Important Startup Concepts
There are many, sometimes conflicting, startup business concepts that I'd like to keep in mind over the next while. I'd like to keep a note of them all in one place:
- David Heinemeier Hanson's (DHH) philosophy of providing a service and charging money for it. This is very well expressed in his talk at Startup School '08. Just create an Italian restaurant on the web.
- DHH's concept of Rails developers having a productivity surplus. Using the productivity surplus to learn, re-charge tangentially etc. 10X productivity of some programmers is knowing what to do.
- Clay Shirky's concept of the world wide cognitive surplus. Give people the chance to share and publish besides consuming. Design the social software rewarding good member behaviour, with barriers to participation, and sparing the group from scale.
- Markus Frind, the solo creator of Plenty of Fish, relates that Adsense can make you money if you have a community creating content and your site generates repeat visitors. He suggests the site be simple and fast.
- Embrace open source. Share your work, become the expert, and build on what other open people are doing.
- Agile Development. Described in 37signals's book Getting Real. User driven features.
- Larry Smith (University of Waterloo). Everyone is too busy, you must work diligently to get people's attention.
2009-02-12 20:59:51