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Here's a braindead simple idea for how to get a startup going: 1. Don't hire anyone else until you're making money. I mean, how easy is that? It's not flipping
by ZenoArrow 12y ago
Here's a braindead simple idea for how to get a startup going: 1. Don't hire anyone else until you're making money.
I mean, how easy is that? It's not flipping rocket science.
- hueving 12y agoThat only works if your product requires essentially no capital to develop.
- dragonwriter 12y agoActually, I think "don't hire anyone else" only works if you have very limited labor needs in order to achieve profitability; its almost orthogonal to capital requirements.
- hueving 12y agoHow would you hire someone without capital?
- TheOtherHobbes 12y agoCapital goes on: People Machinery and infrastructure (which may or may not include office space) Sales and marketing It would be very interesting to see if there's a difference in the way successful and failed startups prioritise these different areas. I suspect for tech people dev spend is overrated and marketing spend is underrated - but that's just a hunch with no numbers to support it.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoSee my reply to hueving.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoYou start small and scale up, bootstrap from smaller related projects. For example, if I wanted to be the "next Google" I'd work as a consultant on Apache Solr and Apache Nutch, build up capital, then find a search niche that is not well served but potentially lucrative (fields of science and medicine spring to mind), build a usable proof of concept, sell subscriptions at a cut-price rate (whilst still in beta), then look to hire and scale, then look to expand into new markets after the core product is stable. So you see, even with the largest of corporate ambitions, you're still able to bootstrap on next to nothing.