Here’s a great list by Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path about what pumps are primed for real adoption in the near future.

Give it a read and see where it takes you. It’s guarenteed the next Amazon, eBay, Facebook or YouTube will get their start just when everyone is saying it’s not a good time to start a new service.

(via Lane Becker)

“Dogster retains bite post downturn as revenue rolls in”

That’s a headline I could read all day.

Big thanks to Camille Ricketts and Venture Beat for doing their own research and writing an article about the Dogster, Inc. that get’s it right.

From Dogster …

… and Catster!

Our new dog breed photo game and cat breed photo game are huge hits. In the last week they’ve averages 144 pages per visits with session lengths averaging 32 minutes for a total of 1,250,000 pages leading to a bounce rate 6.34%!

An important less is that for years we knew such a game would be popular, but whenever we spec’ed it out it would always get bogged down in trying to include advanced game mechanics which required complicated data storing mechanisms. Simply put we didn’t want to make a game unless it was the coolest we could imagine, yet we never had the resources. We ended up backing into this one thanks to an internal challenge of what’s the simplest game we could make that would still be fun to play. Simplicity is also rife with failure as there is a very fine line between something having just enough to make it work, and not enough and it sucks. A very fine line indeed.

Here’s a screen shot of the game:

(I told you it was a simple game ;)

Here’s our first entry about the games.

Some years the holiday’s feel like an onslaught of forced consumerism and advanced marketing thumb screws.

Other years it’s a simple reminder of great it is to be alive and doing what you love. We think it’s a great time to be alive and doing what you love and First Round Capital does to.

Watch their holiday video if you haven’t seen already. Three Cheers for First Round.

We’re making an iPhone game that will challenge players to correctly guess the breed of the dog photo they are shown. There will be all kinds of silly animations, sound effects, leaderboard stats, etc. One big hurdle we had though was that though we have millions of photos of purebred dogs, a percentage of them are actually photos of the owners, photo of their other pets, places they visited, etc. People can tag photos, but we still have hundreds of thousands of photos that aren’t good photos of the dog itself.

So we’ turned a problem into a huge fun experience for our website members. We made a simple web version of the game anyone can play, and if your are challenged with a photo that is blurry, shows a cat, shows a dogpile of dogs, you can click it as inappropriate. We store how many bad flags a photo gets, as well as how many times a photo is correctly guessed so we can learn the best and worst photos.

The best part is it’s been a ton of fun. Yesterday our average page-serves-per-visit increased 40% because the game is such a hit. We’ve been getting tons of great feedback which we hope will help make our the game we sell in the iPhone store a hit. We’re not planning on using similar game mechanics to qualify photos for other games such as ‘guess what breeds this mixed dog is’ or ‘what breed is this puppy’ or even other categories such as ‘cutest all time photos’ or ‘best representative photo of a breed.’ To make it fun for members we made a leaderboard and give away virtual currency when you get to new levels.

Check out the dog breed game and let us know what you think!

We made a cat breed game you can try too (warning, it’s hard!)

None of this is rocket science and admittedly we’ve got a long way to go to be a real game developer, but simplicity is proving itself to be a big hit already and though I wish we did this 3 years ago, better late than never.

Paws crossed we’ll translate this into a new revenue stream via the iPhone store and other app outlets!

If you have any thoughts on the game or advice on iPhone marketplace, please share.

Happy Howlidays friends of Dogster & Catster. I wanted to give a bark out that we’re not having our annual pawty this December, BECAUSE in February we’re going to be celebrating out 5th birthday (that’s 35 is dog years!) AND the launch of our partnership project with the American Red Cross.

Have a woofderful December and we’ll send out a save-the-date in January for the big celepurrtion.

In November I was interviewed by the Businessweek reported and start-up author Sarah Lacy about Dogster & Catster for Yahoo! Finance’s Tech Ticker. The interviews (one, two) can now be seen on the Yahoo Tech Ticker site. Sarah’s reported on the Internet industry for the last decade, which showed, as we got right to the heart of the matter, “how is Dogster, Inc. profitable without VC and what are we going to do to weather the next 2 quarters.”

The interview is broken into two pieces:

1) Our ’surprisingly serious’ business model.

2) How direct ad sales will get us through the recession.

