10 ms·
Your startup is not a startup, it’s just a website.
- stevejabs 14y agoWhat HN and the "startup scene" has taught me for the most part is only that there are a huge number of pretentious CEOs / VCs / Lead Devs who all think they have some unique insiders only membership to startup businesses. A business is a business is a business. It doesn't matter if it's a website, a mobile app or a brick and mortar store. If you are a business that is just starting out... you are a startup. Thank you for putting better words around what I've had on my mind for a long time.
- morisy 14y agoHaving had my own revenue-positive "startup" called a hobby, a toy, a blog and various other diminutions, generally by people who've never managed their own company's budget or, if they have, have blown millions in startup capital, this was great. Whether your company's a startup or not can drive you up semantic walls, when the the focus should (for some people) being on building something of value, whether that value's for shareholders, investors, or just yourself, and to hell with all the labels.
- MicahWedemeyer 14y ago"I managed $ABC million budgets..." always makes me think, "Was it your money? Or were you just dipping into the seemingly endless corporate coffers?" I think working with big corporate budgets negatively trains you for running your own company. You can just throw money at things and if it doesn't work out, no big deal. Drop $80k on a booth at a trade show that didn't result in a single sale? Well, at least you got some good face-time, right? That kind of thing just doesn't fly when you're just starting out on your own. It's much harder to manage a $20k budget and go from $0 to >$0 revenue than it is to manage a $1 million budget that just magically refills year after year.
- dagw 14y agoOr were you just dipping into the seemingly endless corporate coffers At both large companies I've worked at each department had its own budget, and each department head was responsible for that budget. If a manager keeps losing too much money, they get fired, if a department continually fails to turn a profit the department gets closed down. So while it's not the same as a startup it's also not like you have infinite money to throw around without consequence.
- jonathanjaeger 14y agoA startup usually comes with the connotation that you will scale it to some sort of ideal (whether that be revenue, the people or businesses you have an impact on, etc.). A site that pulls in a decent income via advertising is really just a lifestyle business with little chance of scaling. Now if you made a network of these sites or found some other scalable product coming from this site.. then you'd have a startup, no? No one says you have to build a startup though.
- nanijoe 14y ago"A site that pulls in a decent income via advertising is really just a lifestyle business with little chance of scaling" Would that make facebook & google the grand daddies of all lifestyle businesses?
- Pheter 14y agoNo, because they have successfully demonstrated that they don't have "little chance of scaling"
- AznHisoka 14y agoThat that also means Quora, Yahoo, and WebMD are also lifestyle businesses. All rely on advertising. Heck, all are glorified blogs that depend on having as many pageviews as possible.
- morisy 14y agoMerriam-Webster definition of Startup: "a fledgling business enterprise". See a lot of zero revenue businesses that throw around the scale idea as justification for not having a business model, but the older I get the more I believe titles, whether for what your business is or what your role is, matter less than results. What makes the startup world so exciting is its variety outside of the echo chambers: Food truck startups, jewelry startups, services startups. Many of which don't plan on or will never "scale" in a web sense, and then others that will scale in ways the founders couldn't imagine the first year or two out of the gate.
- xpose2000 14y agoI'm with the author on this one. I'd pick a simple blog with millions of pageviews per month than a fledgling start-up idea that is losing money. Is it super sexy? Of course not, but in the end, who cares?
- mrgreenfur 14y agoDo what you want. Build what you want to work on. Bills need to be paid, but ultimately I would rather work on an application that provides needed functionality than on copying and pasting blog posts and negotiating ad deals.
- markbnine 14y agoTrying to define startup these days is like trying to define hacker. The meaning changes, depending on your company. This is a good thing. It signifies a culture shift.
- brlewis 14y agoPG defines a startup as a business with very high growth potential. According to my accountant, the IRS defines a startup as a business activity that is not yet profitable, but you're actively working to make it profitable. By either of these definitions, not every new venture is a startup. This is just semantic. I don't think "not a startup" should be an insult. EDIT: I see from another comment that Merriam-Webster defines start-up as a fledgling business. IMHO this makes the English language a little less rich, since you could just as easily say "new business", but it is what it is.
