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An interesting write-up Matt, thank you for that. It validated some of my own observations of how businesses are actually built and although it didn't even get off the landing ground, it was nice to read even as a technical report of what not to do. While I do not have experience of running my own start-up, I have with keen interest seen people build start-ups around me and by far the biggest leading factor to their success is the team. The team is everything. Sure, you can maybe sketch up a decent app and maybe sell it to couple businesses but then what? You'll be over your head with work and maybe hire some of your friends and if things work out well, it could work. But why didn't you hire those great friends then in the beginning? Why didn't you cofound the company together? See there's something about people working cohesively in groups that just outmatches anything that a 1-man team could do. Now I'm generalizing here a little, but the fact of the matter is that alone, without your peers to constantly revalidate, build and improve your business-idea, you'll be miles away from those teams that are actually doing it. And if the idea sucks, you'll just pick another one. It's just that easy. When you have a group of friends who are that driven and capable as you are, it's only matter of time when your start-up actually takes off. There are so many would I say "mediocre" folks running perfectly good companies because they had great co-founders, had those social skills and networks to grow larger and eventually it became self-sustaining. Hmm it's still a bit hard to pinpoint the exact reason why I think it is so. Maybe if I put it in this way: you are creating a machine made of humans. In the heart of it is the dynamo, the moving force. That is what keeps it moving. And even if it would one day be gone for some reason the machine will keep running, by its inertia, for who knows how long. But to build this starting unit, this dynamo. It is what starts this whole process. In this case, sure you made the wrong calls with your tech choices. Understandable. But if you had a good co-founder, or even better a good team, I'm sure you'd have together figured out in no time that this was a dumb way of doing this, and picked up something you knew and were able to execute with quickly. It could have been just jQuery and PHP5 and be just as fine as any new framework (with a massive technical debt waiting, sure) but that alone would have not killed your start-up. |