Ask HN: Is there room for another TC alternative like: Startup Foundry

[moreofalurker]

Hi, I know that this post might come across as a rant, but that isn't the intention.

I have been a somewhat long time lurker @ HN, and over the last couple of months, I have/had noticed a ton of negative bias towards the coverage that TC provides; a friend and I were planning on starting a new startup friendly blog to cover the news from HN folks and other members of the startup community.

I understand that execution is key, and that ideas are a dime a dozen, and no matter how much I justify why we didn't do something earlier, they will just be excuses. But if you must know, we are both university students that were working on a web.app / managing a really heavy course load at a good named university that has a harsh-ish course load and we are also involved in planning a conference in April which was/is a huge time suck with small advantages. This didn't leave much time for the idea lest at the cost of our health and more sleep deprivation. We had registered a domain, and twitter id, but the plan was to launch in May, and continue for the summer , as we had decided to pursue this startup blog idea and the development of our web.app instead of internships/classes.

We since did contact some members of the community to ask for their stories, but we were usually buffed away, and pointed to the direction of TSF pointing out that they are already tackling the problem.

Since HN is our only portal to members of the start-up world, and I believe that this was true of TSF to get the initial momentum, and stories for their blog, we really wanted to know whether this community would be appreciative of another alternative / and willingly contribute their stories for us to cover ? We really could launch in a couple of days to a week, but that would not be feasible time wise, we are however debating still going ahead with the idea in a couple of months from now, and I believe that since TSF is already doing a great job, people might be reluctant to accept another alternative or feed it with stories /tips (sorry for the pessimism) once another alternative has been executing on that idea for a couple of months.

Please let us know what your thoughts are. Thanks.

[ig1]

Yep plenty of room. The important question to answer is how are you going to make in long term sustainable. You need a constant flow of articles to build up readership, can you generate 5 small articles/day for say 6-12 months?

Getting the initial boost is one thing, but the difficulty is in the long slog.

[hackscribe]

What made Techcrunch great at one time was not only learning about early-stage startups, but reading Arrington's honest analysis, opinions, and reviews. His brutal honesty did upset founders who got a bad review, but at least he was offering readers more than a BS press release.

[DirtyAndy]

That is certainly what I used to love about Techcrunch, and whilst I think it is natural that as they have gotten bigger they have gone more mainstream and do a lot more coverage of Twitter, iPads etc, it also a shame and certainly taken them from my "first website of the day" to "if something interesting comes into RSS feed I'll click".

At the same time if you go back a few years there were quite a few startups that were really doing different things, and reviewing them was worthwhile. Now there are often so many startups trying to solve the same problem that choosing who to review and keep track of must be a nightmare, and half the comments will be "if you like X take a look at my company Y".

Speaking of Y's, is there an independent blog that just reviews (and meets with etc) Y Combinator companies - that actually would be an interesting read!

[depoisfalamos]

I think there's always room for improvement. Competition and diversification are essencial for an evolving project, be it a blog, a company or a mere discussion. It makes people think about how to improve, how to be better, how to evolve.

I really love the TSF. It's clean, not bloated and very objective. Maybe you have different ideas than the ones the implemented. So, please do try and do your thing.

People we'll be here to "judge" :D

[revorad]

Hehe this seems like one of those ideas which everyone has at some point. Here's my take on it - http://laughingcomputer.com/startups/. I am too busy with other stuff, so feel free to copy.