- sadlyNess 14y agoPG also stresses the importance of creating a new technology in his definition of startup. A startup is a 'Useful infrastructure' previously and wholly 'nonexistent' that 'fills a need' for a population and thus earns revenue. I'm sure I've left something out but this definition helps me sort between startup ideas and content ideas in my head.
- Kique 14y agoThe guy who runs the accelerator program at my university once yelled at me for calling my startup a website when I was explaining it to him. He told me to call it a product or a service and that I should NEVER EVER call it a website - and that "fuck, my 5 year old son can make a shit website". It really made the rest of the phone call awkward since he kept talking down to me and I was being super careful to avoid the W word. Thoughts on his advice? He was the only investor I've ever talked to so just wondering for the future when talking to other investors...
- csallen 14y agoIf you're talking to investors, he's right -- it's better to avoid referring to your company, startup, product, application, etc as a "website".
- rhizome 14y agoSounds like the same kind of MBA talk that has people calling bugs "challenges."
- lubujackson 14y agoHe sounds like an asshole, for one. But maybe there's a point there - if you want to get investment, you should be talking about your business. That means employees, roles, taxes, stock, lawyers, planned growth, goals, etc. The website may be the medium by which you operate, but if someone is to invest in you, they are going to want to see you thinking bigger. Consider it the difference between someone with a corner store and someone wanting to build a new franchise. No one "invests" in a corner store.
- biot 14y agoA website is to a software startup as a bicycle is to a courier. Nobody invests in a bicycle; they invest in a profit-generating courier service. Similarly, nobody invests in a website; they invest in profit-generating online products or services. This guy may have conveyed this lesson in an abrasive manner but it is valuable advice.
- g-garron 14y ago"You are not the CEO, you are the fucking janitor" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4169206 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4169206 As someone said already, it is not how you call your "company" or the position you have in there. The results should be the important thing. The whole thing about Startups, definition, is that every single John Doe, want to say he is a hacker "just because he knows how to code", and want to say he has a startup "just because he has an idea, and a software/site based on it". Well, definitions might be OK, but I agree with you. At the end of the day what really matters is how much money comes into your wallet, it does not matter if you are called "the janitor of the website".
- AznHisoka 14y agoI love this post. People always ask you "Are you doing a startup? A hobby? A side project?". I always respond "I just wanna make revenue, damn it, call it whatever you want". There's this website called MyFitnessPal.com. Has over a million uniques. Run by just 2 guys from their own house. No coverage in TC, VentureBeat, or any startup publications. Yet they probably get more visitors and more revenue (and less employees) than 99% of the startups covered.
- robgough 14y agoI know HN loves anecdotes, but they're a great example for me. As an overweight guy whose relatively open about it (read: happy to discuss my weight and weight-loss difficulties) I'm constantly having this site recommended to me by non-technical non-early-adopters. Figuring out what makes that happen is the magic key to plentiful riches, not so much tech-industry blogs. Of course, positive coverage in the tech press is unlikely to hurt.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoOne data point: a nutritionist at a gym I was using asked me to start using myfitnesspal as a food diary he could monitor. Maybe it's more about their trade press than our own?
- rmc 14y agoNutritionism doesn't exist. Dietician is the real profession. Dietician : Nutritionist :: Dentist : Tooth-i-ologist.
- xanados 14y agoTooth-i-ologist doesn't have its own Wikipedia page. Just because a job title isn't protected by law or regulation, doesn't mean the job title doesn't exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritionist
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI always feel awkward with things like this... I'm more interested in building cool things and making them open source and/or interoperable than I am instantly trying to revenue-ize it. I'm so tired of all of these apps that do the same damn thing with (insert some random useless gimmick) that will never amount to much because they're all competing with each other for critical mass because their products are largely useless without a large-enough network.
