What you really need to do is stop talking and start working.

This doesn’t mean you’ll fail. It means you need to be smarter and harder working, and surround yourself with extraordinary people.

mm: Herr Veith, Deutschland erlebt derzeit so etwas wie eine kleine Gründerwelle. Überrascht Sie diese Entwicklung?

ANZEIGE
Christian Veith: Eigentlich nicht. Wir beobachten schon seit einiger Zeit, dass eine neue Generation von Unternehmensgründern heranwächst. Viele junge Leute glauben an ihre Ideen, setzen diese beharrlich durch und haben weniger Angst vorm Scheitern als ihre Vorgänger.

mm: Ist die Selbstständigkeit heute ein hohes Gut?

Veith: Viele der Bewerber, die sich bei BCG vorstellen, tragen schon Ideen für Unternehmensgründungen in sich. Zudem bringen sie Risikobereitschaft mit, Zuversicht und Ausdauer. Also wichtige Unternehmer-Eigenschaften und Unternehmer-Tugenden. Es ist sicherlich kein Zufall, dass bemerkenswert viele unserer Alumni Unternehmensgründer sind.
...
Veith: Ja, die Mentalität hat sich durchaus geändert. Wenn etwas nicht im ersten Anlauf gelingt, dann ist das heute kein Stigma mehr für den Rest des Lebens. Unter solchen Umständen denken viele junge Leute nüchterner als früher. Sie fragen sich: Was habe ich zu verlieren? Und kalkulieren die Antwort dann sachlich durch.
mm: Wem würden Sie denn raten, ein eigenes Unternehmen zu gründen?

Veith: Diese Frage kann man nicht so pauschal beantworten. Die entscheidende Voraussetzung ist natürlich eine erfolgversprechende Geschäftsidee. Eine gute Ausbildung ist wichtig und ein gewisses Maß an Erfahrung kann auch nicht schaden. Generell gilt: Wer überzeugt ist von seiner Geschäftsidee, der sollte die Umsetzung in einem Start-up zumindest in Betracht ziehen. Die Erfolgsaussichten sind dann wiederum sehr individuell.

mm: Wo haben es deutsche Unternehmensgründer besser als etwa ihre Kollegen in den USA?

bignoggins 15 hours ago | link | parent | on: The 10k Bootstrap Challenge

I'm a big fan of bootstrapping, allow me to add my own data point. I was the typical bored-at-BigCo guy but was afraid to completely jump into startups full time (I have a family). I decided to bootstrap my startup (mobile app) at the beginning of 2010, while working full time for 6 months. 6 months after that I quit my job full time as the income from the startup surpassed my SV engineering salary (made 75K in 6 months). In 2011, I traveled the world for 7 months with my wife while making my 2nd app, and my income went up to 340K. This year, I'm pretty much working ~20 hrs a week and I'm on track to hit at least 600K (already did 300K YTD). No full time employees, no VCs, no board, minimal expenses (macbook + iphone), no hassle.

I have friends and relatives who have done YC, gone the whole fundraising route, etc. Some who are fairly successful, but I wouldn't trade places with them in a second. I'm not saying bootstrapping is better, but if you are like me (risk averse and lazy) then it is definitely a legitimate option.



bignoggins 10 hours ago | link

I haven't spent any money and barely any time on marketing. Development I did all the coding myself and eventually hired a graphic designer part time. The thing is I'm not usually on the Top 100 list (or even Top 300 for that matter), I just charge more for my apps (my price points are $3, $5, $8). That's the best kept secret of the app store. Sure the Top 100 apps make a ton of money, but there is a growing class of niche apps that can make just as much money by charging more and catering to a smaller niche audience.

My advice is to not create the next Angry Birds, but try and find a niche that is underserved and create a great app and charge as much as you can get away with. And get a great designer too, that's the best ROI I can think of.

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sayemm 9 hours ago | link

I think it's very smart, and not just for the risk-averse and lazy... starting small and earning your first stripes as an entrepreneur may prove to be a solid stepping stone to pursue bigger ventures in the future, I think. And now that you're financially independent, you won't have to worry about money holding you back. Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo founder), Ben Milne (Dwolla founder), Nat Turner (Invite Media founder), the list goes on... were all proven bootstrapped entrepreneurs before they worked on their first venture-backed startup.

