The Niche is Your Friend
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When someone imagines a business idea that launches a startup, many times it’s a “big play” – which means it’s a large idea that will need many people to build, and will likely serve a huge market. Such ideas cost a lot of money. And you’ll either need a lot of up-front invested capital or revenue on the first day to help fund it. And you’ll need to have a certain amount of capacity built-in so that your site isn’t always down.
This is a common problem. There are so many services that are trying to reach a percentage of the market, and the market is usually everyone in the world with a computer or a cell phone. That’s a lot of people.
There is another option…
So you’re a businessperson and you have a great idea but you know nothing of the IT nerd world. Or you’re the nerd but have no business acumen. Here’s a great video segment on finding someone to fill in your partnership.
Back when I did my first startup, we were pretty hardcore about data privacy. We had an overpriced SSL certificate, we encrypted credit cards and other customer data, encoded our PHP code with Zend Encoder, and disallowed SSH connections except from specific IPs. We were in charge of security.
Back when my startups were under the radar, I wanted to display a mailing address on my contact pages, but not my home address, of course. My assumption is that a mailing address gives customers the impression that you have an office somewhere, even though you’re actually working from a folding table in your living room.
