Read/Write Web – 6 Startup Lessons For The Year 2007
A great list of things I need to follow for the startup. Pretty much puts into paragraph form I’ve been thinking about what I need to do for a startup.
One thing that I disagree on is the idea of the small niche market. The example used in this article was a community of Persian cat owners. Even though there might be a thousand people out there interested in such a site, how incredibly difficult would it be to reach them? Where’s the advertising budget on this one? Don’t even bring up “word-of-mouth” advertising… it’s not like you have a small town of Persian cat owners.
My belief is that there are small markets that actually are too small. Prices on hosting and other costs in creating an application is dropping, but who’s going to know about these tiny TINY applications. (Mind you, I’m talking about social networking sites… B2B is another story… which is where I might consider going into…)
I would add this to the list:
- Monetization Where the heck is the money?
YouTube was able to sell for a ridiculous price tag, but they’re still (written in Oct 2006) not that profitable. If they do start advertising pre and post clips, chances are the community that came with that $1.65 billion price tag will start to leave to the likes of dailymotion or metacafe.
I believe that passion to develop the product is the most important thing a startup can have. It’s not always about the money; in fact, it shouldn’t be. It should be to create what the users want, and make the world a better place.
But seriously, someone’s gotta pay for the bandwidth, the coding monkeys… This is why I’m holding off on a lot of my projects until I figure out how to actually monetize on it. And until I learn Ruby on Rails fully. Here’s a lovely reading on the subject.