- sharkweek 14y agono, but seriously, this will be the best to-do list app ever
- OzzyB 14y agoHey! Doesn't matter if it's a another to-do list as long as you ship!
- paduc 14y agoDon't listen to them OzzyB. Your to-do list app is really going to be revolutionary. ;)
- Dylanlacey 14y agoOnce it ships.
- illicium 14y agoYeah, get this: it syncs across multiple devices. Revolutionary!
- continuations 14y agoWell, it really is different this time. It is a big data local social gamified MVP'd pivoted to-do list built on a distributed paxos consistent lock-free real-time column-based k/v persistent memory grid.
- brador 14y agoAnyone have more info on the gaming site mentioned? From the tone of the article it seems like it's no longer earning, Google slap? The old Adsense ban? Game fell out of popularity?
- milesokeefe 14y agoI would like to know as well. I can't find anything about it on any of his sites.
- brador 14y agoFrom a quick Googling looks like it was a blog covering the club penguin game and riding that popularity wave a few years ago.
- stripper 14y agoI can really relate to this. I have a site that provides a service, does about 175k uniques & 900k pageviews per month and generates revenue from paid accounts ($1k), adsense ($4k) & partnerships ($10k). Do I consider it a startup? Not really. But I don't really consider it to be just a website either. I guess my definition of a startup is an entity that has a team behind it, provides some type of service & could be substantially scaled with funding or revenue.
- itmag 14y agoMind telling us more about your site? :)
- biot 14y agoOne could extrapolate from the username...
- stripper 14y agoI was waiting for that. I'm a longtime HN frequenter and didn't want to post under my real account so I used a username generator and low & behold the first suggestion wasn't taken - what luck... Debated on it's appropriateness but figured I had to use it since it wasn't taken.
- celere 14y agoPaying someone for developing a (IMHO not really fancy and useful) webapp isn't the same thing as leading "real" startup. A "Startup Guy" works on his product 24/7, talking to investors, partners, costumers and much much more...
- ricardobeat 14y agoBoth the OP's and that guy at the conference's attitude is wrong. One demeaning someone's work, the other chasing a ghost. Where did that revenue-generating website go? That said, this might not be the case, but if your work is creating the same value as the standard car salesman (i.e. none), you'll get corresponding respect.
- PeterisP 14y agoA company with a goal of making revenue and dividends is a normal company (or 'a website' in some cases). It may be a large company or a small company, growing or shrinking - but not a startup. A company with a goal of making huge (not 100%, but 100 times) growth is a startup. 100k company aiming to be a 200k company is not a startup; 100m company aiming to be a 200m company is not a startup; 100k company aiming to be a 200m company is a startup; 0$ company aiming to be a 200k company is a startup. IMHO. Does it make sense? P.S. and it is often determined by the actual business ideas. There are some ideas that can grow and scale if everything goes well; and there are some ideas simply that have a market ceiling of, say, a few million even if everything goes perfectly.
- dreamdu5t 14y agoIMHO No, that does not make sense at all. Think about the word "startup." The etymology of the word means, literally, "start up [business]". A new company that has yet to prove itself is a startup. The Merriam-Webster definition is "a fledgling business enterprise." If that's not a startup, then calling what you're referring to "startups" is very counter-intuitive. It's as if I had referred to a recently founded car manufacturer as a "new business" and then subsequently everyone started referring to 20-year-old car manufacturers as "new businesses."
- jamesjguthrie 14y agoA startup is simply a business that is in the first stage of building; i.e. has a product (website and software included in this definition) and hasn't started/has just started making money from it. A 100k company is already a business and not a startup.
