Startup Next Door

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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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.

After a discussion with my buddy Harry, I decided that the “privacy” tag and “Private Enterprise” categories were a poor choice.  “Privacy” tends to link minds to privacy policies, identity theft, cookies, etc.  And “Private Enterprise” was too vanilla.

I’ve changed the privacy tag to “stealth”, and changed “Private Enterprise” to “Stealth Startups”.  This should lessen the confusion.

Next post: Cross-startup stealth

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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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’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

I guess so. I’ve started my own web-based business more than once. I’ve succeeded and I’ve failed, but the successes have made the failures worth it.

I’m John Washam. I’m a web programmer, startup junkie, and lifelong friend of the coffee bean.

My startups are different than most. I’m the VC, the chairman, the programmer, the marketing department, the copywriter, everything. No employees, no office space. But I make money because I work hard to create services that people like. With the right business model, some of those people pay me.

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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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