StyleFeeder is a community-driven online shopping source that turns your shopping habits and bookmarks into feeds that can be used for personalized recommendations for others. This week the company sent out an announcement notifying the world of its profitably, something that’s rare in the web 2.0 startup scene.
StyleFeeder has only been around since late 2005, and raised $3.5 million in venture capital in 2007. With over 1 million registered users and only 6 full-time employees, StyleFeeder has remained lean in order to turn a profit in a relatively short amount of time.
A few main points to bring up regarding StyleFeeder’s ability to stay lean include outsourcing the company’s entire TI infrastructure over to Amazon Web Services. Freelancers were also brought in whenever possible in order to keep the developer staff small.
Equally as important, StyleFeeder also managed to leverage the Facebook platform just as it was emerging as a new trend. The Facebook platform enabled StyleFeeder to become much more social with less effort on building out its own social network. While StyleFeeder is essentially driven by user-generated content and has many socially-adept features that power its discovery tools among other sharing options, tapping into Facebook helped StyleFeeder delve deeper into social activity in order to grow its brand.
Even though StyleFeeder was among the lucky few to be catapulted into success thanks to the timing of the Facebook platform, there are other ways to still take advantage of Facebook’s large user base despite the decline in direct uptake or conversions through a Facebook application. A key highlight of StyleFeeder’s success through Facebook comes in the form of redistributed content spread amongst Facebook users. This can still be achieved with Facebook Connect, along with leveraging an established user base all the while.
StyleFeeder offers some good pointers on how to turn a web 2.0 profit. See here for details on Newsgator’s white paper, outlining even more ways in which to stay budget-conscious as a startup in a wary economy.