how to run an unsuccessful startup

some lessons

practicalities

incorporate $1000 corporationcentre.ca

domain name $10godaddy.com

hosting $10-50/month dreamhost.com

building blocks

idea

back-end developer

designer

integrator

integrator

≠designer

business plan:

is it useful?

LESSONS

get the core right

it will take waaaaaaaaaay

longer

don't fix it with more

fix it with less

THE BIG LESSON:

CLARITY

1. clarity of:PURPOSE

wikipedia: “The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

librivox: "LibriVox volunteers records chapters of books in the public

domain and publish the audio files on the

internet."

collectik: “like mixtapes for

podcasts”

what?

problems:

what is a mixtape?

what is a podcast?

what does it do?

why do I want to use this?

2. clarity of:LANGUAGE

words to avoid:

aggregate

RSS

web 2.0

social software

social network

user-generated content

tagging

mash-up

feeds

dynamically generated

ruby on rails

python

good language rule:

would hugh’s mum understand?

3. clarity of: PARTICIPATION

what does it do for me?

right now I use:

twitter

flickr

del.icio.us

wikitravel

collectik

wikipedia

blogs (x 5)

cursor.org

email (x 7)

linked-in

libirvox

apple help forums

technorati

youtube

vox

… etc.

LESSON:

i don't want another social network.

i want to solve a problem.

if you solve it, you will succeed.

maybe.

hughmcguire.net