Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005)

Wow, nine years old! I like how some of these ideas have become completely commonplace since then. It's cool that we as a community are progressing.

Also I'm impressed at how some of these ideas are still neglected, or controversial at best. Think about how much of the startup world, leading thinkers like Paul Graham and Sam Altman included, still haven't figured out #10 on this list.

Meaningful stuff always remains such - a classic.

Take the Top 100 Startups since 2005 and explain me, compared to this list, why they were successful.

Take money in six months - and do it with Paypal, rule #7, I think is very accurate to a degree. However, it also depends on if you're doing a media startup or a Saas startup. Most of the bootstrapped businesses I've done were professional services or (a few times) download software. In both cases, we took money but in the media business, it was always indirectly - eg, CJ sales, Adsense, etc.

Rule #10 I've seen tossed out the window too many times, as a consultant, to admit it. Thing is though, when I review my own performance, it's always when well balanced with actual life that I get the most work done, even if I'm putting in a paltry ~50 or less hours per week of work.

As an employer and manager, I've also seen the difference between people's engagement and output at peak and at "overclocked performance," where they put in an extreme amount of overtime. Perhaps I'm missing an instance, but I've yet to see the team win where they gave up everything that meant something in their lives in an effort to somehow make the business better.

Great rules. I'd spread the advice except that I cannot stand that it advices to be greedy.

Greedy is self-serving and it will block things sooner or later.

Way more interesting is to advice Ambition.

Positive ambition.

Possibilities-expanding-for-all kind of ambition.

Subtle you might say. Yet greedy and ambition have different ethos in the long term.

Write article in 2014.

Edit post date.

Instant visionary.

PS. And this article is just a bunch of generic small business advice where grocery store was replaced by web startup.