sonink

Could you please care to elaborate ? Not very sure what that means.

Would like to add Guy's chat with Mike at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/11/how_to_get_in_t.html was spot on in approaching TC.

Mike spells it out in the first two minutes.

Awesome Stuff.

Extremely simple. Very Useful. Usability rocks.

You guys are going to make tons of cash from this.

Debian etch

not really ..check this out .."Once the prototype is ready, IIM Ahmedabad students shall work closely with the teams to develop a sound business plan and get traction for the product."..so finally the business guys will get in and teach a thing or two to the hacker group ;)...sounds like a plan.

Startups are freaking hard - simply because it is very easy to screw up lots of things and any one of those could be easily fatal.

You might already know that startups are hard, but in all liklihoods you won't know what 'hard' means.

Value an experienced startup entrepreneurs advice more than anything you learnt at school, and hunt one down as soon as possible.

The impact of what mark spencer has done single handedly ( afaik he hacked the original version in C by himself over a couple of months) is freaking huge. I would rank his to be the second biggest contribution to open source, just after linux.

I have been personally testament to the havoc that this disruptive piece of code has wreaked in the telecommunications business. I worked as an angel member in my previous startup, where we built software used to handle the call dialling and management in call centres. Also known as a 'dailer',the software has a huge market in India as it is central to operating any call centre. Before we got in, the space was dominated by players like Avaya, who used to lug around with their huge expensive pieces of hardware (used to manage the real time routing and call logging). Asterisk changed all of it and made possible for small startups to enter the fray.

Proprietary and expenseive hardware solutions are now all but extinct in the small to medium call centre space and softwares driven by Asterisk rule the roost. Distributed systems running on Astersisk are now slowly challenging the last bastion of expensive hardware telephony systems - the big call centre market.

Unlike the OS business, free and open source is definitely set on winning this game - and it all began by one hacker wanting to test the limits of some lean, mean and pointer-ridden C code..

isnt this something like instablogs ..http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/18/instablogs-negotiating-...

everyone blogs about successes, but blogs about failures are hard to come by, and that too straight from the horses mouth.

.. best of luck for your next venture

Nutch is good and I would second it, but I would suggest to NOT build a crawler - its not trivial and inadvised in a startup, that is unless your startup is just about building a crawler.

This article is very well written - might not reflect the truth of how everything HAS to be in a startup but definitely reflects how most startups end up being. Also, and as I have been lately figuring out, the reason most startups end up being like this is because most startups have a misplaced understanding on how things are supposed to work.

A lot of them try to do too much or try to compete when they should be ideally figuring out the business.

Good mentorship goes a long way of making the startup work the right way.Getting good mentors who have done startups is really the harder part.

Startups are good for society and hopefully good for the individuals who do them - but they need to be done the right way. Matts article serves as a cautionary tale to every startup entrepreneur. If he describes your startup really well, you are probably doing it the wrong way.

I think it might be a good idea to get a good programmer as an advisor to your startup. Give him a small stake like a percent or two and get him to verify your software outsourcing plans. I think the bigger problem here is the doubt that you will not make it incase you dont have programmers as founders. You might or might not , but that will only depend on you trying and figuring things out - it might be the case that for your domain you absolutely need a programmer on board (or not) - but there is no real way to know as such.

Getting a programmer on board will help you with figuring out things faster than you would otherwise have done - atleast on the programming part.

If They Say No Just Say Next by John Fuhrma

Assuming it is a web startup.

Build a content website on something you consider yourself good at. Try to get users, make money through adsense, put up analytics and test it out. You would learn a ton about how(and what) works on the internet - and possibly be making enough by the time you are ready to quit to bootstrap your startup .

noprocrast works for me big time ..i will be willing to pay sites to implement noprocrast

its fine as long as your business plan is not a plan for you to build your business ..its only purpose is to look good on paper and get the money in....somethings are best use and throw

8.5

The answer to the last question is definitely 50%.

