Greg Giantforte has a different take on starting up a business. His advice is not to first build the mousetrap, but to call a bunch of potential customers. If you have an idea for a business Greg's suggestion is to ask people:
"Would they buy a better mousetrap?"
"How would they use the mousetrap?"
"What features do they want in a mousetrap?"
"How much would they pay for the mousetrap?"
By spending a couple weeks doing market research before developing a product you have a much better idea exactly what customers want and what they would pay. If you don't find enough interest you've only lost a couple weeks, instead of months and thousands of dollars developing the mousetrap.
Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money by Greg Gianforte and Marcus Gibson is a quick read, packed with lots of good ideas.
I have been fascinated by out Paul Graham's thought that cheaper computers means startups are much cheaper. This trend continues to accelerate for example Google recently announced App Engine as a service to reduce operating costs for Web startups.
If you are interested in starting up your own business then check out Bootstrapping Your Business.
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3 comments:
Combine Paul's ideas with starting a family business and you've got an even cheaper combination. I, along with my six siblings, have been homeschooling all my life (I'm a high school senior) and over the past few years I've taken an interest into web design and development. So we decided to start a family business: a website to help homeschoolers find curriculum and books, called Homeschooling Together. I've learned so much about web development that just the learning experience is worth it for me, but if we can help a bunch of homeschoolers find curriculum, and eventually even make a few bucks that would be fantastic. And our costs (other than our time) have been relatively small.
I definitely agree with Paul about "outsourcing development to a more powerful language". I'm using Ruby along with the Ruby on Rails framework that David Heinemeier Hansson (mentioned in Paul's article) created.
"So we decided to start a family business: a website to help homeschoolers find curriculum and books, called Homeschooling Together."
It sounds interesting. I've added my email address. Good luck.
Thanks Henry, we launched last night (I sent off the email this morning). I hope you enjoy the site.
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