Super Angel Ron Conway To Would-Be Startups: Don't Quit Your Day Jobs
alleyinsider.com
alleyinsider.com
Keep working until you've saved enough money to live for a year. If you've got a decent IT salary and really learn to tighten your belt, you can do that in 6 months.
- Quit driving and use public transit.
- Never buy anything but generic stuff. Shop at Aldi or somewhere that only sells cheap stuff.
- Get a roommate.
- Eat at home.
- Pack your lunch.
- One beer at the bar instead of three.
- No new toys. No, you don't need an iPhone.
- No impulse purchases. If you didn't go out to get it, you don't buy it.
- No hotels. Need to travel to pitch? Find a friend's couch.
It's disheartening to have a business that's growing, but not fast enough to stop you from hitting the brick wall one year out where you're out of money.
I think you also have to have some real idea for how you're going to make money on the stuff. Even if you don't write a real business plan, sitting down and saying, "Our costs will be about this much. We'll make this much per user. So, we'll need to have this many users in a year of it's a no-go." -- doing that can give you an idea of if your ideas sound really nutty or not.
The brick wall is an important construct; it's an important idea to have there to keep you scared of what happens when the cash runs out ... but in reality, if you've got a stupidly low burn rate, you just do one week of consulting and then live for the next two months off of that.
I know the advice isn't mutually exclusive; but that was a confusing front page the first time I saw it.
However, if you like your current day job, it might not be a bad idea to hold on to it for a while.
Granted, not everyone is happy just to "bake good bread" and that's cool, I'll be the first to cheer you on as you enter the area with Google/MS/Symantec/Digg/Facebook/whoever but on the flip side, don't assume that no one is.
This may be a hard concept for a lot of people to grok in a world addicted to "more" and possibly an unrealistic concept to entertain if you have a big VC expecting X return on their investment in Y amount of time.
But to write off companies that obviously have their own idea of how to proceed and seem to be doing just fine from their point of view is overly myopic on your part.
I am against VC and against big growth, but I am also against continuously boasting about how good you are, as 37signals seems to constantly be doing.
I believe in product companies - they let the quality of their product speak. 37signals product is stagnant and really not that great.
I can see how 37Signals' marketing might rub some people the wrong way, there's a fine line between productive self promotion and "boasting", a line that I think many people who are good at the former may cross from time to time (hasn't everyone felt like smashing DHH square in that pretty boy face of his at one time or another? :P). But however you feel about their approach, you can't deny that they have created a pretty good lifestyle supporting business for themselves and this should be commended IMO.
I use Backpack almost every day and it serves my particular needs very well. So I also don't agree with you that their products are not that great. I think Backpack is awesome, it does what I need it to do and doesn't get in my way. Their products are simple and straight forward for sure, but that's what I like.
I just think it just sounds like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit here. But each to their own I guess.
Those are the real success stories, not people who make their money by giving talks on how to make money.
I think there is a little more to both those companies :-), in any case if there is value in what they are saying that is akin to building something users want.
A lot of the biggest names in computing today started small, didn't take money, and grew organically. The best example is probably Microsoft.