Tizra Blog

John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites ( Shorelines: portals Passe ). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up. Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the en...

This is a bit of a hormone-supplemented blog post, but I hope the length is worth it. We spend a lot of time pitching to potential investors. You need faith in your idea, and an ego of steel, because they're usually critical. I find it helps to think about all the great companies that barely got funded, were rejected by everyone, etc. That's nice for confidence, but you also need to think hard about every objection; they've dealt with a lot more business plans (certainly than I have, probably than you have, too). So once I've cheered myself up, I try to follow up on my "they just don't get it" boosterism and look to see if it's me that just doesn't get it. This note is inspired by some criticism that I don't believe, even after thinking about it. One prospect didn't like Tizra's business model of helping publishers sell their own stuff; he prefers to create or license large aggregations of data. "Aggregations mean real value and...