Do not do this to *thank* your friends!! It is no way to show your appreciation!!

Walter

Pat: It might be working for you and you may not know it. If you visit your biz page as an admin or someone who “Likes” it then you’ll still be directed to the wall. New visitors to your page will land on the Stik.com recommendations tab.

Hope that helps!

There are two ways that people can appear in Stik search results:

(1) They can create a profile on Stik – this is, of course, the recommended way.

(2) The Facebook platform allows people to share certain information about their networks with their friends. It’s likely that one or more friends of yours have signed up and shared the work histories of people in their network with you.

Of course we do take privacy very seriously, and the only information that we allow users to share is professionally relevant.

Hope that helps.

I see two major groups of predators: (1) powerful institutions that want to see a start-up fail conceptually (ie – banks hate the idea of P2P lending), and (2) companies that could easily “crush” the start-up by copying the product (as Twitter has done to a variety of apps on its platform) and thus don’t need to acquire.

The Toyota / Big Three struggle was a bit simpler than these cases: Toyota had a better version of the same product, and the Big Three couldn’t match their standard for years.

PayPal is a tougher case for me to evaluate. It’s clear that credit card companies didn’t want PayPal to dominate the online payments space, but they certainly weren’t threatened by the mere concept and have since found their own footing online. I wonder if PayPal could have survived outside of eBay…

two realities that might not jive with this:
1. a hallmark of attractive start-up is clear, definable exit strategy; one of the most concrete and reliable exits is acquisition, and start-ups that present logical points of acquisition from loaded “predators” along their growth timeline are desirable. think “Paypal”–it was obvious that if their model worked, they would immediately become such a threat to the existing order that controlling them became immensely valuable to the predators ruled the e-commerce arena.

2. “disruptive” (in the textbook sense, not the buzzworded “business school synonym for exciting” sense) companies are by definition a threat to entrenched players. it is roundly agreed that disruptive companies are potentially great bets for start-up. toyota certainly had threatened natural predators; it just ended up consuming them.

-Cap

It seems that many businesses are in fact facing an economy in which ‘Mom&Pop’s’ will inevitably go under if they don’t effectively ‘go digital.’ As a sort of non-sequitur I’d recently seen an episode of CNN in which Google was featured… What fascinated me was the segment on Google Ads. There was a business that had begun as a “Mom&Pop” with no VCs in sight for them (they were est. in the 1800s) & succeeded locally without the immediate ‘global’ pressures such entreprenurial ventures currently face including… the gigantic pharmaceutical-juggernauts & their online counterparts (as an aside, I wonder what % of GNC’s profits are generated from online sales.) This particular entity(M&P Business) on the segment had evolved to the point where it made good ‘cents’ to purchase a geographic/key-term -based segment of ‘google ads’ and effectively *eBay-ify* their business on the largest ‘search market’ in the world: Google. They’re doing amazingly! (Despite their continued reliance on eBay itself for generating a % of their profits.) Fortunately, Google is still *useful. This brings me to… What is Stik.com’s role?

At any rate, it certainly seems like this Stik.com forum is trying to function as a sort of ‘consumer-reports-cum-online-better-business bureau’ at the same time. It’s a very interesting premise. If I’ve understood Melody’s point correctly, it’s that Stik.com should not attempt to *encourage people to seek out non-expert opinions on crucial financial matters. After all, Stik.com too is a *business* and might suffer financial liability from *bad advice* as in ‘go buy virtual real estate! it’s guaranteed to pay off!’ That doesn’t mean, however, that I wouldn’t* recommend perusing such a site as this in the meanwhile if it simply meant that I could become better acquainted with the questions to ask/concerns to have/etc… However, it would certainly be frustrating if Stik.com & its peripheral ‘fB app’ turned out to be as *useless to e-consumers as WebMD has proven for doctors & their patients–a colossal time/money waster; you probably should just see an ‘expert’ for diagnosis. To say otherwise would be in your terms *not scrupulous. Trouble is that financial advisors just seem universally creepy. Friend-based ‘financial advise’ *ought not steer anyone ‘wrong,’ if it does, you turn to your friend to fix it. That’s the difficulty I see on the horizon for Stik.com. If anything can go wrong, it usually does. At the moment, I’m just wondering what challenges Stik.com sees itself facing in 2011? Where would they like to be v. what do they ‘accept’ as ‘reality’?

I only say, that I doubt these guys are simply ‘WebMD-ing,’ with personal financial products. They must already be familiar with that concern… right??

Just wanted to point out that the tagline and the concept don’t seem to really match up. Not trying to bring you down, but figured some constructive criticism would be useful.

1) Be a successful entrepreneur

2) Have clear traction

3) Have a hot product at exactly the right time

Since it’s hard to do anything about #1, you’ve got to either have #2 or #3, and #3 helps you achieve #2.

Most of the WTF investments you read about in TechCrunch or VentureWire fall into category #3–that’s why things like GoWalla get funded with only 10,000 users.

To get funding, build an insanely great product, and prove that you can get people in the market to care. If you do those two things, you’ll rarely fail.