Posted on March 10, 2009 in Book Review, Small Business

It's the subtitle that really caught my eye with this book. It reads: How to Make a Fortune from Starting Online Communities. An interesting topic to a web designer who has had a hand in a few online startup community-based websites.

(Although the subtitle seems to be different in the Amazon version: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities which actually seems more appropriate.)

David Silver runs an angel investment firm that invests in startup businesses primarily dealing with online content and communities. He is involved in funding several sites that are gaining popularity, and although he doesn't seem to have been involved in any of the super-huge names out there, his research into and experience of the industry give him good credentials.

After discussing some of the theory on how important online communities are and will become, silver gives advice to entrepreneurs heading up these organisations. This advice is partly management, partly marketing, and partly related to how to generate income from a community.

What you won't find is ground-up help with how to build community websites or even specific advice on how to make them work. Instead, you are provided with a big picture approach aimed at those planning to start a large corporation utilising online technologies.

The amounts of money Silver talks about seem huge to me - his idea of 'almost no capital' means a startup fund of $250,000, and most of his ideas involve several million. Okay, I get that it's an investment - the idea is that venture capitalists make more money by investing that amount to start with, I understand how all that works in theory - but it means that the audience for this book is limited to relatively large players or those who have experience with venture capital and business management.

Overall, this is a book that has some interesting ideas and will be worth a read if you are someone who knows how to source millions of dollars of startup funding. For the rest of us, however, it might be better to start with something more practical.

Buy it from Amazon: Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities