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Some of my arithmetic is off; I typed
too fast, and it's too late to edit now.
But broadly the lesson remains: 100,000
uniques can yield enough revenue so that
a one person company will be comfortable
financially, i.e., enough to pay the
rent, buy groceries, take a pretty
girl to a movie, and have cash enough for more
servers, and if those servers stay busy,
then he is on his way to more servers and
revenue and, then, hiring. I, too, did mention that there are cases where
have to be in a hurry so that then some equity
funding could be crucial. For the young, inexperienced readers of HN,
I'm sorry: HN is helping them get educated,
and there is a lot on the Internet, e.g.,
at Fred Wilson's AVC.com. But help for the
young or not, the projects VCs are interested
in are exceptional which, we have to expect,
filters out a lot of people for various reasons.
Tough to make a $1 billion; the economy is
not big enough for everyone to make $1 billion. For being slow to market, my approach is to have
done some original research that few others will
want or be able to do, and until I am successful
nearly no one will try to do. Then if I am
successful, they will be too late. But I've
had a long time, e.g., mud wrestling with
Microsoft's software, learning that VCs
don't look at projects anything like I do,
etc., without any significant progress by
competition. A common claim is that any idea
entrepreneur A thinks of some entrepreneur
B thought of before. Of course, this is silly
because among all people who thought of
the idea, there has to be a first person
and, then, for that first person there wasn't anyone before. Again,
that first person is exceptional, as is usually
necessary to make $1 billion. In picking projects, I would recommend
picking one where can do some original
research that few in IT are able to do
and have that research be an 'unfair'
advantage and a technological barrier
to entry. Of the "tons of ways to approach a problem",
I would urge others to pick some ways
that help make the path to success easier.
E.g., now and for a few years, exploit
an 8 core server for $1500. E.g., if
have to be in a mad rush to get to market,
then pick another project. If have much
doubt about 'product-market fit', then
pick a project that right from the beginning
has very little such doubt, e.g., like
a safe, effective, cheap one pill cure for
any cancer. If need a big team long before
revenue enough to pay them, then pick
another project. My project, about to
have all the software needed to go live,
has several simple Web pages, two
more complicated ones, and
two internal server programs with a total
of 24,361 source code lines and
6,615 source code statements.
Not a lot of code. There is a little
more code that runs maybe once a
day in 'batch'. So, it's a one person
project. There is an old piece of advice that
a key to success in research is
good project selection -- similarly
for entrepreneurship. |