GoodGuide Should Have Won TC50
So the 'Twitter for enterprise' product Yammer won the TC50 contest. Having slammed Yammer, here is who I think should have won: GoodGuide. It's a consumer play, but it is not Web 2.0 social media wisdom of the crowd. It uses hard core technology and research to deliver a service that is totally mainstream. It is also needed and in a hot area.
What criteria should we use to decide winners? Well this is about business, so my definition of a winner is a company that becomes very profitable for a long time. In other words, would I invest?
Profits will usually follow if you have these three characteristics:
- A valuable "must have" service
- Delivered to a very large number of users who have money to spend
- With rich customers (not necessarily the same as users in web ventures)
Parents a Key Audience
GoodGuide looks like it meets those three criteria pretty well. It looks a tad "trendy green" at first glance, but if you have young children you pay a lot of attention to what you put in and on those little bodies. As a parent, this is "mission critical". There are lots of parents out there and they spend a lot of money on what they consider their top priority. GoodGuide is not just for parents, but I think that will be their initial traction.
GoodGuide is going after a totally mainstream market; this service does not rely on the satiated early adopter that everybody else in Web 2.0 has been chasing.
Being in a hot area - "trendy green" - will help in getting mainstream press. I assume they will be worrying a lot more about PR in Vanity Fair and People than the tech blogosphere. So when they are ready, they have a shot at being noticed.
As for rich customers, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) is the classic advertiser. They spend tons. GoodGuide is not dependent on advertising from financial services firms that are in a mess at the moment.
Database of Intentions
GoodGuide did not reveal specifics on their revenue model. That is not a concern. GoodGuide is naturally monetizable, as the service creates a database of intentions. They will need to be careful in the nuances of monetization and so should take their time to get this right. But unlike communication services - which do not have a native monetization model - anything that creates a database of intentions finds clients and revenues fairly easily.
As for longevity/sustainability/barriers, what GoodGuide has done takes real hard work. This is not a simple social media hack or a surface aggregation that you could do with a tool like Dapper. GoodGuide requires a fine balance of technology, research and domain expertise. If 10 wannabees set out to compete, they would take at least 6 months and probably a lot longer to get to a me too offering.
Finally, passion. These guys sounded like they had been working this for a while and were in it for the long haul. You need that to build a business when simple exits are less likely and businesses will need to manage through a slower growth in the global economy. You need that passion to be thinking a couple of moves ahead, so you have plenty of innovation to counter the inevitable copy cat attempts.
Number 2 Pick
My number two pick would have been TrueCar - and it has similar characteristics. In the end, GoodGuide looks a better bet for one simple reason. We buy a new car only every few years, whereas we buy the products that GoodGuide researches every day. Marketing a brand/service that consumers only need occasionally is tougher, although search engine marketing has certainly made it a lot easier than it used to be.
What do You Think?
Tell us in the Poll what you think. Who should have won? Yammer or GoodGuide or another startup? If you choose 'other', tell us in comments who you think should have won and why.
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Yammer as winner of Techcrunch50 is a joke. GoodGuide is the obvious winnner, and history will show that.
When it comes to usability I think GG should of win, yet if we are speaking about communication and technology I see why Yammer won.
I am not for any of these startups.
I hope ill start my business soon yet I need an idea lol for www.mwd.com
:)
GoodGuide is a pretty good service but I was more impressed with FitBit, although I wonder how broad of an audience it could attract.
Real Car Tips is similar to TrueCar in that it offers real prices paid for new cars. The prices are submitted by users, however.
Bernard, to claim that the business model is "not a concern" is rather ignorant. Of course the business model is important.
I don't care how much passion, "green washing", or technology you think they have. Analytical chemistry is not as high tech as you might think (that is my degree), and there are tons of labs around the US that offer services to determine the constituents within all types of substances/ products.
And finally, pointing to the CPG industry as a possible advertiser ignores the fact that they will be analyzing lots of products from these companies which will draw their objectivity into question.
This is a straight Consumer Reports business model, aka subscription.
I see several problems with GoodGuide. First, if they hope to have every possible product are going to need an insane amount of money to build and update their database themselves. (What happened to the power of the crowd?)
Second, nothing is absolute. What is good? They don't use water, but they test on animals. They donate to social causes, but they use cancerous chemicals. It's all a tradeoff. Grouping users' with similar goals and priorities (e.g. saving water, reducing carbon footprint, reduce packaging, no animal testing) would help those communities to identify products that were "good".
Third, it's boring. Why did a product get 8.6/10 and another got 5/10? Well, there's a stock answer. No real explanation. No story. Yawn.
Backstories and product history are interesting. Even chemistry can be interesting if packaged correctly. Check out how Wired explains the contents of everyday processed foods.
GoodGuide was interesting. But from a business, innovation as well as just plain jaw-dropping cool standpoint, my favorite was Swype. I also liked FitBit. I thought they presented well, their product addressed the problem well, and the market has a great need for something like FitBit.
GoodGuide was cool, but definitely not community based, which I think is a clear problem. I agree with Jason, this is not science of fact, everything about the environment is a tradeoff and how you compare things is very subjective. There is another service called Greener One (http://greenerone.com) which is more along the community/wisdom of the crowd solution, but still has science roots. GreenerOne strikes a better balance, but it is much less filled out right now. They should have been at Techcrunch 50 as their concept is much more Web 2.0 like.