The 20-step program to ramen profitability
1. Hack for 4 months.
2. Set a launch date.
3. Miss launch date.
4. Pick new launch date - tell relevant blogs & forums about new launch date.
5. Miss new launch date, but they still write posts about it.
6. Piss a lot of people off.
7. Put a countdown timer to launch on homepage, no sleeping for the next 3 days.
8. Argue over launching with bugs.
9. Launch anyway - at 3am on a Saturday morning to minimize the support queue.
10. A few tweets & forum comments - suddenly you have 200 signups by 5am
11. And the support queue has about 200 emails as well.
12. Spend the next 3 days trying to keep support queue under 400 emails.
13. Fix bugs.
14. Fix more bugs.
15. Users are placing trades, this is good.
16. User finds trade bug and exploits, now your book is all jacked up.
17. Luckily user is a nice guy and returns the funds. Bug is fixed.
18. Third party service provider that has been hooking you up calls, you're overloading them, they want to get paid now.
19. Another third party service provider calls, they want to get paid too.
20. Book is steady, bugs are few, trades are growing.
Deep breath.