“Be Narrow, Be Tiny”: Don’t Raise Money ! ! !
September 14, 2006
Credit for the first part of the title goes to Evan Williams, CEO of Odeo, the second part from me. If you are building a web application, if you want it to work, you’ve got to make it work without much overhead, that means you can’t have a big team, you can’t have cool chairs, you can’t have cool offices and you can’t quit your day job. Why? Just ask Evan where Odeo went wrong - I suspect money had a lot to do with it (fyi - Odeo is not dead yet, don’t bet against Ev).
GigaGannes reported from the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco today about candid comments from Ev (founder of Blogger which he sold to Google) and current founder and CEO of Odeo (podcasting startup). Read Liz’s post here. Ev wrote a great post a year ago titled, “Ten Rules for Web Startups” where he suggested “Be Narrow, Be Tiny”. Today he admits that he ignored those rules while building Odeo. Here is a list of screw-ups as reported by Liz:
- building too much
- not building for us
- not adjusting fast enough
- raising too much money
- not listening to his gut
Trust me, money is not the solution it is the problem. If you don’t invest much capital it doesn’t hurt when you have to change your model or head in the opposite direction. Take for example our own adventure into web applications, the Big in Japan tools, we thought we could build a bunch of cool tools and build an ad supported or pro-level supported business model. Had we raised outside capital for that model it would have been difficult, to impossible to change to our managed services model (today we build white-lable versions of the applications and sell related licenses and services). It would have been even more difficult to merge our Weblogs Work brand of consulting services into our tool business to create our so-called “social tool and services” company.
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This is a hard concept to stay straight with. It always seems like our perception of success is in line with those things…”cool office, nice chairs” etc.