Rocket Surgery
Apr 21st, 2008 by Dave
Just found out about a free conference for startups up at Stanford - Startup School ‘08 - and am sorry I missed out on it. While the approach of many startups seems to be focused on getting angel or VC funding, and spend months or years perfecting an application before launch, I think it makes a lot more sense to bootstrap your web startup and focus on creating highly useful apps that visitors can start using right away. Startup costs are ridiculously low - with Google’s AppEngine and Amazon’s EC2 you get scalability for almost nothing; all you really need is a laptop, an internet connection, some skillz, an idea for a web service and some sense of how to monetize it, and you have yourself a business. It doesn’t have to be perfect; as long as a visit to your site is mostly a positive experience; you can iterate to perfection. Offshore / outsource the coding, the QA and the design for ridiculously low rates - so you can focus on what real visitors are actually using - and how you can give them more value. As you iterate, you focus on how real people are using your site. Visitors are willing to give you a break, especially if your service is free. 37Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson has it exactly right - find “peace and contentment in a life that nets you a few hundred thousand bucks a year and leaves you plenty of free time…it isn’t ‘rocket surgery’”. It doesn’t mean you’ll miss out on the IPO lottery; in fact I think that if you focus on making users in your niche really happy with your service, you will be in a much better position to catch the next big wave.