- rprasad 14y agoStartups existed before the Valley. They will exist after the Valley. Technology has played a role in some startups, and no role in others. A 100k company aiming to be a 200m company is not a startup, it is an established business hoping to expand...just like every other business.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- neya 14y agoThis trend needs to change. There's too many guys out there running Wordpress blogs on shared hosting plans and/or making Android (or iPhone) apps, just to call it a 'start-up'...my Facebook friends list is full of these guys, calling themselves with ridiculously random titles like CEO/Founder/Co-Founder/MD of <insert-wordpress-blog_or_mobile_app_here> Back in the days, a start-up was something different, something the society looked down, you know...a real challenge (which is why the society looked down). Today, the scenario is like as if its cool to run a Start-up (and fail). X: "Hey dude, I run a startup..howz about you?" Y: "Cool story bro..I runz one too..wanna be my co-founder?" X: "sure thing bro...right away" [now X can call himself a 'Serial Entrepreneur' because he sabotaged his old start-up for a new one]
- freshhawk 14y agoIf they have people reading their wordpress blog or users for their mobile apps then they are already ahead of many of the startups featured here. You might want to look up the No True Scotsman fallacy.
- icebraining 14y agoI think the position is that having users is necessary but not sufficient for being a startup. NTS doesn't apply here, since no one is changing the definition of startup to exclude a counterexample; they simply disagree with it a priori.
- freshhawk 14y agoI couldn't see any concrete distinction between the "bros" in his hypothetical and many things HNers would consider a "real" startup. Maybe he was also attacking the very lean startup people who only have an email collecting landing page, a funny or inflated title and a blog filled with lessons for entrepreneurs when they come from a geek subculture and you are correct. It seemed more like a perfect NTS because of the "bro" references. Reading it again, I could see either interpretation being correct.
- Juuumanji 14y ago
- brudgers 14y agoSomething I wrote on the matter: http://www.kludgecode.com/index.php/startup-in-the-silicon-valley-sense/ http://www.kludgecode.com/index.php/startup-in-the-silicon-v...
- ig1 14y agoWords mean different things to different people. Startup. Ninja. Hacker. There's absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing about word definitions, people treat definitions as axiomatic. People don't logically derive what a word means through etymology or historical usage, they define it as what they understand it to mean. Telling someone that their definition of a word is wrong is like saying their preference for one colour over another is wrong. It's a personal view, accept it and move on.
- icebraining 14y agoEventually, that makes communication impossible. If people are constantly reassigning different values to the same terms, you may have a conversation where each participant is actually discussing something different, and where the conclusions are therefore irrelevant. To give you a current example, take REST. When a service says it has a REST API, it tells me absolutely nothing, since I don't know if they mean REST as in Roy Fielding's dissertation or REST as in "JSON instead of XML and some URL templates". Their ability of communicating with me has been destroyed by people constantly reassigning different definitions to the term.
- freehunter 14y agoHacker is a great one to pick on due to the name of this site. I'm in information security, and when I found a site called "Hacker News", I was expecting a bit more security research, not rockstar ninja bootstrapped VC-seeking programmers talking about Rails and the newest JS framework and how they founded a new startup with an MVP trying to disrupt a larger industry. That's not what hacker means to me. Writing code isn't hacking, it's writing code. The hackers I deal with on a daily basis are either my coworkers doing pentesting or the bad guys I'm paid to keep away from our networks. This is the only time I've complained about it, though. Point being, words are often perverted by groups trying to describe their activities. This is how language works.
- keeptrying 14y agoBoth the author and his critique have different labels for the same thing. Its a non-issue. A startup is company which doesnt have a stable cashflow and is searching for one. Thats about the only difference that really needs to be applied from a taxonomy point of view. Impact is also completely unrelated to the label "startup". Private citizens, companies, NGOs, social communities and even projects-on-the-internet (eg: Linux) have had a huge impact on the world and its hard to say who has had more. Again another inane and useless conversation - who has more impact. First make enough money to attempt to make an impact. Then you can try your hand at actually making an impact.
