Startup Next Door

So you’ve likely noticed I haven’t posted in quite a while. Blogging is hard work, and takes a ridiculous amount of time to write even a short, quality post.

I’ll be back to posting soon, but wanted to share what I’ve been so busy with.

Several months ago, I joined a small team of amazing individuals. The goal of the team was to create a new product that would save online advertising, help the online publishing industry, and most of all, save the consumer from annoying, awful and downright abusive advertising practices.

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The regularly scheduled post will be a little late, as I’m waiting to hear back from Rackspace. So a little diversion…

Great video from This Week in Startups, featuring an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, whose remarks mimic the Startup Next Door philosophy, where your revenues dictate the scale of your business, and how taking other people’s money is a mistake that stifles your “hunger” in building your business profitably and efficiently.

This video begins 47 minutes into the show, where the interview starts, and after a brief history of his programming career, we get to the meat of the interview.

I’m not a member of the IEEE, but I have ambitions that someday I’ll speak with as much distinguished eloquence as these guys.

So here’s my fancy paper:

Abstract

Twitter is a valuable tool for marketing your business, but Twitter as a tool is a meritocracy, whereas only the most interesting of ideas will permeate concentric layers of user influence.

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Although I tend to talk quite a bit about getting your startup done yourself, not all businesses can thrive that way.  A good home-based startup with lots of traffic and revenue will require quite a bit of customer support efforts, and eventually you will need help to keep it running.

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When I was driving to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport today from Abilene, I saw an old building with a large realtor’s sign on it that read "Residential – Commercial – Ranch". That got me thinking – how different is a ranch from a residence or a commercial property? It’s really both. A ranch is where you live and work, with pastures for cattle and fields running with horses or other animals. I live where I work, since I work from home. On further thought, I thought, "I’m a rancher – a rancher of startups."

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In the beginning when the idea of some hot new startup idea is fresh in your mind, but may require considerable resources, you’ll be tempted to borrow money from friends and family. You’ll go on about how they’ll be rich and how the idea is sure to succeed because no one has ever done it before, and there are potentially billions of customers.

But it’s a bad idea – a really bad idea. Why? Because you’re mixing the social contract with a financial contract (even if there’s no physical contract involved).

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I briefly mentioned using an umbrella company in 6 Tips to Picking a Great Company/Product Name, but I want to go a little further in explaining.

Photo by Metro Centric / CC BY 2.0

An umbrella company is one company name that you run all of your startups under. You may have 5 startups, all with different product names and domain names. By placing them all under the same main company name, you unify them in a way that has certain benefits.

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A solo or home-based startup is a wonderful thing when done right. My favorite startups are the ones which are self-sustainable without babysitting them.

Photo by Spider.Dog / CC BY 2.0

When I come up with another idea for a site, I’ll do a good bit of research to make sure it hasn’t been done already, will see how much I’ll need to pay for resources, and basically try to guess if it’s worth the effort. If it’s a really good idea, I’ll put in the many hours to build it, add in a registration and payment system, and leave it for a while and watch as traffic increases. I’ve also been known to advertise using Adwords, Twitter, and friends to get the word out.

A good startup site is a self-serve site: one where you can go on vacation for a week or two and it will take care of itself.

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Many times, startup founders have this plan:

1. Come up with a winning idea
2. Figure out how many people you’ll need to hire to make the idea come to life
3. Figure out how many server and other datacenter resources you’ll need to support millions of users
4. Hire or contract enough to get a prototype
5. Get VC or Angel funding (if you’re lucky)
6. Find office space, hire employees, get it all set up and built
7. Do a private beta
8. Launch it to everyone
9. Make money to pay back the investors
10. Go IPO
11. Sell your company

This is a great model if you’re building the next Google, or Facebook, or Twitter. If you’re expecting 95% of the US to use your service, the above model is the way to go. But it’s a horrible idea for many other much smaller markets.

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I’ll be adding articles that deal with:

• Bootstrap business philosophy
• Startup advice
• Tips for business privacy
• IT advice for the non-techies and experienced IT folks
• Free and cheap services to outsource your work so you can work more efficiently
  

  Ernst Stavro Blofeld

I also plan to feature bootstrapped startups with founder profiles, interviews, and information about these ambitious companies.

Over time as traffic on StartupNextDoor increases, I’ll be adding tools to the site to help people get their startups rolling (see more on Coming Soon). You’ll have to wait and see. If I told you all of my secret tricks, you would build it before me and take all my lovely internet friends away.

Next post: the Startup Next Door philosophy

Art by Nicholas Anderson