Simon Willison's Weblog: leanstartups

Should I pull the plug?

2013-11-24T12:41:00+00:00

My answer to Should I pull the plug? on Quora

Is there any way if turning this in to a recurring revenue product? It's enormously easier to get money from an existing customer (since they already know that your product works for them and is worth the cash) than to sign up a brand new customer.

Building a business takes a long time. If you need 24 sales a week and you've only just made your first sale, it will take you months to get to your break-even point.

That gives you three options:

Give up
Raise money from investors
Find an alternative income source to support yourself

Based on what little information you've provided, it sounds like you should be looking at number 3. Plenty of successful businesses have been built by people as a side-project to their regular income.

Tags: entrepreneurship, startups, quora, leanstartups

What advice would you give to a new technical co-founder at a startup?

2013-08-20T18:41:00+00:00

My answer to What advice would you give to a new technical co-founder at a startup? on Quora

It sounds to me like you'd be better off seeking an engineering role in an existing, relatively mature startup (one with 5-15 engineers) rather than looking to be a technical co-founder of a brand new company. Startup engineering is likely to be pretty different from what you're used to, and there's no better environment to learn than a fast-moving company that already has a small and highly talented group of engineers.

Make sure you pick a company with a great engineering team though!

Tags: software-engineering, startups, quora, leanstartups

Besides MTurk, what are some good resources to use when doing market research for a startup?

2013-08-14T17:38:00+00:00

My answer to Besides MTurk, what are some good resources to use when doing market research for a startup? on Quora

SurveyMonkey and Google both offer services where you can pay to get responses to a survey from a large number of recipients:

SurveyMonkey Audience Google Consumer Surveys

Tags: entrepreneurship, startups, quora, leanstartups

How should I evaluate a potential technical co-founder? What qualities matter most to the business, to investors, to future employees?

2013-08-06T13:26:00+00:00

My answer to How should I evaluate a potential technical co-founder? What qualities matter most to the business, to investors, to future employees? on Quora

Build a small weekend project with them. If they can't build and (more importantly) ship something simple in a couple of days, with you collaborating with them effectively on what it is, how it should work and so on, they aren't a good fit.

Tags: entrepreneurship, startups, quora, leanstartups

What is the inital costs for a tech startup? Do you have any checklist or spreadsheet?

2013-07-16T10:41:00+00:00

My answer to What is the inital costs for a tech startup? Do you have any checklist or spreadsheet? on Quora

Initial costs can be incredibly low - a few bucks for a domain name, $40/month or so for VPS hosting. Things only start to get expensive when either you need to scale up to multiple servers (which means you're doing well) or when you start to pay salaries.

Tags: funding, startups, quora, leanstartups

What's the best platform I can use for a food delivery startup? Shopify? Or should I instead learn to code?

2013-06-11T13:35:00+00:00

My answer to What's the best platform I can use for a food delivery startup? Shopify? Or should I instead learn to code? on Quora

Don't build an e-commerce system as your first programming project - I know engineers with many years of experience who wouldn't trust themselves to write code that handles money.

Instead, go low tech. Prove your business model by running everything by hand using a spreadsheet and a PayPal account. If it works, you can either hire an experienced developer or use the traction you have proved to bring on a technical co-founder to automate your manual process.

Tags: entrepreneurship, startups, web-development, quora, leanstartups, ecommerce