Mark Fletcher e.day 2007: Startupping 2.0

Startupping 2.0: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Startups Mark Fletcher http:// www.wingedpig.com September 13, 2007

Startup Experience
Founder
ONElist (acquired by Yahoo)
Bloglines (acquired by Ask Jeeves)
Startupping
Advisor
One True Media
Techdirt
Wesabe
Early stage employee
Diba (acquired by Sun Microsystems)
Pixel Media

Kitchen Table Web Business
More and easier capital
Free/low-cost tools, storage, equipment
World wide outsourcing, virtual teams
New business models

In the beginning, you have …
Identified a genuine pain point
A passion for the idea
A business model
Become educated
Another job

Assembling your team
Outsource
Elance
Rent A Coder
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Collaborate using Internet tools
Harness users – extended team members
Hire a lawyer

Building the Service
Be Cheap!!
No office overhead
Free tools
Storage
Rent, don’t buy, servers
Release Early/Release Often (3 Month Rule)
Doesn’t Have to be Perfect
Involve Your Users

The Result of Being Cheap
From Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/12/web_20_is_a_gif.html

The Design
Don’t reinvent the UI
Expose as much content as possible
Show activity on the home page
Do some SEO
Make registration easy (do you even need it?)
Room for ads
Amy Jo Kim’s presentation at Etech - Putting the Fun in Functional: http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm

Raising Money
Get educated on the types of financing
Friends and family
Traditional angels
VC
New funding sources
Y Combinator & Techstars in USA
Seedcamp in Europe
How Much?
Raising Money Takes Time

Marketing
PR is cheapest marketing you can do
Pursue on-line opinion makers
Blogs
Digg & Reddit
Slashdot
Let traditional press find you
Focus on viral aspects and user growth
Get a blog
Social network piggybacking

Partnering
DON’T

The Exit
Do you need one?
ONElist vs Bloglines experience
Don’t sell – be bought
Investment bankers
What they are
Finding/Interviewing them
Negotiating with them
The sad truth about being acquired

Examples
SmugMug
No outside funding
Used Amazon’s S3 to save $1M
iLike
Piggybacked off Facebook
11M users total
7M Facebook users in 5 months

Startup Commandments
Your idea isn't new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that's really the case, you shouldn't be doing your startup.
You will have at least one catastrophe every three months.
If you don't pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time.
Abject Terror. Overwhelming Joy. Monstrous Greed. Embrace and harness these emotions you must.
You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

Resources
Google Docs and Spreadsheets
Skype for chatrooms
37 Signals Backpack/Campfire
Yahoo Groups
Elance, Rent A Coder, Amazon Mechanical Turk
Startupping
Y! Combinator News
Open Coffees, Meetups
Google Analytics for web metrics
Feedburner for feed metrics

Go forth, and may the best t-shirt win!
Join the conversation at
http:// www.startupping.com

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Mark Fletcher e.day 2007: Startupping 2.0

by Emerce on Sep 17, 2007

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