How To Startup!

(not being a programmer)

By Steve Polandhttp://blog.stevepoland.com/about

Don’t devise a Solution to a non-existent Pain

What pains do you or others have?

Here’s 100 web startup ideas: http://bit.ly/100ideas

If you can’t find a competitor, you aren’t looking hard enough.

◦ Twitter = Facebook◦ Facebook = Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, etc◦ YouTube = MetaCafe, Vimeo◦ Google = Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos

Are you worth the switching cost?

◦ Evite has been out-dated since 1996.◦ Founder of Friendster launched competitor in

2006.◦ Socializr couldn’t get the masses to switch.

ASSume nothing! Talk to potential customers, now Talk about your business idea to

everybody! (ok, maybe not directly to your competitor)◦ You have the passion for it. ◦ People won’t steal it. They may think about it for a

second, but tomorrow they won’t. It’ll take 100’s of hours.

◦ Ideas are nothing, Execution is everything.◦ Talking with others will help you refine your

idea.

Will customer #1’s experience be just as good as customer #100,000?◦ See http://bit.ly/1st-user ◦ There has to be value to User #1 and then you’ll

see User #2 come on board, and so forth. ◦ MyBlogLog gave bloggers stats at first — that was

of personal value/utility to them. Later on, MyBlogLog applied all the social networking features that we’ve come to know/love about MyBlogLog — but that was after they had a bunch of users in their system.

◦ Ditto on Delicious.

Can you sell someone on it in 30-seconds?

If not, it’s too complex – you might be making up this “pain” that the person can’t grasp in 30-seconds because they don’t have that “pain point”.

How will you make money?

◦ If advertising or anything else, be realistic with how much you likely can make and how the business would eventually sustain itself.

A ‘Twitter’ story rarely happens.

I prefer making money off Customer #1.◦ Self-funded vs Investors.

I personally start with pencil on paper mockups.

Then I get digital mockups designed (focus on the user-experience / flow).◦ Then a pretty design and style guide.

Mockups cutup into HTML, to give to a programmer to make it actually work.

Finding a programmer is as hard as finding your husband/wife for life It’s potentially a marriage.

NDA signed

RFP (1-2 pages about the project, with a spreadsheet of line items for each page/component of site/app)

Be aware of their questions, it’ll help you gauge how well they “get it”

Project Management software – I use BaseCamp (http://www.basecamphq.com)◦ Manage task lists, milestones, discussions.

I have two weekly meetings with my programmer, and constant IM’ing during week.

I try to keep discussions about functionality in BaseCamp, so we have it archived.

We use Unfuddle (or Github) for version control. Unfuddle has ticketing (nice!)

“If you're not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late.” –Reid Hoffman

Put dates to milestones.

Internal private beta - We just play with it Public private beta - Select people to play with it Public beta - Anyone can play with it

No longer a beta ◦ (Gmail has been beta 5+ years)

Testing, Bugs, Fixes, Feature Requests Listen! Allow users to contact you easily

– put your phone number up, email address, contact form, AIM, etc.◦ Bugs and changes into Unfuddle.◦ Ideas for future features into BaseCamp.

Uservoice.com is great for gathering feedback/input (feature requests) from users.

ClickEgg and Userfly for user experiences.

Contact:◦ Steve Poland◦ http://blog.stevepoland.com/about◦ http://twitter.com/STP

Slides: http://bit.ly/howtostartup