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BizNik - Radical Self Promotion
By Rob | May 7, 2007
BizNik is a “business-building social network for indie professionals.” Founded in Seattle, WA, Biznik promotes an event centric rather than a chapter centric model of business networking. All of the events I could find seemed to take place in or near Seattle, but there’s nothing to prevent you from starting an event in your town. BizNik doesn’t appear to be limited to Seattle.
Dan McComb, co-founder of BizNik explained the idea for starting the site like this:
I think most business networking groups suck. They’re too expensive, too exclusive, clueless about the web, and too Republican, even here in Seattle. But many of them do one thing well - promote their members. But do they have to be so lame otherwise?Organizations are a reflection of the people who comprise them. Cool people, cool org. Enter The Biz Group. In May 2005, I got tired of my wife Lara badgering me to join BNI (a group she’s been a member of for about 5 years). I’d visited several chapters without feeling any affinity, and because they only allow one person per profession to belong, it was virtually impossible to find a group in Seattle that needed a web developer. So I decided it was time to roll our own. I figured, if 300 people had showed up for our wedding party in March, we could get a few dozen to show up for something like this.
Biznik doesn’t appear to charge for anything at the moment, and doesn’t seem to have a concern with exit strategy or business model. But sometimes these fun side projects turn out to be the most profitable.
Not enough info for an Outside the Valley score, but based in Seattle, with no apparent proprietary technology would probably put the site around a 5 or so.
May 12th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
I wanted to let you know that we’re just a few weeks from releasing a massive upgrade to the site, which will featuring localization so that it’ll be easy to see at a glance all the members in your area, join discussions and form your own group or join existing ones. And I also wanted to let you know that, in fact, the new site is patent pending, so there is, in fact, a proprietary element to what we’re building now.
Thanks for the review!
Dan McComb, Biznik co-founder