StartupLi.st launches, for entrepreneurs and early adopters

For the past few months, I’ve been following the work of three entrepreneurs Eric Ingram, his wife Melissa Ingram and Nick Frost on the Twitters. Today, they launched The StartupLi.st, essentially a mini social network of startups and early adopters, whether they are investors, bloggers, designers, programmers or other entrepreneurs. In the first few hours of its launch, they’ve added over 30 startups.

StartupLi.st’s main goal is to encourage the discovery of startups by early adopter types. The StartupLi.st home page features one startup per day, chosen by an activity algorithm based on the number of follows, visits and recommendations of that startup. To sign up, startups have to be submitted by founders or managers with access to an an email matching the site’s domain. Each startup is approved before being listed to provide quality control. Once signed up, they can submit company news, tweets and posts. Eric says the user generated news model is a direct copy of HackerNews, but for startups only.

Using the Steve Blank definition, they define a startup as “a temporary organization in search of a repeatable business model.” Eric says he hopes to get every startup added, even the big ones like Twitter.

But the real value of StartupLi.st isn’t present yet. They’ll soon be syndicating content from every startup profile. So let’s say as an early adopter, you follow a startup, you would then be able to see all of its activity–tweets, blogs and press– in one stream.

Signing up for the StartupLi.st as a tech enthusiast is quite easy through Twitter, requiring just an email address. Once in, you can follow startups, sign up for their services and learn all about them through a simple profile. It’s actually really awesome. I’ve already found one or two startups that I want to write stories on. (Drumbi, I’m calling because I want to write your story!)

The three founders also co-founded the yet to re-launch BetaCandy, which Eric describes as a startup offer engine for startups to target segments of self-described early adopters, whereas StartupLi.st is where they attract those early adopters and startups in a network situation. He says the goal of both sites is for startups to attract early adopters, gain more customers and prove and iterate their business model. StartupLi.st is free, while BetaCandy will be a “pay per customer” model. Beginning in June, BetaCandy will send out a daily or weekly email offer to targeted users.

So many startups to play with and so little time! Remember the olden days when kids just used to start bands?