Startup Next Door

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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I’m not going to tell how you should run your business, or how much privacy you should give up. I’ve run both closed and open door businesses, and they both have advantages for  your business.  But since I have quite a bit of experience in keeping my identity hidden when running startups, I thought I would be helpful in assisting you if  you need to keep your venture closed-door.

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When a brick-and-mortar business sets up shop, such as a restaurant or shoe store, they have a business space, employees, a published phone number, and other items that identify the business. As the proprietor on the internet, you expose only what you want to. Depending on the volume and demands of the business, you could be one person or 500. The customer won’t really know unless they can find your financials somewhere. With this comes the choice of how private you want to be.

You have 3 choices as to what kind of privacy filter you’ll have for your business. The one you choose to use is very important, because you’ll need to maintain it. I’ll explain why in a moment.

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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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StartupNextDoor is a site for small business that thinks big.

If you work at a startup that has VC or Angel funding in the millions of dollars, is featured on TechCrunch, has scaled for 500 million monthly page views and is hoping to be the next Facebook/EBay/Craigslist, your company will not be featured here.  Enjoy your nice office space and good luck with that IPO.

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