If I have a side project pulling in 10K a month, I don't really care if nobody wants to invest. I've already succeeded.
So what if the authors of these project chooses to call them startups. Nobody has a right or the power to decide what is a startup or not.
Especially not some guy with a whiny attitude.
Oh wait a lot of us fail in that regard, don't we?
If you were using traction, I would find more agreement with you. On feature, you can make a lot of startups look like POS.
- twitter is an inputbox where you write some random crap about you
- facebook is a freakin ugly looking profile page
1. If you couldn't tell, those are what facebook and twitter launched as.
2. May be you should be figuring out how to make your "real business" as big as twitter and facebook? Of course, you'd hate that and you'll claim you are happy to be running what you already have. So are the tiny startup dudes you seem to be railing against.
You have a very narrow sense of what constitutes a "real business" or a startup...which is totally okay because it's just semantics. It's just not worth getting bogged down on.
Also, don't forget the biggest hit of this decade(facebook) was a college kid's side project just some years ago. As was twitter. And many others.
Facebook was a weekend project long before it went to raise money. It wasn't merely a weekend project trying to raise money.
Twitter wasn't a college kid's side project. It was developed by Odeo.
Indeed, the "biggest hits of this decade" seem more to be weekend projects that evolve from that, and then seek funding, rather than weekend projects that remain that, and seek funding.
And while his tone does come off somewhat harsh, I think the message is still a good one.
I not only don't want to invest in your little 'startup' but don't ever call me again young mister Zuckerberg.
Also, the quality of a start-up should not be measured against scale potential. How a VC sees the world is deeply influenced by their own goals of 10x returns. A cynic might say that VC's promoting this view do so to produce more fuel for their business model.
I suspect the prior works better but may need some patience. I have a bunch of projects in various stages of completion and now I am working on (enjoying!) something new and hoping to make it useful.
IMO make-something-useful and then bother about business should work better, but then I haven't made much using this approach yet.
Is this actually true? It would seem to me that ads could work for a small, but focused web site, because the ads could be targeted really well.
What about twitter and youtube?
Do you think I could get a tech crunch article out of this?
edit: (I misread the joke, nevermind)
re-edit: (Added support for saving messages..I wonder if twitter would buy this from me for a million dollars?)
The scale of a software business can be anything from "Hello World" to Microsoft. The little one-day "startups" that we see here every day exist in a tiny sliver all the way to the left of that spectrum, near zero. The "Real Business" part is everything to the right, on out to infinity.
The 'realities of business' are not expensive for a sole proprietorship, if you are frugal. At $10/k a month, I could live like a king.
At that point I don't think it would be hard to find an investor (other than the OP) to help out.
A) Borrowed money.
B) Rolling those profits back into the company.
Assuming lead time is less than a year and the profits are already significant both of these options can grow extremely fast. However, just because you can pay someone a reasonable wage to do what you do does not mean it's profitable. It's easy to throw a lot of time and money after a bad idea that only seems to be working.