Startup Next Door

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…

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Our first Startup Next Door interview features Earndit and its founders, Andres Moran and Harry Kautzman II.  Earndit is a site that rewards you for exercising – specifically runs, walks, jogging, and bicycling.  Here’s a listing of current rewards.

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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.

From This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis interviewing Jason Nazar from Doctstoc.com, the question came from a caller about finding a technical co-founder.

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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.

Nowadays, PCI Compliance is the boss.  If you store or transmit credit card information in your organization or site, you will have to conform to the PCI DSS rules in order to do business.

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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.

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I posted an update to one of the most popular articles, “The Benefits of an Umbrella Company” based on correspondence with a reader.  The update is at the bottom.

OK, So GooberBlitz is not a real startup, and a $20.45 round of funding isn’t likely to make TechCrunch.  TechCrunch reports on startups and businesses in the Web 2.0 space that are dealing with large VC and angel funding. TechCrunch rarely reports on bootstrap startups unless they are doing something exceptional.

That’s a problem!  Where can the home-grown startups go to share the good news on what they are doing?

Let StartupNextDoor be the TechCrunch for the home-based/lean/bootstrapped startups!

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As I mentioned before, my bias for Linux comes from me being cheap.  And since it’s my responsibility to provide free and low-cost options for you to build your business, I’m sticking with it.

If you have VC or angel funding, you can spend money without regard for current or future costs.  Lucky you.

If you’re building your business on a shoestring, free is great.  But you don’t want free stuff that will cost you an arm and a leg later.

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If you read my last post about servers, you may be wondering how much this is going to cost to get a server.  Don’t worry.  It’s not as expensive as it once was.  Let’s go over the options.

Why can’t I just run my startup on my own computer?

It’s a noble thought, and you wouldn’t be the first to think it.  First of all, your ISP is not going to approve of you running a web server on their network.  Second, your IP address at your home will change from time to time.  If it does, your site will be down because your domain (www address) will be pointing to the old address.  There are ways around that but just don’t.

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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.