Founder Institute: How To Launch In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000 | Hacker News Reader

Founder Institute: How To Launch In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000

techcrunch.com

74 pointstransburgh20 comments

#3: you don't need $750 for a logo/business cards/letter head...adding those is a piece of cake for designers, you can just request that with your original brief

#8: why do you need to pay to run a survey?

#9: $100 for some sticky notes?

+ he seems to have missed the cost of incorporating

Bizarrely, I've needed letterhead in the past to buy hardware for Delicious. Of course, that was in 2005...

This still happens. I've been asked (and refused) to send certain things on 'official letterheaded' paper. They weren't interested in signatures, just the letterhead.

The only information content is the company registration/tax number and contact details. When I've offered to send the same information by email, including a logo, people usually realise how ridiculous the request is.

Probably still true here and there -- but I would be willing to bet you could get a competent designer on elance to make you business cards and a letterhead and get them printed for far, far less than $750. And that might be the last priority on this list, at least for me.

You mention incorporating and in the TC comments someone mentions legal fees. I watched the video and I thought he was leaning far more towards a minimum viable product than a fully functional site - he doesn't really talk about actually having a proper product much - more of getting to a point where you know if you have a goer or not.

I don't know about in the US but in a lot of places you certainly do not have to incorporate to launch a product, or even to make money from it. I'm pretty sure technically in the United Kingdom and New Zealand (markets I have started businesses in) you can make as much money as you like without ever becoming a business. I'm sure the tax department would find it interesting if you declared 50 million revenue on your personal tax form, but no reason why you can't do it.

You do not need to incorporate anywhere in the US. By default you are a sole practitioner or a partnership. But not incorporating is stupid.

$750 for a logo/business cards/letter head

There may be reasons not to add it to the brief. If the brief is a simple logo then that's a quick way to assess what kinds of things you want from the designer before getting into a longer discussion.

As an aside, what you've listed can be collectively called 'Corporate Identity'. I know at least one designer that works with companies on their corporate identity's and he charges a lot more than $750.

Edit to add:

re: #9. $100 of sticky notes is somewhere between 6000 and 9000 notes (depending on the brand). Even as an approximate figure, $100 seems way off.

Wait. You make and organize 9000 sticky notes?

#8: why do you need to pay to run a survey?

Two things that help speed up surveys are buying targeted traffic and offering a prize as incentive. I got 300 survey responses in 3 days with $75 in Facebook ads and a $25 Amazon gift card

Doesn't offering the incentive get you biased results, by including participants who didn't care that much for your survey's subject in the first place?

Possibly, but it was a chance to win a $25 card, not one for every participant. I still got very good results, much of which I attribute to Facebook ad targeting.

I did understand that it was a chance to win one.

I wonder if it would make sense to do a split (meta) survey, one group gets no incentive, the other an incentive as above: and then compare conversion rates between the groups (where applicable). My intuition is that the first group will be smaller but will have a better conversion rate.

I wasn't worried about conversion rate, just number of responses. I planned to run it for a week but stopped after 3 days. My CPM ended up being 1/3 of what I budgeted per completed survey, again b/c Facebook ad targeting was already so specific. My survey was about trading card games, and I limited it to people interested in Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, etc.

Decent list, though I'm surprised actually building the product isn't on there:

11. Buy a slice, learn Pythyon/Django, and build a MVP. Cost: $20/month and a bunch of all-nighters.

I like #11 but I'd fork it - python/django for a content-centric site or ruby/rails/heroku for a task-centric app - and throw in some jquery for either type. That'll pretty much cover 90% of web app ideas.

That's sweat equity.

Yeah that "build a product" bit always seems to get missed. I have heard many different non-technical start-up want-to-bes blow that off like that was the easy part and they could just get anybody to do it for them for cheap.

Am I the only one who think that it's not really "how to launch" but it's more "how to be ready to pitch your idea"?

(but the points are interesting)

What about the cost of incorporation and getting a Merchant Account?

If you want to meet Adeo Ressi and you live in Europe, check out http://founderconferenceparis.eventbrite.com. That's September 14, and I expect him to cover similar topics to what the TechCrunch article covers.

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