Odeo is Obvious and Evan Williams is a Competitive Webmaster
- By: John Andrews [privmsg] On 27th Oct 2006
Odeo is gone. Evan Williams bought it out and formed Obvious Corp., which he describes on his blog. His business model sounds exactly like mine:
The Obvious model goes something like this:
- Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.
- Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they're focused and easy to understand)
- Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently
I am an independent competitive webmaster, and this sounds like what I (and many SEO practitioners) have done for years. I build web properties using the latest technologies and small teams (if I need any team at all). I monetize via subscriptions, advertising, and (affiliate) marketing. I use my sites to support my other sites, following sound SEO principles such as semantic theming and whatnot, for organic search traffic and search marketing. My "network" is my base for launching new sites and new promotions, obviously.
I have never needed venture capital, private equity (other than my own) or ... gasp... lots of employees. Small is the new Big, and that's what Evan is saying. It wasn't always the case, but I suppose it's now "obvious".