I could not believe the amount of quality material on this site. The site is extremely eyecatching and pulls the reader straight it, the articles are great quality and are very professionally written. I have seen too many of these sites where it looks…

Thanks for the comments.

I may not have been clear when I said you were taking the ‘walled garden approach’, I was referring to the fact that the verticals you have built are like little ‘island communities’ with no integration between them.

Very specialised and topical niche markets provide for a great business model, I just think you might find building new communities easier by somehow leveraging your existing communities, rather then effectively starting from scratch each time you launch a new vertical.

For example if TheMentorMom wanted to go and get some advice on a small DIY project she was doing on the weekend, all I am saying is that it would be beneficial to make that as easy as possible for her, and requiring her to register again for a new login provides a barrier that might just be enought to deter her from checking it out.

Anyway I wish you luck and I will certainly keep on checking back to see how you go.

Just to clarify, the ‘walled garden’ tag was mainly assigned to Minti in its early infancy where we chose the ‘first mover’ advantage into the trillion dollar US mom market industry rather than have RSS (which came out weeks after). We wanted to secure passionate users happy to give user feedback and test RSS and all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles in subsequent releases. Then core Minti evangelists naturally taught other noobie parents how to operate all the site features, like tagging articles, group blogging, using the rss to track search terms, author content, friends etc

In terms of Refurber this is a very specific $300 billion dollar US market, whilst yes we could build a yahooID function, if we did this it would be done in a very different way, as it would be hard for TheMentorMom to use her same member brand she has built up on Minti (as a parent consultant) to then be able to create the same following on Refurber. Facebook is using a different model, which gives rise to other models to look at (myspace had I believe 12 web properties) basically we are concentrating on our own strategic path…of very niche specialized topical markets.

It will kind of make more sense down the track as we launch more, interesting verticals in very interesting markets in the future :0)

Hope this helps…

Rachel Cook
Refurber Co-Founder