We Heart Startups and given that today is Valentine’s day, we decided to share probably one of the most important document with the entire community – the 10 commandments we internally follow and question ourselves for.
NextBigWhat.com (formerly Pluggd.in) has been around for a few years now. We have brought focus upon numerous startups, raised several issues and questions, made a lot of friends, stepped on a few toes (ouch!), and overall, never hesitated to speak our minds.
We’ve not been journalists, but techies, product people, evangelists for entrepreneurs and a startup ourselves. We’ve had guest authors who’re CXOs, business leaders, investors, geeks – and together, we have played cheerleader to India’s growing entrepreneurial spirit and product and technology ambitions.
We’ve won kudos, made mistakes, have had internal debates and introspected a lot.
As we take on a bigger responsibility and engage with a much wider audience, and as Indian entrepreneurs themselves connect more globally, we decided to commit ourselves to some basic beliefs and a set of rules we’ve more less always stuck to. This is more important keeping the current state of (tech/startup) media in mind, which we believe is going the mainstream way – i.e. paid content, hidden agendas and much more.
So here it is: YOU can question us on these and we as a team hold us responsible for the below commandments (permalink: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/commandments/). Ofcourse, if you have suggestions/recommendations, please share with us.
Who we are and what do we do, as NextBigWhat?
- We bring visibility to startups – not just among investor community, but importantly among customers, potential hires and other stakeholders.
- We play the role of being connectors for various parts of the entrepreneurial and product ecosystem as best and helpfully as we can.
- We do not focus specifically on breaking/exclusive news unless it happens naturally. We are more concerned about useful news with a perspective, an insight that helps connect a few dots. Our news coverage brings to our audience a 360 degree view of happenings in the digital economy.
- We believe that entrepreneurs know best. We respect that, and at the same time we consider it our duty to encourage healthy debate around products and the industry.
- We do not cover plain press releases. We look for interesting, impactful stories that are worth sharing.
- We consider it important to raise key questions around trends we are spotting in the ecosystem/industry.
- We cover ideas and startups that are innovative and/or solve problems worth solving. Big or small, well funded or not.
- We review products and startups honestly, fairly and so that the review is useful to the team behind it.
- We bat for entrepreneurs. When in doubt (say, whether to break the funding/acquisition news) we lean towards the entrepreneur.
- We do not publish paid content in the guise of an article or news. We clearly mention sponsor details and have earlier refused sponsors who asked us to push their agenda as part of the content.
We hold ourselves to the above, and ask you to do the same if we ever slip. We hope we can help create a healthy, vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in technology and products, and contribute significantly to its growth.
Cheers!
– Team NextBigWhat.com.
We Heart Startups!
