This has been an interesting rabbit hole I went down.
I’m a co-founder of a new startup called, Ramblen. We launched at the end of November of 2013. Like most startup entrepreneurs I pay attention to the latest in the tech world and startup community. I’ve found some good resources in the way of blogs and websites. Recently I began to wonder if there was a place where we, as a new small business, could find service providers that were in the same boat. My research wasn’t coming up with anything so I turned to Twitter.
I’m not completely altruistic in looking for a startup marketplace like this. One of the ways Ramblen creates revenue is by providing content marketing services and I think a lot of startups could benefit from by implementing that’s what got my wheels turning in the first place. However, startups, including bootstrapping and lean startups are still in need of services themselves. Hosting, design, business cards, accounting, SEO tools, legal and office management applications are all things off the top of my head that I can think of that I know we’ve had to spend money on. If someone in the startup realm has services along those lines that they can offer us I’d like to support them in their efforts to build their business.
After Twitter yielded no answer. I turned my research to my SEO tool, SEM Rush. That yielded some more insight that is probably worth sharing with the startup community. As you’d guess most startup online queries have to do with finding a job within a startup or how to find investors for your startup.
When I plugged in the word, “Startup” in the tool it came up with the following results. These are the phrases that people type into a search engine the most when they’re searching for something to do with the word “startup.” [Tangent: You’ll notice that the word, “Startup” vs “Startups” has more than double the search volume and volume is measured monthly..hence this blog post title].
The top 20 organic results, meaning the top 20 websites that will appear in a search engine results page (SERP) when you type in the word “startup” into a search engine are the following:
By clicking on any single one result a whole new page of research and phrases of how people search for them appear in this SEO tool. You can see now why I used the term “rabbit hole” because research like this is very telling but can also suck you into a time warp. I actually discovered Startuply through this research…I hadn’t heard of it before.
Despite all my SEO adventures I never really found my marketplace but I did uncover some things worth sharing and found some things you can do if you’re determined to hire a startup service provider that’s less than five-year’s-old.
Go to the AngelList homepage and click on >> More >> Markets
Click on the market you’re interested in and then *most important step* at the top of the page of markets listed click >> JOINED. Otherwise you’re gonna get some startups that have been around a while and are well established. In the words of Jerry Seinfield…”Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” but if your goal is to help or discover emerging startup service providers you’ll want to make sure you toggle the Joined button so it shows the most recent startups.
Crunchbase, which is a great resource, surprisingly didn’t allow me to filter by date. You can search by market on there but you’ll have to sift through a lot of startups to determine when they were established.
Then there’s Startuply which is mainly for people to find startup jobs but also includes listings of startups by market/industry. I liked the map feature on this one but again it didn’t have a filter by date established. Still worth checking out though.
If someone reading this post decides to build a startup marketplace that would be great…just let me know when you’re done so we can use it! In the meantime, if you are a startup and have a service you provide, by all means please share it here in the comments. Thanks!