How to Build a Web Startup

Steve Blank has another distillation of the startup process.  I love this stuff!  It's like popcorn.

Business model development

The NY Times just published a fascinating article on a guy who sold reviews for ebooks on Amazon, B&N, and other venues.  It didn't last long (goes against Amazon's ToS) but at its peak he was drawing $28,000 a month.

I love reading about business hacks like that.

Here's an exercise for the reader (and for me, should I ever get the time) - design the business processes for that business, including any interface code for the various roles (reviewer, author, etc.) and the interface code to Amazon for submission and tracking of reviews.  (That latter should be done with Javascript in the reviewer's own browser.)

It should be brain dead easy to design and iterate a business of this nature.  Less than a day, at most, between idea and execution.  That's my goal.

Update: just realized I saw the same story in an NLP context last week: textual analysis to determine whether a review is false or not, with the same usual counterintuitive linguistic markers.

Adapting price points for SaaS

Patrick Mackenzie again, this time with an article about adapting price points in software as a service.  He's all about the autostartup.

Thoughtbot playbook

A fantastic run-down of the elements of a small technology business, with (thoughtbot's) current best-practice solutions.  Wow!

Virtual receptionists

Another component of a minimalist company: the virtual receptionist.  I'm currently researching solutions, but essentially the idea is to have a human answer the phone during business hours, talk to callers, and route calls.  Prices vary widely.

Google Event Tracking

Huh. Google Analytics also supports JavaScript event tracking. Fascinating.

Feedback models of big data usage

Interesting article at O'Reilly on modeling the use of data in companies. Feedback being good.

How startups succeed

Good article. tl;dr:

• Fire lots of bullets, not cannonballs (MVPs again)
• Fanatic devotion to performance goals even when times are hard
• Productive paranoia: cash in the bank, reduce risk whenever possible, anticipate killer strikes
• Don't bet on luck. Bet on being good.
• Seize opportunity when it arises.

Questions for startups

Here's a funny little look at VC questions by a Croatian startup. Toss it into the slushpile.

Startup escape path

Swombat again. Toss it kind of into the "procedural" pile.

Business management

A really handy list of things startup guys shouldn't worry about.

B2Brev

B2B tool reviews by startups. Nice idea! Goldmine of component information.

Unbounce: component and target

Unbounce is a quick way to build landing pages for pre-startups or other purposes.

Fast test for startup ideas

Some of the pieces of this procedure could be automated. Maybe all of it, essentially...

Marketing one product under two names

Another little technique for company construction.

Dissection of a viral launch

Interesting data-packed post about viral marketing.

Startup tools

A fantastic curated list of startup tools.

Startup::Declarative

OK, so where I want to go with Startup::Declarative is to paint a picture of an entire business, then allow the script to suggest things that have to be found out, planned, done, etc. Business processes, in other words.

To that end: the Process Classification Framework of the APQC. Also, open standards benchmarking assessments. These also suggest a long list of metrics and figures to be collected for a given business.

Startup::Declarative needs to be able to describe systems. The idea of System::Declarative will be to encapsulate a semantic description of various components that fit into a system. It could also define deployment, makefiles, whatever. The semantics of what exactly a "system" is are pretty vague.

Business model canvas

Another something that's been popular. Might be overkill to softwarize it, but ... it's part of the semantics of startups.

Startup::Declarative

Ha. Just a thought: a declarative language describing the structure of a startup company. It would hook into workflow, maybe a site description language ... ??? 3. Profit.