Ternovskiy is visiting the U.S. and flirting with investors, and you can see why they’d want to talk to him. The 17-year-old spent three days in his bedroom building the site, named after a key scene in “The Deer Hunter,” and it attracts more than 30 million visitors a month.

He’s also savvy enough to tell everyone that he’s perfectly happy to go it alone. Though it would be easier for him to do that if Google (GOOG) would send him a check. He says the search giant won’t pay him his AdWords money because he’s too young.

Q: Do you want investors?

A: ?I’m not sure. There are a lot of business people that are interested. I am afraid to take the offers as I don’t have a business plan. If I take the money I’m responsible for delivering on that. Right now I can survive without investors. The site uses peer-to-peer technology and my Web site is not the kind of site that needs a lot of money to run.

Q: So if someone came along to you today and said I’ll give you $5 million for the Web site would you sell it to them?

A: ?I’m not sure to be honest. The thing is, I could take the money, but what if it won’t work well in the future, I would blame myself. I don’t want to disappoint people.

You should read the whole thing, which doubles as a very nice metaphor for the Web 2.0 era.

Which turns out not to have disappeared, after all. You can now launch a Web service that attracts millions of users without having to leave your parents’ house.

But if words aren’t your thing, here’s that excellent Jon Stewart clip about Chatroulette again.

The price of that access? Unknown, but I can’t imagine it’s much. Twitter says it’s charging companies according to an as yet undisclosed scalable licensing scheme. For the likes of Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), that means millions of dollars–enough to make Twitter profitable. For these seven upstarts, the fee is substantially less, at least until they evolve into more high-volume users.

In any event, it seems Twitter is finally pushing ahead with a business plan that could begin to justify the venture capital investment it has attracted.

That was the third round for HubSpot, which has raised more than $30 million from venture firms in just two years. And it’s done it all without a formal business plan.

“No venture capitalist actually asked us for a business plan,” HubSpot Chief Executive and founder Brian Halligan said last week at the Puerto Rico Venture Forum.

Halligan believes “it’s a fool’s errand” for start-up founders to create a business plan. He knows a lot about raising capital, serving as a venture partner at Longworth Ventures before his current position.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Perhaps plow it into more start-ups like Aviary, a Long Island-based design software company.

Bezos, via his Bezos Expeditions fund, has followed up an investment in the company earlier this year with another slug of cash. It’s part of a $7 million Series B round led by Spark Capital, best known in these parts as the guys who made a very big bet on Twitter, which Bezos also invested in.

If you’re sick of hearing about Web start-ups with just the vaguest sense of a business plan, Aviary may be a refreshing change. It is trying to make money by selling cheap, Web-based alternatives to popular, expensive design software, primarily the stuff that Adobe (ADBE) sells, like Photoshop and Illustrator. Granted, it doesn’t make much money yet: The company only began selling $24.95 subscriptions to its software suite earlier this year.

Down the line, Aviary also imagines it will be able to create an online marketplace where the creative types who use its software can bid on work assignments. Sort of like eBay (EBAY) meets Craigslist meets Etsy meets Amazon’s (AMZN) own Mechanical Turk.

Here’s the full press release:

Aviary Secures $7 Million in Series B Financing Led by Spark Capital

Provider of Creative Application Suite in the Cloud Makes Creation Accessible to All and Advances the Growing Digital Economy

LONG ISLAND, New York (October 26, 2009) – Aviary, Inc., a pioneer of a creative application suite in the cloud, today announced that it has received $7 million in Series B financing led by Spark Capital, with participation from existing investors, including Bezos Expeditions, a personal investment company of Jeff Bezos. With a suite of digital creation and editing software available as an online service, Aviary offers a simple and cost-effective solution for creators of all genres–from graphic design to audio editing – to express their creative talents and participate in the burgeoning market for digital goods. In conjunction with the investment, Mo Koyfman of Spark Capital will be joining Aviary’s board of directors.

“Aviary’s robust suite of online creative tools is fundamentally democratizing digital creation. Whereas the market for digital goods was once reserved exclusively for creators using proprietary desktop software, Aviary is delivering creative applications that allow anyone with a browser to participate,” said Koyfman. “And by doing so in the cloud, Aviary allows for seamless online creation, collaboration, distribution and ultimately monetization previously not possible. The Aviary model has the potential to exponentially increase the number of creators and collaborators contributing to the digital economy.”

Until now, the digital creation market has been largely dominated by desktop software solutions which are often cost prohibitive and involve complicated interfaces. By contrast, Aviary offers a powerful creative toolset in the cloud that enables professional and amateur creators alike to easily create their own digital works. The basic Aviary suite is available for free to users and includes an image editor, vector editor, audio editor and more. Users can also upgrade to the pro suite to gain commercial features such as unlimited private storage, as well as collaboration and community enhancements. For more information, visit http://aviary.com/.

“We are disrupting the status quo by eliminating the long-held barriers to digital creation and giving creators the tools they need to create, market and monetize their vision,” said Avi Muchnick, founder & CEO of Aviary, Inc. “We are extremely excited to have Spark Capital on board. Their broad-ranging internet, software and consumer experience will be a tremendous asset to us in furthering our mission to make creation accessible to creators of all genres.”

