Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

So lately i’ve been noticing a ton of spam in my spam folder. Among that spam has been many emails from friends - real people - that aren’t spamming me. My bootstrapper.com email address has also fallen victim to being marked as spam and ya know what? It drives me nuts.

Someone needs to create a personal whitelisting service where people pay $5 a year and their email is guaranteed into the inbox at all major ISP’s. I don’t care about optin email whitelisting or newsletter whitelisting, I want personal and corporate whitelisting. Guaranteed delivery of email into the inbox - it would take stress out of so many lives and save so many awkward situations where you think someone is ignoring you because they never got your email.

The next great question, Google or Microsoft. Is the future of
computing about desktop computing with Internet fused into it or internet computing with desktop elements. In the early days, Internet speed was slow and computing was all about the computer, then it became
about networking, mainly corporate and educational, then the Internet came in full force and suddenly it was Internet only. Occasionally, you saw an application that allowed itself to be connected to the Internet but with the exception of outlook and email tools almost never used. The internet has seemingly became a GooglePlex being about to do
just about everything online - or offline as created mainly by
Microsoft….the question is what is the next step?

The next step, I think at least, is this, the two most popular tools
are instant messaging and email … the core of computing will be
around communication based on applications - sure you can access them wholly on the Internet however the key will always be on the system - the reason: internet always has and always will go down and people always will travel - therefore I propose the main system revolve around
a communication device that logs all email / messenger and file
transfer communication between people, accessible via simple search, you want to learn about a person, pull up their profiles from 5 different sites and your communication history and add in notepad and you have a little slice of history of all of your friends…

Social Networking will be tied into the tool but different than it is
today. There is some value visceral based networking such as myspace and there is value in more in depth platforms - the most important component however is a) ability to find friends b) ability to link
through their friends and c) search - all will be able to occur through the same tool …

When it comes to applications such as word processing and spreadsheets - the key will always be on the system, 1 person, 1 creation, however using this same communication center, users will be able to collaborate
on different projects, the applications based mainly on computers for stability purposes but fused into the Internet so it is dynamic - similar to how AIM works.

Users will be able to have one single system for creating and storing creations as well as communicating about them and distributing the final product. Of course as soon as this product is complete it will be
need to be modded, updated, changed and added on to - ala Open Source - right now there are all sorts of open source platforms for search, messaging, networking, browing etc…the future will combine them in a
way that saves time and money for all involved…my 2 cents, whats yours?

My issue with web2.0 is this: Lots of good products by people that don’t know how to market them. Viral marketing is a misnomer. You need to SEED viral marketing. You usually need to BUY your first 50,000 users. Once in a while there is an exception but you need to market.

Myspace for example was seeded. They had 300 employees and they have a contest where the employee who got the most friends would win $1000. The average person got 30 friends = 10,000 users.

Then they did email blasts to millions of opt-in records, probably another 40,000 users

In total they seeded it with at least 50,000 users in less than a week. Then it took off.

So Mr. Web2 - what’s your seed marketing plan?

So I was emailing back and forth with someone that found me on a listserv. I was trying to figure out who he is. So in theory I could look him up on linkedin or facebook but those are closed communities. Why isn’t there a global directory & search engine for email addresses so you can find people by email and dig up details on them. Sure you’d need some heavy captcha - anti-spam stuff in it but seriously why isn’t there a global email directory? Is there one? If so, please share…to me it sounds like a $100MM business idea…work with me people….