[fivedogit]

By now, everyone is aware that cloud computing (among other recent developments) has drastically reduced the cost of starting a new business, both in time and money. What's not so well known is that this has changed not only how cheaply and quickly businesses can be started, but also how they're started. Rather than draw up an executive summary and business plan, talk to advisors and research the market, it seems like nowadays folks just say "fuck it" and put their foot on the accelerator from day one.

Even those who form a team and raise money are doing this. It's not just the bootstrappers. For instance, I can name 3-4 people in my admittedly tiny sphere who had an idea, raised significant amounts of money, built a product, promptly failed, then pivoted multiple times before running out of cash.

It's as if starting a business has become so easy, that it's easier to just do it and see what happens rather than invest any kind of time and effort in researching the market first. This shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude is spurred along by stories of huge multi-billion-dollar companies being born out of half-assed "so what now?" pivots. (See Twitter.)

In my experience, it's ok to do this once or twice because in your first at-bat, you don't know what you're doing anyway, so stopping to assess a market is just a waste of time. Put a year or two into something, get a feel for how it's done, and if you don't turn into Mark Zuckerberg (home run on first shot), you'll be better prepared to assess the validity of future projects. (That said, the best of my 4 businesses was the first, so there are exceptions.)

While I admire his entrepreneurial spirit, the author of this article (and his partners?) seem to have taken the "shoot first" philosophy a bit too far. 10 startups in 7 years seems extreme to me. The optics of it, from a potential investor's perspective, seem negative, too.

[rtpg]

The best advice I've heard for "shoot first" people is to sell your product before it exists. If you can't convince anybody to give you money on the pitch, then chances are that you won't be able to sell it after it's built either.

Unfortunately this advice doesn't apply well to a lot of consumer, ad-supported startups , but it would apply well to this guy's "modest"(nobody's ever given me $250k for anything) success (GroupScript).

More of argument against consumer startups than against this principle.

[fivedogit]

"Shoot first" is definitely more widespread (and probably has a better chance of working) on the consumer side.

I have done it on the enterprise side, though, and the experience wasn't all bad. I built a face recognition system to spot TV reporters on the air and auto-tweet. It was a "neat"-enough idea that I was able to get 3 TV stations to run pilot programs. In the end, even though it doubled traffic to the TV stations' live streams, it turns out they barely make any money that way and unflattering screen shots irritated the reporters. You can argue that I should have researched harder up front, but if 3 different top-15 TV groups representing 125+ stations were willing to try it out, it wasn't far off. It was close enough to a big score and took so little time (1 year) to iterate, it was worth the try.

[jdawg77]

Mark Zuckerburg was offered multiple millions for his earlier business than Facebook...which was his third, not first, business. And yes, starting a business is in fact very easy. For a variety of reasons, I'm technically on my eleventh business...so three of them, all bootstrapped. The idea of raising money is appealing, as it would potentially mean not having to balance between client custom consulting revenue and working on product in my, "Free time." However, until you launch, prove the market, see real results, etc, it's all just a very nice sounding hypothesis.

[fivedogit]

I stand corrected. I didn't know about his other projects before Facebook. Wikipedia doesn't say anything about being offered multiple millions for a product he'd built, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

To what are you referring?

[dia80]

It seems the rational approach when the cost of "shooting" is of the same order of magnitude as attempting to conduct market research.

Also to take an example from the article how would one accurately assess demand for a 10 language flash gaming site without building it?