Look for investors, hire people to join your startup, read entrepreneurship blogs, and create groups: Go BIG Network has it all.
Go BIG is an established network focusing on the startup community. Whether you’re starting your first business or your tenth, there’s always room to learn more. Go BIG provides the entrepreneur with a good amount of resources and tools to help keep the startup process as painless as possible. And we all know how frustrating this phase can be.
As a member of the network, you have the capability to create a network of your own. You can add friends and partners to the network. This seems like a great networking tool for entrepreneurs.
BUT…. there is a huge downside to this network. Members pay a fee to post their requests on Go Big; they also have to pony up cash to contact other members outside of their network — what a turn-off.
Though I see the value in such a network, I feel that their offerings go counter to the bootstrapping entrepreneurs who are starting a company. Heck, we’re already paying for hosting, marketing, investing in our businesses, and on top of that you expect us to pay to create a group? No thanks.
Go BIG needs to think more about the bootstrapping entrepreneurs and less about their corporate image. Think I’ll stick to their free articles before they start charging members for that too.
Read some related articles:
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- Successful Network Launch What a great start to the network! Today my inbox flooded with praise and support for Mind Petals. I’m excited and confident about the future...
- Young Money Blog Joins the Network We are proud to announce that Dennis Ngin from Young Money Blog as the latest addition to the Mind Petals Network. Dennis has a keen...
- Entrepreneur Bootstrappers I am very excited to be one of the contributors to the bootstrapping column of Mindpetals. Bootstrapping is not a buzzword, individual technique, or get...
Keep in mind that for any site (or business) to continue to grow and provide value, it has to charge a fee.
The Internet has become the dustbin of imploded companies without profitable business models. As an entrepreneur yourself I would be surprised that you don’t see the importance of exchanging value for value.
Regardless, I appreciate the write-up on the site. Hopefully we can provide enough value to keep you coming back in the future.
Hey Wil,
You’re absolutely right: as a business, you need to make money whether it’s through 1) ads or 2.) charging for premium services.
In the former scenario, I think that that business model is the most acceptable in the context of offering a service to budding entrepreneurs.
In the latter scenario, I think that you’d really need to offer something extraordinary to justify charging these new entrepreneurs X amount of dollars for simply networking with people in groups.
Just my 2 cents.
Like I said, I think that your site offers plenty of great information and I stand by that.
Rock on!
David – sorry if I sounded defensive, blog comments always sound kind of impersonal and caustic.
If we were ad supported we literally would be out of business in about a week! Ad-supported models only work on Internet businesses that have extremely high volume of particularly “free” traffic. Even then, they don’t add up to much. Digg.com was registering 1 million users per day and only doing $3m in revenues, which isn’t that much.
I think the key is balancing the costs with the value, like any business, but also trying to offer as much service as possible.
We do offer the ability to create groups and network within them for free which is certainly helpful. We are always trying to offer as much for free while trying to make sure we only charge for something that can lead to an increase in revenue or value for the membership.
Again, I want to thank you sincerely for supporting what we’re trying to do. We are working like mad to create a really powerful and useful service for entrepreneurs like yourself to get started and go bigger, faster.
I hope we can help you in the future if the need arises!
I look forward to seeing your network grow. Thanks for the awesome discussion. We’re both in this to help other entrepreneurs and that’s what so great.