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I'm stoked to read these opening phrases: "...The founding team is very small, often one technical person. In some cases ... hacking something together because

I'm stoked to read these opening phrases: "...The founding team is very small, often one technical person. In some cases ... hacking something together because she needs this thing to exist ... They are slowly and deliberately building small communities or early customers. Some are even making money. In fact, a few of these startups are profitable (in the ramen sense)." ...because they read exactly like a case-study for what I've been experiencing with my project[0] over the past 12 months, and have found very hard to explain to people. It's really nice to have a rosy outlook beyond "Hey that's neat, now you can go do a real startup!" [0] Open Exchange Rates (https://openexchangerates.org https://openexchangerates.org)

corford 14y ago
Another "2013 start up" guy here on the march towards a first public release and it really does read like a case-study. He's beautifully articulated the philosophy I've adopted to get from light bulb moment to something real and the resulting experiences over the last year. Also, congrats on openexchangerates.org ! Idea's great and deliciously simple, the site is lovely and the API looks snappy and clean. By sheer serendipity my project has a major requirement for exchange rate data so I'll be getting my hands dirty with your API now I know you exist :)
- josscrowcroft 14y ago
  That sounds awesome, best of luck with the release. And cheers for the complements, hope you enjoy using it!
- gfodor 14y ago
  raises hand me too. I'm way too honest to call what I'm doing "a startup." But I am spending my own money on it, and I am working on it exclusively. The article makes the point but it should be re-emphasized: the tools a capable individual has at their disposal now to build software is, for lack of a better way to describe it, completely insane. I'm revisiting AWS's offerings as a solo person now after working for a larger company for a few years and it's mindblowing what's there. And then there's stuff like github, mixpanel, new relic, and so on, all of which offer starting tiers that are free or absurdly cheap. I can buy tools to do design work in the App Store today for tens of dollars which just a few short years ago would have required a sales call and a 4-figure purchase order. Having done a "real startup" three years ago I look around now and realize a lot of the hard operational stuff I was wrangling with back then has basically been commoditized and can be paid for as a service that scales linearly up with profits. It's nuts. My focus is this: take advantage of this massive leverage to get as many experiments going as fast as I can. Invest the time to build domain specific components (not devops crap that I can now pay for) so that I can quickly create a series of products/experiments around a similar theme quickly while I try to find something that clicks. Keep costs low and charge for the product, keeping a close eye on operating margins. (People paying for something is the strongest signal that you've found something interesting, after all.)

corford 14y ago

Another "2013 start up" guy here on the march towards a first public release and it really does read like a case-study. He's beautifully articulated the philosophy I've adopted to get from light bulb moment to something real and the resulting experiences over the last year. Also, congrats on openexchangerates.org ! Idea's great and deliciously simple, the site is lovely and the API looks snappy and clean. By sheer serendipity my project has a major requirement for exchange rate data so I'll be getting my hands dirty with your API now I know you exist :)

josscrowcroft 14y ago
That sounds awesome, best of luck with the release. And cheers for the complements, hope you enjoy using it!
gfodor 14y ago
raises hand me too. I'm way too honest to call what I'm doing "a startup." But I am spending my own money on it, and I am working on it exclusively. The article makes the point but it should be re-emphasized: the tools a capable individual has at their disposal now to build software is, for lack of a better way to describe it, completely insane. I'm revisiting AWS's offerings as a solo person now after working for a larger company for a few years and it's mindblowing what's there. And then there's stuff like github, mixpanel, new relic, and so on, all of which offer starting tiers that are free or absurdly cheap. I can buy tools to do design work in the App Store today for tens of dollars which just a few short years ago would have required a sales call and a 4-figure purchase order. Having done a "real startup" three years ago I look around now and realize a lot of the hard operational stuff I was wrangling with back then has basically been commoditized and can be paid for as a service that scales linearly up with profits. It's nuts. My focus is this: take advantage of this massive leverage to get as many experiments going as fast as I can. Invest the time to build domain specific components (not devops crap that I can now pay for) so that I can quickly create a series of products/experiments around a similar theme quickly while I try to find something that clicks. Keep costs low and charge for the product, keeping a close eye on operating margins. (People paying for something is the strongest signal that you've found something interesting, after all.)