Killer Startups

Updated November 11th 2009 I have found myself using this site quite regularly since I reviewed it, and I've raised my rating of it as a result. I don't think my earlier opinions need serious revision, the site still looks and functions the same, but it's a more useful source of information than I expected it would be. I haven't voted on anything and to be honest I usually don't even think to look at the votes. It's a good one to bookmark just to see what's new, though. ========================== Original review A site intended to bring the latest and best of the new internet startups to the attention of the general web public and venture capitalists out there, they claim to be reviewing more than fifteen such new startups every day. When I visited, they had nothing at all for today and I had to go look at yesterday's selection. I found only five reviews, far short of the 15+ that were claimed, and the reviewer for each was the same, a "pbarker" whose name wasn't hotlinked to a profile, making him or her effectively anonymous. I found that it was possible for me to vote on a review without registering. So I assume if I go to a different PC or clear my cookies, I can vote as many times as I like for my own company. I confess that I didn't spend as much time on this site as I often will before writing a review. And there's a reason for that. If it's true that hundreds of startups are appearing every week, then whether I'm just a curious surfer, a venture capitalist, or the writer of the coolest web blog around, I'm not going to have the time to wade through all of them. I'm going to want to see the best and I'm going to expect that the reviews are, if not actually authoritative, at least plausibly honest and independent. Unfortunately there's no indication that the reviews here are independent, and the voting system is pretty much irrelevant given the ease of anonymous and probably repeated voting. The site software is also broken in that the number of votes on a review is different depending on what page you are on, as is the timestamp on the review. For example, the one I have in front of me now, according to the index, has 6 votes and was published 20 hours ago. But if I click through to the review itself, it now has only 1 vote and was published under a minute ago. None of this leaves me with any feeling of confidence in anything published here. Which is a shame, because a reliable index of the latest and coolest startups could become hot property. This, though, is lukewarm at best.

I paid $30 to have my new SaaS appear as featured on their catalog and was more than disappointed with what I saw. Basically, they just took what I wrote and ran it through ChatGPT, so you get a horrendous text full of nonsense in a fake article written by a guy that probably doesn't exist, a cover that has nothing to do with what we actually do, and on top of that there's no backlink - or link at all - to actually access my website. Why would you even register there? People wouldn't even know how to go to the SaaS if they wanted to. I wanted to contact their support for a refund and a delisting but there's none (obviously). This is ridiculous. And I write this review so that nobody falls into this trap.