Do You Think Your Business Idea Is A Head of It’s Time?

A few month after Yurie systems, my first startup employer was sold to Lucent for a cool $1.23 B, as employee number 8th, I cashed out my stock options and lunched telezoo.com back in 1999. telezoo.com was the first B2B social networking site on the web years before myspace and Facebook of the world. I remember I ended up hiring at least ten sales guy and wasted a third of our series A funding, a cool $1 m on advertising to get the attention of the companies. We rarely managed to get 300 companies to utilize the site.

Getting the companies to leverage the power of social networking to market their solution offerings and get engaged with their existing and potential clients online was something totally unheard of and premature. Many of them even thought I was on dope We had a good run with it till 2004 though.

Thanks to the popularity of LinkedIn, myspace, Facebook, Twitter and I guess Google+, eight years later, the same companies are now joining my second social media startup, awesomize.me on their own. awesomize.me is kind of telezoo 2.0 leveraging the power of rating by the community plus a lot more.

Today, I am not even spending a dime on advertising, nor having a single sales person to go after the companies, but over 1000 of them already on it in less than a year since our beta launch. In addition to their company pages, most them have also set up a page for their products and services, including the following and The Huffington Post that just joined.

(Click on their logo to see their company, product, service pages on awesomize.me in action)

As for why are these companies joining awesomize.me now?

There are several reasons, but the one below is my favorite. Take a look at these three company pages as an example – NYC based ita Collection that makes luxury handbags, at&t, and Mclean, VA based company, microStrategy. Leveraging the power of awesomization (rating) by the community on awesomize.me, there is a real-time score assigned to each company, their products and services. You as the marketers can easily determine your most and least popular products. You can also click on each user page who awesomized your brand to interact with them. Such stats will help you to improve the quality of those products in the bottom before they completely go out of favor.

(Click on each image to see them in action)