me, 2.0: startup thoughts

me, 2.0: jose nazario beauty and the street

startup thoughts

http://monkey.org/~jose/figs/IMG_1480.jpg

every now and then i start thinking about founding a startup (although i'm not entirely sure about what it would do, i do have business ideas from time to time). so, i went looking for some advice from the web on starting a business.

my startup life covers some interesting time periods in the author's life when he started his own product company ...
stuff like this, specifically "Believe in the impossible", really gets to me. useless information ... ok, how about i believe that magic faries from the north pole will come in and manage my projects to perfection for me just in the nick of time? impossible? but you said to believe in that .. oh, you mean something more serious ... so why didn't you say it?
another guy who quit his day job and formed his own software busines, and many of the lessons he's learning.
the thing i like about the coffee republic story is this quote: "I thought the market was heading that way, so I made a gut instinct decision." backed up by market research and similar sanity, but you get it: go to where the market will be, unless you think you can really win against the established players in an existing market. would you try and sell a new washing machine in this day and age? silly you ...
stories like the founding of PC magazine are the kind of thing i went looking for. "Too late, David and I realized that we might have paired up with the wrong person."
the budding manager in me likes the quote from this fast company article, "The challenge is to find great people and then to inspire and empower them." i'm big on empowering a team of people, instead of having them mired in the day to day crap of trying to do things.
every now and then you hear sage wisdom, and i think this tidbit fits the bill: "The first of the three employees you hire should be the one that will get you closest to generating sales so you can afford to hire the other two." how many software companies that you know of have focused on engineering only to wonder how they'll ever market and sell a product, never mind build something a customer will want?
stories like my smartest mistake are also very telling. "We should have done it in a methodical way -- tested the system, done some forecasting. But our "mistake" also illustrated quite graphically that there was a demand for this service, and that we were the ones to handle it." this is only going to work if you can actually fix the scalability problems, keep customers around to adopt the fixes, and move on to better things ...
and if you need to just read a bunch of stuff (some good, some useless), have a look at AOL's small business website which covers stuff like this.

i'm not leaving my job to start selling teddy bears on ebay, but i do recognize you don't get rich (and hence retire early) by working for someone else ... then again, i also recognize i lack business acumen.

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