The Startup Toolkit - for founders in search of a business model. Startups.com | Your Business. Your Questions. 36 Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More! - ReadWriteWeb. This is a collection of startup tips covering software engineering, infrastructure, PR, conferences, legal and finance. They describe best practices for an early-stage startup. We hope that you will find these tips useful, but also please remember that they are based on subjective experiences and not all of them will be applicable to your company. These tips originally appeared as separate posts on the BlueBlog, the blog of AdaptiveBlue. [Ed: Alex Iskold is founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, as well as being a feature writer for RWW.] Since the posts were quite popular, we decided to share them with the ReadWriteWeb audience during the holiday season. 8 Software Engineering Tips for Startups Since software is at the heart of every modern startup it needs to be elegant, simple and agile.
Tip 0: You must have code Working code proves that a system is possible, and it also proves that the team can build the system. Tip 1: You must have a technical co-founder Tip 6: Cultivate an agile culture. Bare Naked App. In the box » Blog Archive » Open Source and Business: a Precarious Partnership. The business world has thoroughly embraced, by some definition of “embraced”, Free and Open Source software. No longer is it the sole province of the barefooted ideologues, MIT AI lab vagabonds, or bearded Berkeley beatniks. The biggest businesses in the world now have an Open Source deployment plan. Even Microsoft, the historical protagonist in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) story, has begun making vaguely conciliatory gestures towards the community alongside its traditional FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) and Embrace and Extend tactics, because their biggest customers have started demanding better interoperability, better standards compliance, and more transparency: features that are core beliefs of the FOSS world.
So, big money has come to FOSS, but so far, the majority of big winners have been traditionally proprietary vendors adding FOSS solutions to their portfolio. There are a few success stories from pure play OSS companies. Here’s why: Pick a popular project. How 9 Tech Companies Lost 2 Billion Dollars. To an outsider looking in, venture capitalists may look like the cavalry of the gravy train. Images come to mind of handsome men in sharp looking suits, swooping in on helicopters with briefcases full of money for people like us to follow our dreams.
But to the insider who has actually worked in those fields, venture capitalists are just that. Capitalists. They are businessmen whose jobs, just like any other businessman, are to make money. And like anyone else, they are capable of mistakes. Webvan -- Webvan started as a reasonably sensible idea, "A Super Market that Delivers! " Pets.com -- Started by Greg McLemore then bought by venture cap firm Hummer Winblad and executive Julie Wainwright, Pets.com was proof that it takes more than a "money is no object" marketing campaign to save you. Kozmo.com -- A great idea poorly executed. Flooz.com -- Why spend dollars when you can use the internet's own new currency, "Flooz! " MVP.com -- Your online sports equipment store! How To Market Your Startup Offline. So you have been on the front page of Digg, you have been a Stumble Upon Top Pick and the blogospere buzz machine has blessed you with enough ink to make Gutenberg cry.
Still, your neighbors still doesn’t have any idea what it is that you are doing coding in your den all night long. In fact, he’s pretty sure that you’re some kind of terrorist. Once you decide to expand your business beyond the bounds of early adopters, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. This will be a brief rundown of most of the important ones. Keep It Simple The best way to get real people to use your product is to tell them about it. Remember that most people do not have the same knowledge of “collobrative, crowdsourcing designed to leverage your social graph” that the average internet entrepreneurs does. Notice that I said useful “concept”. Use Your Community No, I am not talking about your social network on Facebook.
The Mainstream Web Mainstream Media Consider Advertising The point? Web 2.0 Roundup. The Future of Web Startups. October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very expensive and made in small quantities.
Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways. Computers are a familiar example. This pattern is very old. Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. 1. So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them.
Even that threshold is getting lower, as people watch others take the plunge and survive. Starting a startup is hard, but having a 9 to 5 job is hard too, and in some ways a worse kind of hard. 2. Some investors will still want to cook up their own deal terms. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Creating a web app. This is the second post in our series on how to run a startup and develop a product. In part one, How To Bootstrap Your Startup, we outlined the process of bootstrapping your company into existence. In this post, we show you how to go from idea to specified product. By the end of it, youÄôll know how to build a mock-up of your business idea and write the most important document youÄôll write for the company: your functional specification. For a simple system the process outlined in this post should take you a month. For a complex build, there will be a lot more research and your mock-up and functional specification will be big - so budget 3 months of full-time work.
A Word on Strategy Every good business begins with a solid understanding of the proposition and business plan - in short, your strategy. From Strategy to Development Whether you are out-sourcing or developing in-house there are two ways to build a system: Your mock-up The Functional Specification A Word on AJAX Conclusion. Business of Software Blog: Start a software company or work in a bar? The Micro ISV dream is that of quitting your day job and setting up your own one-man business. Instead of slaving away to make other people rich you can leave your cubicle behind, spend a few hours a day with some light coding and relax while the money rolls in. But is this possible? Can you afford to leave your job? Or should you get a job in a bar instead to get that extra income? A handful of Micro ISVs are extremely successful. A Micro ISV can sell more than $50,000 a month. These rare successes skew the numbers for the majority of Micro ISVs though.
