go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

You Won’t Believe How Big This Profitable 5-Person Startup Is

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/you-wont-believe-how-big-this-profitable-5-person-startup-is-2011-11

We recently met with Adrian Constantin, the founder of video startup TV Links. 

TV Links is a video aggregator and search engine, serving up videos from hundreds of sites, similar to US startup Clicker.

It’s not the most innovative business in the world, but here’s what you should know about it: it’s bootstrapped, profitable, it claims 37 million monthly unique visitors, and it has only 5 employees. 

TV Links is not just impressive, it’s interesting because it’s a combination of two important trends: globalization, and the extreme capital efficiency of online businesses. 

Globalization: the company has developers in Romania, servers in Spain and in the US through Amazon, and most of its users coming from the US, UK and Canada. 

Extreme capital efficiency: the company basically outsources everything: hosting, advertising and even some development. 

TV Links’ one weak spot is that it gets the vast majority of its traffic from Google and so will live and die by SEO. But the company has ambitious plans; it’s even starting to produce its own original video. 

We once wrote that Instagram is the future of startups in part because of its extreme capital efficiency: it has over 10 million users and half a dozen staff (the other reason is distribution via app stores and social media). TV Links is another example of this extreme capital efficiency; unlike Instagram, it gets distribution through the more “traditional” medium of search engines, but unlike Instagram it’s also profitable. 

This new reality has broad implications beyond startups. If you’re wondering about the sky-high valuations of companies like LinkedIn or Twitter, part of your calculus should also take into account the fact that it’s now possible to build these very efficient businesses with huge global markets, something which wasn’t possible 10 years ago when “clouds” were still things in the sky and the internet population was counted in millions, not billions.

We will see many more of these ultra capital-efficient, globally-distributed online businesses in the future. 

MORE: Why Instagram Is The Future Of Startups →

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See Also:

• VEVO Will Expand Beyond Music Videos — Just Like MTV Did 20 Years Ago
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• Here’s What Facebook’s Management Is Constantly Thinking About

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