A Brief List of Interesting Web Companies

When brainstorming new business ideas, I find it's useful to remind myself that (most of) the best ideas are very narrow in scope. Instead of trying to be all things for all people ("It's a dashboard for managing the intersection of your social, mobile, and real-world lives!"), they just pick one problem or task and find a way to make it 10x easier to solve or accomplish.

To be sure, most companies don't start off this way. It takes a lot of positioning and segmenting work to whittle a company's offering and position down to the ultimate succinctness. But when it actually happens, the effect is like magic.

To that end, I keep a list of inspirational companies that do a great job of this. Here are some recent additions:

• usertesting.com
• DailyLit
• longform.org
• MobileDay
• Yesware
• Voomly
• PivotDesk
• shelby.tv
• InternMatch
• FreedomPop
• Fizzle
• getAbstract
• CoFoundersLab

In addition to the inspirational effect, this list always reminds me that there are a lot of opportunities out there.