I ran a survey on the Joel on Software forums a couple of weeks ago. 96 people replied. The definition of Micro ISV is loose. As you can see, most Micro ISVs are a single person. The average (mean) number of downloads or trials / per month is over 3,000. Although downloads and trials are important, it’s sales that really count. Actually, it’s not sales that really count. A lot of people earn nothing at all. So what’s the conclusion? Part II: The Python discovery and the early grind « Stormpulse Blog. The previous post left off with Stormpulse having been cobbled together from a very large text file and a few lines of PHP for creating XML. It was shortly after this that the project went in to its slowest period of development.
From late 2004 to early 2005, I was working full-time as a software developer at a medium-sized private company in Chicago, the hurricane season had ended, and I still didn’t have any idea that it would ever see the light of day (most of my solo projects don’t). But then, through a friend, I was introduced to a somewhat uncommon programming language called Python.
I had heard of it before through a co-worker, but, as is so often the case when a programmer encounters a new programming language, aversion set in, and I rationalized that I didn’t need that silly-sounding language. I was what Paul Graham would call a true Blub programmer (from his essay Beating the Averages): Now the data was interactive, responsive—fun! Like this: Like Loading... By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09. Because of Truemors, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.” 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not). 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it.
Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt. 7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press. $4,500. I recently saw a presentation called Meet Henry and loved it, so I asked its creators, Ethos3 Communications, to help me create a presentation based on these experiences. As part of the growing world of Truemors, there are two Truemors add-ons to announce: Trickler is a standalone application that provides a ticker-tape interface to Truemors.
Here’s the bottom line: Whether Truemors succeeds or not, I learned a helluva lot. College-Startup: Entrepreneurship, blogging, and college. How to Get Rich Programming. I originally discovered the fiendishly addictive Tower Defense as a multiplayer game modification for Warcraft III. It's a cooperative game mode where you, and a few other players, are presented with a simple maze. A group of monsters appear at the entrance and trudge methodically toward the exit. Your goal is to destroy the monsters before they reach the exit by constructing attack towers along the borders of the maze.
As you kill monsters, you gain cash, which you use to purchase more powerful attack towers and upgrades for your existing towers. The monsters keep increasing in power each wave, but if you're clever, you might be able to survive all the waves and reach the end. I can't explain exactly what makes Tower Defense so addictive, but man, is it ever. I suppose it was inevitable that this new, addictive Tower Defense game mode would jump from the select audience of gamers with gaming-class PCs to simpler Flash implementations everyone can enjoy.
7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail. A few ideas about why some of the web apps out there fail. Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail I’m not one to believe that we’re in a Bubble 2.0 or anything like that (aren’t we always bubbular?) , but here are a few ideas about why some of the web apps out there fail. Focus on social instead of personal. OpenCoffee Club. Referral Marketing System for Small Business | PromoterForce - where everyone wins. The Dangers of Moonlighting - Found+READ. Back in January 2007 while taking a shower I thought up the idea of my startup. ;) I’m a business major, but I can’t write a single line of code. I knew I’d also need someone I to help with marketing and administrative parts and since my budget was nearly nonexistent, these would have to be people I could trust, and who’d be willing to take sweat equity. I started talking to a few of my friends. It was my 1st mistake. Two of them were already working at other jobs, but I was not willing to spend our tight budget on salaries from day one.
I was able to convince each person to come work with me on the startup in exchange for 24% of the company. By June/July we were working in the garage of one of our cofounders. About the same time a friend at a VC firm introduced me to a new mentor: a 30-year-old with vast internet experience, but most importantly a guy who had “been around the block” and with whom I could really relate on my many levels. Incorporation Master's Guide. MyMicroISV. Startup Essentials - Starting a Business, Entrepreneurial Resources. OnStartups.com - Practical Advice for Software Startups.
Why Startups Condense in America. May 2006 (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.) Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami. A country that wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes these clusters form. I've claimed that the recipe is a great university near a town smart people like. If you set up those conditions within the US, startups will form as inevitably as water droplets condense on a cold piece of metal. It is by no means a lost cause to try to create a silicon valley in another country. 1. For example, I doubt it would be possible to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive features is immigration. A silicon valley has to be a mecca for the smart and the ambitious, and you can't have a mecca if you don't let people into it.
Of course, it's not saying much that America is more open to immigration than Japan. 2. In poor countries, things we take for granted are missing. Volusion E-Commerce Hosting. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. I love to play cards. I've spent many hours sitting around a kitchen table playing pinochle, euchre or spades. But I think my favorite card game is bridge. More specifically, the variant of bridge which fascinates me is called "duplicate". The basic idea of duplicate bridge is that your score is a function of how well you play your cards as compared to how the other teams played the exact same cards. Just to be clear, let me repeat: In duplicate bridge, you are playing the same cards as your opponents. You have 13 cards in your hand, so there are 13 "tricks" available to win. Duplicate bridge is a brutal game. I often wonder what other pursuits would be like if they had to operate under the same rules: Resources and context do not change -- the only variable is the ability of the person managing those resources.
These questions become particularly interesting to me when asked in the field of software product management. Incorporate or Form an LLC with The Company Corporation: Servicing Small Businesses for more than 100 Years.