Get Rich Slow

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890387,00.html

by tortilla • 17 years ago

94 42 17 years ago

pg3• 17 years ago

"Again, this is a get-rich-slowly scheme: the business generates enough money to house and feed its three founders, who live together in an apartment that doubles as their workplace."

That part is a bit misleading. Airbnb happened to cross over into profitability about the time the article was written, but the graph is quite steep.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

The guy who made motormouths should have given it a more generic name. You know, so the site could expand to different products later on.

MotorMouths• 17 years ago

Hi. I am that guy. And we do have some generic offshoots to do other products. But the car thing is our first project, followed by international versions of it. (We're bootstrapping, after all.)

edw5195• 17 years ago

"Hi. I am that guy."

This reminds me of the scene in "Annie Hall" where the guy behind Woody Allen keeps pontifcating about Marshall McLuhan until McLuhan shows up in person to refute him...

  MCLUHAN 
  (To the man in line) 
  I hear-I heard what you were saying.  
  You-you know nothing of my work.  You 
  mean my whole fallacy is wrong.  How you 
  ever got to teach a course in anything is 
  totally amazing.

  ALVY 
  (To the camera) 
  Boy, if life were only like this!

Hey Alvy, it finally is thanks to hacker news. Another reason why I love it here!

tjic2• 17 years ago

A name that says "everything" says nothing.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

Well, pricegrabber could have called themselves carpricegrabber, and that would have been a mistake.

jpwagner• 17 years ago

I'm sorry this was too funny and relevant:

http://www.fazed.org/forum/view/?id=24396&last

smoody• 17 years ago

"How do you get started? All that's required is a great idea for a product that will fill a need in the 21st century."

Wow! So easy! Where do I sign up???? :-)

edw5195• 17 years ago

Nice article, but like many mainstream sources, they leave a big gap in the technical center.

  a. great idea
  b. computer magic
  c. get rich

Their examples of computer magic?

"He visited RentACoder.com and Elance.com sites where you can find software developers."

"they quickly enlisted as their partner a former roommate..., who had some technical skills"

If only it were that simple.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

I'm using an open-source script and part-time Objective-C developer. But yes, I agree with you in general... to become an AAPL/GOOG/MS requires significantly more emphasis on unique and progressive technology (or to move extremely fast). But to be a profitable web company, it's rather quite easy using secondary development resources. Sugar, Inc relies heavily on Drupal if I'm not mistaken.

Alex39175• 17 years ago

"If only it were that simple."

If you are able to spec out how every single screen and interaction works before outsourcing your site then it is that simple. The reason most sites cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a year to design is that entrepreneurs don't force themselves to thrash up front.

I would posit that for the vast majority of non-technical would be web entrepreneurs, the one thing that is keeping them from being successful is that they don't do 100% of the design upfront. If you can actually write a completely unambiguous spec and then have the discipline to not change it at all until after the site launches, no magic is required.

edw5195• 17 years ago

Right. A thorough functional spec would eliminate the "magic" problem and introduce another concern: management. Having the perfect spec and the right talent guarantees nothing. You must still manage every single step of the dev process. Needless to say, this is non-trivial. OP glossed over this part.

I would go even a step further. I think the "management of talent" concern is so non-trivial that, in many cases, it simply doesn't work. The world has plenty of people with the scars to prove this.

For a tech start-up, I'd put a team of quality hackers on the most critical path. Something the rest of the world conveniently seems to forget.

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

This is highly dependent on what kind of startup you're doing, as many of the complexities in building a web app are behind the scenes, and therefore can't be captured solely through a requirements spec and perfect mockups of everything.

rjurney3• 17 years ago

You can only write an exhaustive spec if you know what you want - and no startup, and most software projects in general - have no freakin idea what they want 'up front.'

Thats why BDUF failed and hardly anyone uses it anymore. You have to use a prototype to know what you really want and even the prototype changes as you build it. Its an iterative process, and one that requires an intuitive developer as well as customer contact.

And you can't get that using elance. Building good products requires technical intuition that you can't rent.

pg3• 17 years ago

the one thing that is keeping them from being successful is that they don't do 100% of the design upfront.

No one can, technical or nontechnical. Spec-and-implement doesn't work.

mattmaroon5• 17 years ago

It pretty much is that simple. I've had solid success that way multiple times. I once elanced a site that grew to making 5 figures monthly. I know a number of other people who've had even more success than me with it.

The thing is, doing dev in house may have a lot of advantages for many types of startups. But it is entirely possible to come up with a spec, get a mediocre quality (but functional) programming job done to meet it, and then launch it and it takes off. It's even possible to then have your contractors evolve it for you.

I wouldn't say it's optimal by any means, and I much prefer doing stuff in house, at least for what I'm doing these days. The number of startups who succeed by changing courses radically is large, and that's harder to do with the outsourcing model. But that doesn't mean it can't work.

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

I once elanced a site that grew to making 5 figures monthly. I know a number of other people who've had even more success than me with it.

I'd love to hear more about this :)

webwright• 17 years ago

+1 for Matt's comment-- for a lot of businesses, the fundamental problem (or at least the first problem that you need to solve) isn't a technical one. Famous example: Digg. Famous example #2: TechCrunch (or any content play, really).

I know of a guy who is minting money doing long-tail adwords for car buying phrases, collecting contact information of the people who click on the ads, and selling that contact info to car dealerships for $20 per. It's not evil-- the pitch is: "enter your contact info any we'll get you three quotes from local dealers".

Bang, no impressive technology required (to prove the initial theory).

ph0rque• 17 years ago

> It almost goes without saying that many more start-ups fail than succeed.

When will this myth finally be put to rest?

pg3• 17 years ago

It's not a myth. I would be happy if the success rate for YC's investments was over 1/3.

bd• 17 years ago

"When we raised our first Union Square Ventures fund, I told prospective investors to expect 1/3 of our investments to fail. I always like the 1/3 rule, which is that 1/3 of the investments will fail, 1/3 will under-perform expectations, and 1/3 will meet expectations."

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/11/failure_rates_i.h...

tjic2• 17 years ago

> How do you get started? All that's required is a great idea for a product

Harrumph.

brianculler• 17 years ago

I love how articles like this give the general public the perception that software development is akin to getting something heavy off of a tall shelf. Its okay if YOU can't do it, just find someone tall to do it for you, and viola, you'll make a million dollars.

Ardit20• 17 years ago

These days you'd do best if your idea either makes people money or saves them money

You might do even better if you save them time, or perhaps fill their time with entertainment, or maybe fill their need for belonging, or self esteem, etc. Money is not everything, perhaps money in fact is nothing.

Get Rich Slow

Related Stories