By Termeh from the NewYorkBuzz and AMP3pr

Last night, April 28, 2009, Mashable NextUp in New York City was dedicated to teaching “Lessons from the Local Internet Startup Community”, featuring an interesting variety of New York-based web startups: Snooth, Savvy Auntie, Aviary and Behance.

The NextUp returned to 92Y Tribeca (200 Hudson Street, New York) – whose non-profit programs received all proceeds from the ticket sales.

Mashable COO Adam Hirsch took the stage at 7:15pm to introduce the event’s sponsors (DubMeNow  – who made the official announcement of their partnership with LinkedIn – and Sun Startup Essentials) as well as the presentations which kicked off with Snooth.

Snooth’s founder Philip James launched the site in June 2007 and today, Snooth is the world’s largest wine shopping site, with searches available for 12 countries! After introducing the company, the utterly charming Philip shared some of the lessons he learned as a startup, which he compared to a Formula 1 race car that shares a single, determined goal. At the finish line, that race car’s engine will likely blow up and the shiny sports car will be nothing more than a Chevy pick up truck – but the end goal remains, according to Philip, to have a laser-like, single-focused goal when starting a company. Philip’s partner Mark Angelillo (a shameless nerd if I ever saw one) took the stage and preached about the benefits of open source (“Get on it. Use it. Love it.”) while demonstrating an unexpected gift in stand-up comedy.

Next up was Savvy Auntie’s lively and passionate founder Melanie Notkin. SavvyAuntie.com is the first multi-platform media company that caters to what Melanie calls PANKs – Professional Aunts No Kids – who allegedly account for 50% of the female American population. Melanie, sporting an oversized synthetic flower pin on her dress (to reinforce the flower branding on her site), revealed her 3 secrets to startup success: tap into a powerful niche, have a strong product, and build your social influence. She explains how she had to become her own senior VP of Public Relations, garnering both massive media coverage for her company as well as advertising deals from some of the biggest corporate giants, including Playskool whom she claimed made her an offer less than half an hour after Savvy Auntie launched!

Following Melanie’s passionate appeal to entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams, was Aviary founder Michael Galpert. This Brooklyn-raised hipster-geek (of Worth1000.com fame) launched Aviary.com (a suite of powerful creative applications that people can use directly in their web browser) in October 2008. Aviary’s mission is to “make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing.” The site includes colorful bird-themed tools (with names like Raven and Peacock) that allow artists to edit images, vectors, and simply create cool image effects for a minimal subscription fee. Michael encouraged startups to focus on community and collaboration – a leitmotif of the evening – and like Mark Angelillo of Snooth, Michael was a strong advocate of open source.

The final speaker, Scott Belsky, founded Behance (pronounced bee-hance), a sleek online platform for creative professionals to showcase their work. Scott also created what he aptly named the Action Method, a cutting edge online application that helps boost productivity and action management. He gave the room a wake-up call: creative spirits often fall behind because of a simple lack of organization. He calls Behance a “LinkedIn for the creative world” and a “glorified to-do list” that helps artists prioritize tasks and stay organized. His key suggestions for start-ups included hiring staff based on their initiative, not their experience, and defining one’s frustrations (which he reminds us is what prevents most entrepreneurs from launching their start-ups) and then trying to solve them.

Immediately following the individual presentations, Mashable editor and chief Adam Ostrow moderated a panel discussion where he brought up New York-centric questions like: What’s it like to launch a start-up in NYC versus Silicon Valley? And How does raising money compare in NYC versus California? The biggest takeaways of the panel discussion being: use social media (especially Twitter and Facebook) and engage communities; make sure people can easily understand what your product is; and: the crappy economy is ultimately not relevant. Your company is ultimately what you make of it, and financial success is not dependent on a healthy national economy.

Watch / listen to Philip James’ shout-out to AltSearchEngines:

To read Termeh’s interview with Mashable editor in chief Adam Ostrow, please visit her blog here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.