“Tasty Nectar” Makes Tasty Profile Sites For Your Personal Brand
Written on 11th November 2008
8 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Tasty Nectar is a new startup focusing on, as they put it, “selling you’. Rather than helping businesses with their sites and promotion, Tasty Nectar have launched a service designed to make creating a beautiful personal profile site, a piece of cake.
Created by the team at Texas based creative agency Fuor, your new personal site will include a gorgeous design (supposedly well optimized for search engines) and a basic lifestream.
How Does it Work?
Select a general theme (design) for your new website and sign up. Once you’re all signed in, you are greeted with a clean UI and requested to answer some pretty straight forward biographical type questions. The next step is to insert all your social media username’s and blog URL’s, this step includes options for all the major social media sites as well as any site with an RSS feed. The final step is to include any relevant contact details such as your IM and email. Click “view” at the top of the screen and voila, your new personal website is ready. I went through the process and created mine in a matter of 15 minutes and as you can see, visually it’s rather impressive.
Pricing
Well, here is where the majority of techies will gasp. To create a site of your own with Tasty Nectar costs $199 followed by $79 annually. There is a 15 day trial period, the visual results are wonderful and the the creation process is very straight forward, however it is definitely on the rather expensive side for someone who could create this themselves in their own time. For the average non-techie who wants to have an elegant site set up which is bound to visually impress prospective visitors, it may be worth it.
There is an ever increasing focus on enhancing personal brands. With online marketers such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogran, Robert Scoble and many others demonstrating how important having your own website is, it is no surprise that companies are beginning to target this niche.
With Tasty Nectar however, I hope to see a fair bit more feature-wise considering the notable cost of their product. Including a blog or microblog of sorts could improve their offering, as well as possibly including file hosting, analytics and other such services. That being said, adding too many additional services to the site may spoil it’s core offering and therefore re-evaluating the price and/or frequency of payments may also be a consideration.
All in all, a refreshing new startup targeting a growing niche. Hopefully we’ll see many more features over the coming weeks.
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By Patrick de Laive on Nov 11, 2008
Indeed a steep price if you compare it to wordpress :) The market for this might be bigger then we’d expect though.
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By sjjh on Nov 11, 2008
I never paid for sex and I never paid for web 2.0 neither
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By Zee M Kane on Nov 11, 2008
Definitely sjjh, but have you come across girls as gorgeous as Tasty Nectar before? (i kid…i kid… :) )
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By Brett Tilford on Nov 11, 2008
Thanks for the writeup Zee. We really appreciate the feedback and you raise some excellent points. I agree that if someone has an eye for design and a relatively good command of HTML and CSS they probably won’t need Nectar. However, for people who don’t have these skills and don’t want to dish out a few thousand dollars to hire a good web designer/developer we think this could be a great alternative.
Developing a blogging platform was considered but the reality is there are already a significant number of great free or low cost blogging systems on the market. Rather than re-inventing this type of system, we chose to create a seamless integration point (the lifestream) to connect a person’s blog with their Nectar page. Nectar should remain the focal point of someone’s personal brand – but not the only component.
Cost is always tricky and we’ve had feedback from both perspectives- One person says “I can’t believe this is only $200! I was going to pay a designer $2,000 to build me my own website” while another says, “Why isn’t this free? I can build a website at Yahoo or similar locations for almost nothing.” We’re definitely listening though and are open to future adjustments.
Thanks again.
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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Nov 12, 2008
I would consider this. I don’t have much time left to update my personal blog and something that looks good and integrates my lifestreams would save me a lot of work…
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If they come out with thousands of gorgeous themes…then maybe. But with just a few and the chances of a number of people having the same theme…i dunno man…
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We’re limiting the number of times a taste is sold to 250 so out of the 1.4billion people online only a few hundred would have the same site.
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By Cory O'Brien on Nov 14, 2008
I think this is a great idea, and despite the price, there really aren’t a lot of other options out there if you want to have a beautiful personal site that also functions as a life stream.
One thing that I would like to see is an option to self host if you’re already capable of doing so. Maybe sell the backend as a one time, upfront cost similar to a premium Wordpress theme.
Glad to see that they’re actively out there promoting their product though, and I look forward to seeing this personal brand/lifestream space develop, because I think it’s only just begun.
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