Congrats on your success, do you recommend any good books or resources for bootstrapping/marketing apps?

I'm a big fan of Rob Walling's book/blog.

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bignoggins 9 hours ago | link

pretty much followed Rob's advice to the T

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sayemm 8 hours ago | link

good to know! thanks

Hannan 18 hours ago | link

Living in London was quite expensive for me. He estimates four months:

"All my expenses come from the £10k but I can only make money from products (e.g. no consulting). London is expensive, so this gives me about 4 months."

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CharlesPal 18 hours ago | link

Spending £2.5k/month to live in London? In your experience, how accurate does that sound?

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objclxt 18 hours ago | link

Sounds about right, the London Living Wage (a suggested but not mandatory minimum wage for living in London) works out at just under £400 per week, so maybe £5k to live on, the remaining £5k for other expenses, etc.

Bear in mind it's not £2.5k/month for living expenses: it's £2.5k per month for all expenses: including building the product, etc etc.

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beck5 17 hours ago | link

That is living an fairly decent life. You could scrape on £1k a month if you really wanted to.

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megablast 2 hours ago | link

This is what I do, rent and bills is around £800 a month, and can live quite well on another £300 to £400, and that includes going out.

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robfitz 35 minutes ago | link

I spent 5 years living like that at my first couple companies. These days, however, my life is no longer organised in a way where that's viable. So 2-2.5k it is. If I was in a real pinch, I could temporarily get to 1.5k, but I feel like 4 months is about the right period of time for this anyway.

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alinajaf 17 hours ago | link

That's about me, post-tax for the past two years I think. Would go a lot further if I were single, but we can afford to rent a decent-sized 2-bedroom flat in a nice area without having to pinch pennies.

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rythie 17 hours ago | link

It's fairly common to pay at least £1k/month for a one bedroom flat in central London.

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nirvana 3 hours ago | link

This article is silly. The idea that you can't make any money from an App if you aren't in the top of the charts is false.

One of my apps has only occasionally and then briefly, broken the top 200 in the US in its CATEGORY. (So nowhere near top 200 overall) and it still reliably pays out every single month. Further over its lifetime-- about 2 years at this point, the amount it pays every month has gone up, not down. The experiments we've done show that several things we could do would make it pay even more.

For instance, if we'd done a single bit of marketing that might have helped. The closest thing to "marketing" we do is to give promo codes to anyone who asks for one because they want to review the app. (nobody in the USA has yet reviewed the app.)

The idea that you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop an app is also kinda silly. A team of two developed our app over the course of a month. In the intervening 2 years, another month or two has been put into the app. At this point, the app has gone well more than a year without an update and it is still earning the same income- in fact, its income has gone up in the past several months.

There are somethings that you should do to have success though:

1. Have a good UI. The team of 2 was an engineer and a designer and we spent a lot of time on the design.

2. Make the app good. The star rating is a factor in the app doing well.

3. Make the app useful. Have something unique about it... but this doesn't have to be super unique. (our unique value is quite terrible. Paul Graham would throw me out of his office or a YC interview if I pitched him on it... its barely a differentiator, but its enough.)

4. Learn from your app and then do another one. Over time you can build a nice stable of apps and a nice income.

5. Update your app regularly. You experience a sales dip when the app is first updated, but after there are sufficient ratings on the new version the update seems to boost your sales. (or at least ours have, though we stopped updating it to focus on other things.)

6. Make your app sticky. About %80 of the people who buy our app never use it, and that's unfortunate. But the %20 who do, do for a long time and use it quite a bit. I think not every app is for everyone. But if your app is going to be useless after awhile, there's not much point (remember the vevuzula? lots of apps came out to make that sound. wonder how they're selling now?)

Hits come and go, and the big money may go to the hits. But viewing an App as a dividend that pays out every month, in my experience the returns are quite well worth it.

Some more points

-- Don't spend $100,000 on an app. Or even $10,000. IF you count our cost of living, our app cost us $3,400. We did spend a couple hundred on an outside designer that didn't work out, and about $500 on the app down the road after it was already making good money each month. That $3,400 we "spent" on it-- we get more than half of that back each month.

