There’s always something special about the first day of what the founders hope will be a big new thing. Often — and I know this was the case with this one — that opening day is after a big final push, the long hours, overnighters, and then the excitement of “going live.” It’s sort of like sending a kid to the first day of school, high school graduation, college, and the first job and the first job review, but coming all in that first day live.
I’m watching with that kind of interest today as www.236.com launches. It’s a new comedy site backed by IAC and the Huffington Post. Its comedy team is led by Jason Reich, previously a writer for Jon Stuart’s Daily Show. 
The “About” page describes it well enough:
236.com is a co-production between the gigantic, vaguely Death Star-like IAC, and The Huffington Post, a progressive news hub where outraged people go in order to get more outraged before going to have dinner at Nobu.
Cool? Funny? They hope so. A few dozen people have spent a long time getting it ready. The business model is based on ad revenue and traffic, so now that they’re live they get to sit and wait to see how it goes.
One thing about our world now, the Web-driven world, is the news comes fast. Whether it’s good news or bad, you get the news fast. It’s not like the old days of launching a product via press release and direct mail or even getting it on the retail shelves, and then waiting days, weeks, months to finally know. When we launched the first Business Plan Pro®, back in November of 1994, we didn’t know whether the channels would even take it until middle January, and we didn’t get real orders until February, and we didn’t get paid until that following summer.
I’m rooting for them. I like the comedy, I like what they’re trying to do, and I hope they succeed.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under startup stories. 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.One Response to “Launch Today of a Big New Site”
Leave a Reply
November 9th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I just visited the 23/6 website and I like what I see! I’m rooting for them too.