THE WEB STARTUP SUCCESS GUIDE doc

FROM DEVELOPER TO FOUNDER The Web Startup Success Guide BOB WALSH FOREWORD BY JOEL SPOLSKY, CEO OF FOG CREEK SOFTWARE “This book is a fantastic resource for anyone doing a web startup or a software startup.” —JOEL SPOLSKY [...]... desktop application Then along came the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Marc Andreessen Andreessen cowrote the first popular web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, while in college, and then hooked up with a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Jim Clark to found the startup Netscape Communications to popularize the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 Over the next six years the upstart Netscape... wrote this book The Web Startup Success Guide is kind of the Kill Bill Vol II of what it takes to create a successful startup I have written it for all those developers who are ready to step up and create more than just an alternative to programming for money for someone else There’s a whole other story now to be explored and told, one being written by tens of thousands of developers on the Web, on mobile... Although the real story is a lot messier, our story comes to a fork in the road On the high road is Richard Stallman and others who believed that software should be free—free to modify, free to own, free to do what you want with Call this the road that led to Open Source Then there was the other road the people on the first road would call the low road It started with an open letter from a pissed-off developer... all their coding skills, they didn’t really know the first thing about making a business successful Which is OK They’ll learn It’s not that hard The hardest part is realizing that even though you’re making an Internet company, writing the code and getting it to work is only a small part of the effort, and not necessarily the most critical one The business side is just as crucial xi xii Foreword There’s... community while the venture capitalists were licking their dot-com-bust wounds on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto If there was one single event that signaled the start of the current era of software startups, I’d point to the founding of seed-stage funding firm and startup factory Y Combinator in 2005 Paul Graham, one of those Internet millionaires, convinced that the cost of successfully launching startups had... and a web designer who raise $200,000 to build a web app from family, friends, and an angel investor network? That’s definitely a startup So why leave the relatively safe harbors of corporate life or consulting to venture into the global market and launch a startup? Specific motivations are as varied as the people who have them—and people in the startup world tend to be anything but homogeneous A startup. .. a kid in the front row who, I imagine, had just gotten his braces off the week before And for almost two hours straight, these poor kids asked me the most basic questions imaginable about the business of startups Pricing Features Marketing Invoicing They had so many questions I gave them as good a brain dump as I could on each topic They sat raptly and asked intelligent follow-up questions These were... wrote their own software that they swapped in clubs while the established mainframe computer vendors clued into the idea of actually selling their software instead of giving it away These computer kits could have gone the way of Heathkit FM radio kits, except for one thing—with software, they could actually do things like calculate payroll taxes Where was the software to come from? Although the real... e-books, and then created a new podcast (this time my own, The Startup Success Podcast, with the able help of my cohost, Pat Foley) I like startups Startup founders have a dream, a passion, a desire to make something happen, not just to do what others have done But by mid-2007 I had come to realize three things First, there had to be a better way to bootstrap a software business than either to hire... a web app, StartupToDo, that I hope will attract angel funding and the right partners to be a full-fledged startup If you check the blogs, forums such Joel on Software’s Business of Software, and the Association of Shareware Professionals or attend conferences such as the Software Industry Conference in the United States or the European Software Conference, you’ll find microISVs that are living the . software startup. ” —JOEL SPOLSKY