Don't launch a company, launch an experiment

My personal opinion is to make an MVP that has a revenue model from day one, and by releasing early and often grow your product while being paid to do so. If no one buys it, stop. It's not as sexy as a social media home run, but it just might make you some money without VC intervention.

They eventually sold the company to Google for $50MM. Great for them. Where is Aardvark today?

I said it then and I'll say it again- experimentation is for laboratories, not for businesses. At the core of a business is a product or service that people exchange money for because it solves a problem. Too many startups set out with the mission of meeting their founders' needs (ie, quick money and fame) as opposed to any real societal needs. The irony is that if the founders worked from the consumer need backward and took a more long-term approach, their chances of success would likely go up substantially. The Lean Startup Method to me involves some mix of laziness, lack of vision, and giving up on your product and vision prematurely.

The faster your product proves viable, the easier it will be for competitors to rip it off anyway (Groupon, anyone?). You want real, sustained traction? Do the things that others are too lazy or unwilling to do because they are too hard or involve some risk.

I'm not advocating over-engineering, and it is great that development tools have progressed to the point that designers and developers can perform experiments for free while honing their skills. But to put an initial idea out there and let the public bat it around and bastardize it until it has some weird mixture of users and you don't even understand your own product is a path to nowhere. Remember- tools are merely used to complete a task. Let the task dictate the tools, and not the other way around.

I think there is a lot of social stuff going on that leads to a particular service or idea being successful. Its more about trends and social networks than people realize.

There are lots of services which are similar to very popular ones but get little traffic. Its not that their idea isn't good, its just that their service isn't popular.

I'm pretty sure that with the right marketing and social happenstance this could become a popular service and make quite a bit of Google Adwords money.

Which is not to say that the concept of an experiment is not a good one or that people should beat dead horses.

Of course, both approaches have their plusses and minuses.

If you do not know what you want to work on, then test & drop as quickly as possible.

If you know what you want to work on, then my advice is to shift you thinking to 'I am in this for the next 3 years (absolute minimum)'. Commitment changes your decisions from tactical to strategic.

Building a company requires 1 ounce of skills + 4 parts of persistence + 5 parts of patience. Get married to the problem, but be willing to change the proposed solution.