Its simplicity results in a no-frills product that opens up a new demographic to the realm of modern on-line news.
Alltop is are philanthropic, in a sense. Kawasaki exalts the reward of providing a news and blogging aggregate that collects information about cancer, adhd, autism, adoption, and other topics that are highly valued to that niche crowd.
Kawasaki uses this as his growth strategy. By removing the technological complexities from the employees, they can focus on personal service to a subset of the huge amount of smaller, low-key blogs that comprise the tail end of the blogosphere. He cited many of these blogs having, say, 100 loyal users. By reaching a high volume of blogs and asking them to reciprocate links, Kawasaki hopes to attract a large crowd. Scalability is left as an exercise for Guy.
Ultimately, Kawasaki’s name makes Alltop an attractive acquisition for a larger media company. His name provides the press attention needed to bring in the early adopters. Finance-wise, he has spent $30K thus far, $6K of that being the purchase of new Macbook Airs for his web design team. Any acquisition would most certainly lead to a positive liquidity event for Kawaski. In fact, his former startup, Truemors, was recently acquired.
Your Regular Joe couldn’t publicize such a product without fame. Kawasaki takes advantage of his name. Is this written into the business plan? Nope (it probably doesn’t exist).