I think what you are trying to do is extremely dangerous. 'Founder' is not just a title, its also a role - that role does not exist in your startup - understand that and let her also know the same. Otherwise you will just be lying to her and both of you will figure out in sometime which could lead to a major disagreements which is the biggest startup killer. If she is willing to take as much risk with as much commitment you can offer her a huge percentage of stocks which is something that she will value as much. Also, incase she thinks that your setup is a good match and understands the extreme difficulty of getting a committed startup team together she shouldnt have a problem with it.

Getting a committed and talented team which can work together is the hardest part of a startup.Everthing else almost always works out. Consider this the biggest opportunity as well as the biggest challenge you face.

i think everyone here assumes hackers means programmers..and also sometime those who build stuff often creatively..the word hacker i guess is much abused by the media to refer to whom most hackers call crackers

design is important ..but not something that will take more than a week to figure out ...i think the only thing that you need is to learn a bit of photoshop (2 days) and read the book "don't make me think"...heck you can even leave photoshop ..just read the book and that should be good enough

If you are into java then I will suggest webharvest...if you want something broader(read generic) and brave enough then you can even try nutch.

Yes, because an idea does not make a business. Its just a starting point of figuring out how to eventually create something useful and build a business around it. You are not really sharing your strategy/plan of how to build a business, because essentially if you dont know it yourself how can you put it down on paper. The hardest part is to create that path of making something useful over an year or so and its not something you know beforehand.

actually I think you are right, however it was also something we were overtly specific about - of trying to build a site which helps make sense of already existing data rather than a community approach to solving things. More on the lines of google search rather than yahoo answers.

I think what you are getting at is that we need something more to engage the user for a longer term to keep him on the site. Definitely interesting, though not sure if it is good from loosing focus point of view.

I have talked to a couple of friends in a similar dillema. My take on the whole thing is that there are two kinds of people:

1. Those trying to find a reason to do a startup.

2. Those trying to find a reason to not do a starup.

"the choice has already been made, it must merely be understood" ...(from the Matrix)

Assuming that you are going after a big hill - I think you need to figure out the following things:

1. Is it a big hill after all - your customers might want something else. If it is not a big hill then figure out what a big hill is and reorient-realign-refactor.

2. If 1.is true then figure out that your value proposition solves that big problem or not. For this you can sit with a target customer and figure that out. If your value proposition is not good enough then figure out what could be a good value proposition.

3. If you are convinced that it is a good value proposition then it is just a question of how you deliver it to the customer. And the most important thing is that you have to be convinced whether it is a good value proposition or not - and if you are then hang in there for as long as it takes and figure out a delivery method.

Having said that, I think the only time you need to call it quits is when you want to - and if you not want then there should be a way to make it fly, you just need to figure out how.

..just my two cents

afaik 1,2 and 5 need to be looked on with pure caution and might be an artifact of the kind of startup (consultancy, which works on contacts and is in general much easier than a product startup)the guy has done rather than a generic rule.

#1. It is hard and takes a lot of persistence

#2. The idea with which a startups starts out with rarely works out - so if its not going to work anyways why does it have to be big and there is little 'rationality' about the idea per se. I would go with guy kawasaki here - try to make meaning - build something useful and everything else will take care of itself.

#5 Having a backup plan is highly questionable. The only way you will get to fighting the devil is by burning the bridge which helps you cross over the deep sea.

A9 is open, though afaik its not good (read big,exhaustive etc.) enough to provide an adequate platform to build something on. Amazon, it seems had their google strategy worked out EC2-S3-A9 though A9 is the weak link which yahoo search can fill.

webharvest ?

The other question is if the guys behind youtube read (and believed) this article - somebody would have been poorer by a billion dollars.

Afaik, its all pretty simple - just create something useful and the money will follow (and stay away from that mba).

Second the fact on laptops - they are indeed ergonomically evil, unless you have a laptop stand with an external keyboard ...but then you might be on a "web 2.0 three month mashup" - in which case it is probably ok , anything longer and youll screw up either your wrists or your neck if not both. If you want to have good food too consider moving your startup to india - it costs around 60$/mnth for your own personal cook.