- andygcook 14y agoThe best definition of a startup that I've heard so far is from Eric Ries's book, the Lean Startup: "An organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty." I think anyone that wants to take a risk and actually create something should be allowed to call themselves at startup. Does it really matter if it's a business, website, startup? At the end of the day, it's pretty easy to tell who is serious and generally talented verses the people who are just hobbiest or not putting their full effort into their businesses.
- alberich 14y agoStartup is about starting a new business isn't it? If your first project was making money, but wasn't a business, with at least a rudimentar business plan, goals, and all the formality involved in doing real business... then maybe it was really just a web site that was making money as a side effect. It looks like people enjoy romanticizing this darker side of starting up a new business. It's not your fault if you don't fail the first time you try :)
- Lambent_Cactus 14y agoCall me old-fashioned, but if you're not making new technology, you're not a start-up, you're a small business. Making a small business is cool, and if your small business happens to be a website, that's cool too. But if all you want is to make a successful small business, and you don't care about technology, you're not really part of my community, and I don't really want you there. I want my community to be people who care about technology first, and business second. People who care only about business and don't care about technology tend to be the kind of people who ruin the companies and the communities I like, where people care about technology first, even if those companies became valuable because they were full of people who cared about technology first.
- rprasad 14y agoAll new businesses are startups, whether they use technology or not. They may not be technology startups, but they are still startups. Indeed, legally, the first year of any business is considered its "startup" year (and possibly longer, in specific situations), and during this time the "startup" is eligible for tax breaks or exemptions under state and federal tax codes. This use of "startup" precedes Silicon Valley.
- btilly 14y agoThe definition of startup that I like is Steve Blank's, a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. By that definition, his website was not a startup. It was a lifestyle business. Note that this definition does not describe startups as inherently good thing. Just inherently different than other types of businesses in many key ways.
- GuiA 14y ago>By that definition, his website was not a startup. It was a lifestyle business. Aren't we just quibbling on semantics here? His website was generating revenue from ads by offering specialized content targeted to a very specific demographic. It's repeatable, it's scalable, and it's very similar to what a bunch of other "startups" do (see: Mahalo, Quora, etc.)
- zio99 14y agoWhat if the website's hosted on Geocities?
- Diamons 14y agohttp://boxngo.tumblr.com/post/29561118300/5-things-startups-do-that-i-hate http://boxngo.tumblr.com/post/29561118300/5-things-startups-... Covering the same thing
- matznerd 14y agoI always felt the same way doing internet marketing stuff. I had fun and was making money, but I didn't consider my company a "startup" because I wasn't really creating any new technology. I think that is kind of the difference...
- reustle 14y agoI mashed this down into a tweet a few weeks ago. :%s/startup/website/gi https://twitter.com/reustle/status/224870973923532800 https://twitter.com/reustle/status/224870973923532800
- Kilimanjaro 14y agoI rather have 10k monthly from a blog than headaches and stress that will give me nothing in return besides telling my friends I am a serial entrepreneur.
- wwwong 14y agoCompletely agree. My favorite 'startup' that's 'just a website', handsdown: Slickdeals. That forum probably pulls in more revenue than 99% of startups.
- jonthn 14y agoI just have a website that sells people websites. What do we call that?
- onedev 14y agoA startup incubator?
- jusben1369 14y agoTrying to follow the logic here. Keep getting stuck. The problem appears to be that folks feel like the term "startup" is abused and watered down to the point of being meaningless. Admitting a self described content aggregator (from one source!) into the club helps out how? I think it's awesome this individual displays the ability to generate $10K in free cash flow per month. (I edited this as it sounded snarky when I read it back) The more you widen the definition the weaker the definition becomes.
- EGreg 14y agoSometimes it's not a website. When you make an app, the App Store really plays a big role in both promoting and selling it. I just wrote about how to get your apps promoted there: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415473 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415473
- lifeguard 14y agoThis article made me think of profitable Internet companies in two categories: 1) content monetizers / producers 2)software projects making apps I think engineers admire apps more than content. But money and fame can be made with either.