Thanks Sarah for the great interview. If you do not read Sarah Lacy’s blog, you should. Same goes with Yahoo! Finance’s Tech Ticker.

ABC Albuquerque did an investigative piece on how people are using Dogster to move dogs in need around the country to loving families. The Dogster Railroad (there’s also a Catster Railroad) have been around for over two years and are extremely active. Complete strangers band together ad hoc to transport the adopted animal hundreds and even thousands of miles.

To see the video just go to the ABC site.

The Boston Globe wrote about this Dogster/Catster phenomena last year.

Here are some more screen grabs from the video:

[This one cracks me up ;]

Steven in ‘05 with our first 6 figure ad deal

In the last two months there has been a rush to exhort start-ups to get to profitability, yet we’re hearing very little advice how to do that other than simply slashing expenses and finding revenue channels.

Dogster & Catster were born in a period when web properties were considered loss-leaders, but we decided to find out how big a business it could be. In July of 2005 we first achieved profitability and ran in the black for next 13 months before putting to use the proceeds of an Angel round we closed in September 2006. We returned to profitability a year later and we’ve been in the black ever since.

Here are our best lessons and strategies for growing a business in the technology era that focuses on earnings and profitability

1. If being a business person is not your goal find a business partner immediately. Without someone on the team that relishes sourcing customers, closing revenue deals, perfecting sales messages, it will always be an afterthought.
2. Consult anyone you know that has run a earnings-based business (VC funded companies are rarely helpful here). The concerns of a restauranteur, law firm, or even landscapers are entirely applicable when it comes to long-term strategies for profitibility. Anyone running a business for years will know volumes about hiring, cashflow, and compensation.
3. Spend your money when it’s in the bank, not when the deal is agreed  to. To know what you actual profit margin is you must know both how much you made and how much it cost to provide. If you spend the money prematurely you’re likely going to be spending more than you earned leaving yourself with a shameful net loss.
4. Spend at least 50% of your time selling. Many technology companies assume if they built great product it will sell itself yet that almost never happens. Usually we’ve found that incorrect assumption is a rationalization of people who love building product, but secretly loathe the business side of running a business. Such a strategy is a great way to lose a lot of money. So constantly ask yourself, are we spending 50% of our time selling? I bet you’ll always realize you’re focusing too much on the product and not enough on finding customers that want it. (Of course the inverse is true. If you love selling you need to make sure you spend at least 50% of your time building product or your sales effort will be for naught.)
5. Know thy accounts! At any given moment know how much you have in the bank. Know your accounts payables and accounts receivables. Know your forecasted cashflow position. Know both your monthly finances in both GAAP and cash calculations. This is the only way to know how much you have to spend, and if you are truly in the black or misleading to yourself.
6. Prove your revenue models before investing in them. Spending investor money on an assumed revenue stream is a very risky proposition. If at all possible prove that there is a firm, interested marketplace for your product before digging yourself into a hole you may never get out of.
7. Don’t lie to yourself. We find a lot of entrepreneurs practice their elevator and investor pitches for so long they believe their rosy sounding forecasts are actually going to happen. The only thing you know is what you’ve proven. Everything else are items that still need to be proven or listed as false starts. While it’s important to strive for the big potential, it’s critical you protect yourself against the much more likely realities.
8. Fail fast. Find out what is going to fail as soon as possible. Every business person has been wrong. You will too. Get over it and be emotionally tied to nothing. The key is to find out what works without losing much money then you’re in a much shallower hole to get out of. In fact you might find there is no reliable revenue for the product you are building and profitability would come sooner if you scrapped it and considered a new business
9. Hire slow and fire fast. Training an employee that isn’t going to be great is a tragic waste of money and time. Likewise, keeping an employee around that isn’t excelling at their position loses you money every week you you do not replace them. So, take your time to find the great person and free your company of the person if it turns out they weren’t. If you ever find yourself saying ‘Well this person isn’t great, but we have to fill this position’ do not hire that person, they will never give the long-term benefit to compensate the short-term gain. Don’t fill position simply because investors were promised growth.
10. Be frugal about everything. Get the black and white printer instead of color. Skip the flat screen show-off TV. Buy used furniture and equipment. Rent office space by price not neighborhood. Get by with what you have. Until your bank account is growing consider every purchase above $50 as if it might break your business.

We sincerely hope this is found beneficial,

Ted, John & Steven