Business 2.0 needs to “get real”
June 8, 2006
David at 37signals wrote a great post titled, “How to shoot a bullet through your startup” as a response to Business 2.0’s article titled, “How to build a Bulletproof Startup.“Â He recommends, “Do exactly the opposite of what Business 2.0 tells you to.”
Ironically, Business 2.0 is one revision behind the rest of the world when it comes to web application startups. The guys at Business 3.0 might not advice you to as their predecessors at the 2.0 version did:
- Order a T-1 and an enterprise-strength email system
- Hire locally, not globally
- Plan to invest $20MM before break-even
- Hire 20 employees before you launch
David calls these tidbits from the 2.0 boys “silly” and I must agree. What should startups do instead? Where do I start? I suggest start working on your idea at night and on the weekends.   Read Getting Real: The book. Get something up and running quickly. Start a blog and start talking about what you are doing - avoid the stealth startup thing. Find a partner who can do what you can’t do. Don’t limit yourself to your home town, find help anywhere in the world. Don’t buy anything you don’t absolutely need (you can rent a server on a month-to-month basis for less than $100). Don’t raise any money until you are making enough to pay your salary and your bills.
The point? To borrow a phrase: GET REAL! You don’t need to raise money to build a really cool application - just start building. We built Architel for $20,000 in cash - today it is a multi-million dollar business. We kept our day jobs while we built it up enough to support our salaries. Now we use available cash to build new companies like Weblogs Work, Big in Japan and SimpleTicket - we never took a dime of outside money. Was it tough? Yep, but not any harder than running a $20MM venture backed startup like LayerOne.
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I agree that you should ‘just start building’, but I thought it was a decent article for the not-so-business saavy.