- eranation 14y agoActually, a startup doesn't even need a website, or be anything software, a startup is a new company trying to create a new service or product that will bring revenue. No revenue, no company, no startup. Tesla motors is not a startup?
- stevewilhelm 14y agoA startup is a company that has captured a small percentage of the overall market it is attempting to fulfill. For example, I would say Tesla Motors is still a startup. By contrast, I would not consider crranky's Blogspot website a startup because I suspect it has captured most of the small, shrinking market it targets.
- pppggg 14y agoLiterally speaking, if you have "started something up", it is a start-up!
- eliben 14y agoReally, so much revenue from 100K uniques and 1.5M page views a month? I wonder if that's typical or just some kind of Crranky's blog speciality?
- stripper 14y agoIt's possible - see my post towards the bottom of the page.
- spiffytech 14y agoThose figures fit with what I remember about ad revenue. If I remember right, it's normal for around 2% of hits to convert into an ad click. If we pair that with a $0.50 mean earning-per-click (memory and a cursory search of the Internet say this is reasonable), we get: $0.50 * (1.5 million * 2%) = $15,000/mo. That leaves some leeway for Crranky to have worse performance and still hit his quoted $10,000/mo.
- dumbluck 14y agoGood post, even though had a bad experience. I think whether site or startup, it is just a (hopefully informed) crapshoot. In the end, the goals are to be happy, make money, and make a difference. Whether you do that via startup, or other means, doesn't matter. And, if you fail, you (hopefully) learn and can do better next time.
- mrmincent 14y agoSomewhat related- foreign correspondent (a news show in australia) ran a story last night on the new goldrush for people creating apps. Besides the cliché camera work, it seemed to be full of 'founders' who had written a single, sometimes unproven phone app and were talking about getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, and getting acquired for a billion dollars. I'm not sure if you can watch it outside of australia, but it's available here: http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2012/s3572792.htm http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2012/s3572792.htm
- melvinram 14y agoWell it's not as clear cut as the post suggests, though it's clearly stated as an opinion piece so they are entitled to whatever they want to think/believe. The difference I'd like to point out is how scalable and reliable the business model is for generating value (aka money.) For example, I run a web design company that offers custom services and consistently generates revenues each month. However it's not a scalable business. If I got 100x more sales next month, I would need more people and the number of people needed would most likely be a linear function of the number of sales I got. Also, it's not a completely reliable business model in the long run. Compare that with that of Wix.com, which is a DIY website builder software. I would bet that they know that for every X free users, they'll generate $y in add-on sales. If they got 100x more users/customers, they would need more people and resources but likely it would be an logarithmic function. Now if you had a "startup" like Wix without a clear focus on figuring out how to generate revenue, that's just foolish. That wouldn't be a startup. That would be wishful thinking. Basically what I'm saying is that it wouldn't be fair to say that my business that consistently generates $x/month is better than a "startup" that might generate 1/10 of the revenue each month IF they are deliberately trying and succeeding at figuring out an effective, scalable & reliable business model because in year Z, they could be 10x my revenues.
- anovikov 14y agoI would say that a startup is something that generates value (hard to do), not cash flow (which is easy). I had a lot of businesses that generated $10 K+ a month, some without me doing much at all, or working 5-10 hours a week. But they didn't worth a dime, so they weren't startups. I couldn't sell them for any meaningful amount. So is yours.
- vintagius 14y agoAm I the only one who feels that the tech community has robbed the word startup of its true defination. Nowadays its seems that the word startup means a tech or web "something"(dont want to use the word company).From a business POV a startup is anY thing( product or service) at infancy level created with the intention of generating revenue on a continuous basis. It does'nt matter if its small ,"scalable" or not,as long as the Intention is to make money from it and its still young (hence the use of the word START). PS I feel there should be a cut off date as to when you may be regarded as a startup. I see some companies being labelled as startup even though they are like 5 years old.
- rshlo 14y agoIf it makes money it's a business. If it doesn't makes money than it's a problem.