It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur 2
Joe Kraus says It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur
In this post he asks why it cost $3m to launch Excite and only $100k to launch JotSpot
His conclusion is that it boils down to the following 4 things:
- Hardware is 100X cheaper
- Infrastructure software is free
- Access to Global Labor Markets
- Search Engine Marketing changes everything
I agree with these, but would also like to add these to the equation:
- Simpler services are more successful
- Big is no longer cool
- Better frameworks
Simpler services are more successful
Most new successful services are very simple in reality. Just look at Flickr, Del.icio.us and Backpack. They are all intentionally simple services that do one thing and do it well.
This allows you to focus your development and sales efforts and you need less focus on the foolishnes that I remember was rampant when I was at AltaVista during 1996.
Big is no longer cool
Burn rate used to be cool. Founders of startups used to blag about their monthly increase in staff size (read burn rate). There is no need for this and most people have got the gospel. Most people sucn has 37Signals are infact bragging about how much they can get done on a team of 4 people.
This wanting to be big is actually also one of my Bootstrapping Anti Patterns
Better frameworks
It is a lot easier and quicker now to bring a new service from concept to launch. One of the biggest things helping this is the emergence of new practical web frameworks like Ruby on Rails . This allows single person or tiny teams to incredible things in very short time.
Just look at the Real World Usage in Rails page to see what has happened in less than a year of Rails.
There are other similar frameworks where you could do similar things quickly, but really Rails is one of those economy changing tools that is and will cause a lot of turmoil in the world of web applications.
Conclusion
Joe says that there will be a lot more companies founded on $100k. This is true, but there will be even more self funded bootstrapping startups out there competing with their angel funded breathren.
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True dat! I wrote my little app(similarthings.com) in about 2 months in my spare time after work, about 2x a week. I used Rails and Utilized Basecamp and a Texdrive account. I could have never done this a few years ago.
I used to program in Frontier(used to run Launchpoint.net with it), Zope(used to run Zopesite.com with it) and Python and never was I able to write my own all by my lonesome. Talk about a small team :)
I’m in full agreement. We are in the process of putting together a start up social software business, following similar ideas.
Its interesting just how rapidly things are changing for start ups, even a year ago much of this would not be entirely possible. Rails certainly didn’t exist, technology is becoming cheaper/more accessible and people are understanding that the old models are not necessarily the logical path for building a business.