Today’s example: Rubicon Project, a Los Angeles-based advertising-optimization start-up, has raised a $9 million C round led by Peacock Equity, the joint venture co-owned by GE Capital and GE’s (GE) NBC Universal. This follows a $13 million equity and debt round the company raised just a few months ago. Rubicon has raised $45 million since its 2007 launch.

CEO Frank Addante, whose company helps publishers manage their relationships with advertising networks, says he’ll use the new cash to acquire other ad-tech start-ups. Earlier this month, Rubicon picked up Others Online, a behavioral targeting company.

Keeping a close eye on all of this activity: Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT), all of which are reportedly looking at ad-tech acquisitions themselves.

A nice, easy exit for Mint, which might have been the next Intuit–had it stayed the course and remained independent. But above all, a savvy move for Intuit (INTU), which has neutralized a growing threat to its Quicken Online and absorbed Mint’s 1.4 million registered users and their $47 billion in assets. Seems that “doesn’t-make-me-scoff-out-loud business plan” that Kara Swisher once noted, worked out quite well for Mint.

Below, Swisher’s January 2008 interview with Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer.

UPDATE: Patzer has confirmed the acquisition from the TechCrunch 50 stage. The price is indeed $170 million.

Yesterday, BoomTown decided to start a new “Twitter Business Plan Count-Up” because the fine folks over at the hot-as-Alabama-in-July start-up were taking too long to do so.

Oh, they’ve been promising for a while to deliver the financial goods, but Twitter still has a devil-may-care attitude toward its lack of revenues.

(Who do they think they are? General Motors?)

My first idea was simple, taking advantage of the excessive hype around Twitter in the media by charging pundits, television anchors, bloggers and anyone else, a small microfee every time they mention Twitter in the vain hope of seeming hip, happening and relevant.

Last night, I was lucky enough to grab drinks with two of Twitter’s major venture investors and board members: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet.

While we had a lively discussion about a lot of stuff, they had just come from a Twitter board meeting, but would tell me bupkis about their money-making ideas.

Thus, I foisted my next one on them: A wearable Twitter-branded device and fleece blanket outfit that vibrates every time you get tweeted.

Bear with me.

First, it links two completely overhyped trends: Twitter and a Snuggie. Enough said.

Second, Snuggies get boring after a few wears–I have one, so I speak from experience. But one that lets you know you are being bombarded by meaningless online chatter in real-time translates to endless fun.

Third, it’s a little naughty. A few days ago, watching “The View,” the group was chattering about Twitter and could not get through a three-minute segment without making wink-wink-nudge-nudge comments about “getting tweeted” or declaring, “Careful or I might twitter you.”

Combined with a Snuggie and vibrating, it’s a multimedia experience everyone can make giggly jokes about.

Lastly, imagine the extensions that are possible of a whole line of Twitter devices. A George Foreman grill that tweets everyone about how much fat you are cooking off your burger. A twit-on-twit-off light switch called the Tweeter.

And, of course, the Chia-Twit.

Today, Twitter’s investors are in rainy San Francisco for a board meeting of the hyped microblogging service, where they will presumably discuss revenue options that the start-up keeps promising are coming soon.

In fact, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said about a month ago in a blog post that “we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.”

Right now, Twitter has no revenues.

No-Biz-like-No-Biz Stone added: “We are still very early in the idea stage and we don’t have anything to share just yet despite a recent surge in speculation. When we do, we’ll be sure to let you know.”

Well, why wait? As with BoomTown’s 100-Day Yahoo (YHOO) Countdown, which was initiated here after former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said he was taking that many days to rethink Yahoo from top to bottom, it’s just about time for a Twitter Count-Up!

Here’s the idea: Because Twitter’s execs have been so poky about coming down from the mountain and delivering this alleged business plan to the waiting masses–I suppose all those investment dollars in the kitty can make one softer in the head–why not come up with some suggestions to get the ball rolling?

Thus, my first idea is simple, taking advantage of the excessive hype around Twitter in the media, which are acting as if being able to tweet 140 characters is the second coming.

The plan would be to charge pundits, television anchors, bloggers, Barbara Walters and anyone else, a small microfee every time they mention Twitter in the vain hope of seeming hip, happening and relevant.

Just imagine the bucks that will roll in once Oprah figures this Twitter thing out and starts to give it the same treatment she has given Skype!

And in case you need reminding about just how obsessed the media are with Twitter, which is still relatively small in comparison to other services in relation to its coverage, let’s roll the hysterical Jon Stewart video on it from earlier this week on “The Daily Show,” below.

Explaining the Twitter phenomenon to Stewart, Samantha Bee tried to put her finger on why the media (and Congress too) were so fixated on it.

Her take: “Because we’re rotting corpses grabbing for any glimmer of relevance, Jon, hoping at some point one of these retarded things will be the vine that can rescue us from this quicksand.”

Monetization of desperation? Ka-ching!