-- If you're a big business expecting to gross $1M a year from an app, then maybe it is a lottery. I dunno.

-- A high price is not a problem. We sold our app for $3 the first year, then $5 the second. No real change in income. We experiment with pricing a bit. You get a lot more downloads at $0.99. And you can have a big boost to your app by running a sale... but that also affects the amount of "juice" apple gives you.

-- Since we're not in the charts, our sales come because Apple is recommending our app to people. Think about that. The store does work, even if you'd never see us in the store by just browsing.

-- I think the idea of focusing on a few apps is a very good one. don't just throw crap out there and see if it sticks. That's the biggest problem with the store-- too much crap. But Apple is getting algorithmically better at figuring out whats crap and what isn't. Make your app good. Doesn't have to have all the features you could possibly want in the first version, an MVP is fine, but make it polished.

I think that the app store is a huge opportunity for people who would like to work for themselves but aren't in a position to raise funding to do a startup.

I think its a lot easier to get a good app discovered than an obscure website.

Instagram Co-Founder Kevin Systrom believes building solutions for most problems is the easy part; the hard part is finding the right problem to solve. Here he opens up about how he and fellow Co-Founder Mike Krieger identified the problems they wanted to solve around sharing photos through mobile devices. He also reminds entrepreneurs to embrace simple solutions, as they can often delight users and customers.

Steve Jobs' "Stay hungry, stay foolish" comes to mind, and I'll side with his blissfully ignorant optimism any day.

Rechner nach Maß, verkauft per Telefon oder übers Web - mit dieser Idee wurde Michael Dell zum Milliardär. Doch den Erfolg des Computerunternehmers macht in Wahrheit etwas anderes aus: Der Wille, seinen Konzern immer wieder auf neue Bedürfnisse der Kunden auszurichten.
...
Selbst wenn man also weiß, wofür der Kunde bezahlt, erfordert es einiges an Anstrengung, sich so zu organisieren, dass der Kunde im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit bleibt.

wrong: build something and then figure out how much you can charge. right: choose your desired price, then figure out how to justify it.
— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) March 5, 2012

If you're stuck at the starting line, you don't need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke.

A Q&A with Seth Godin

Question: What does it mean to Poke the Box?

Seth Godin: Conformity used to be crucial--fitting in, not standing out. Compliance used to be the heart of every successful organization, every successful career. The reason? We all worked for the system, in the factory, doing what we were told. Now, though, compliance is no longer a competitive advantage.

Poke the Box is about the spark that brings things to life. We need to be nudged away from conformity and toward ingenuity, toward answering unknown questions for ourselves. Even if we fail, as I have done many times in my life, we learn what not to do by experience and doing the new.

This isn’t the same thing as taking a risk. In fact, the riskiest thing we can do right now is nothing.

I’ve had an extraordinary run, creating a dozen nationwide bestsellers, starting Internet companies and giving speeches around the world. The key thing I bring to the projects I take on is not more talent than most (I don’t) or even more hours than most (hardly). My contribution is a willingness to poke, to start, to lean into the project and to get it out the door.

Question: What will I learn from reading Poke the Box?

Seth Godin: Hopefully you will learn lots but do more. Start thinking about when you’ve taken initiative in a way that really meant something to you and your team, your family. When was the last time you did something for the first time? How did it feel?

There are no step-by-step how-to instructions in Poke the Box. Instead, you’ll find a series of layers, a foundation for taking a different approach to your work. Instead of learning to be more compliant, I want to push you to be the one who takes initiative.

Question: Why did you write this book?

Seth Godin: I’ve been fortunate enough to hear from almost a million people over the years, to talk with CEOs and bosses and customers around the world. And they all tell me precisely the same thing: it’s the motive force they demand, the person who will shake things up and move them forward.

Static is not an acceptable state. The status quo is no longer something we want at work or in politics or in any organization we care about.

The market is just waiting for people to step forward. I wrote the book for those people, the ones who’ve been hesitating to take the leap.

Question: Why did you start The Domino Project?

Seth Godin: The Domino Project is my latest attempt at "poking." It’s an independent publishing imprint founded by me and powered by Amazon. This is an opportunity to publish "idea manifestos" committed to readers, rather than being bookstore friendly. It’s named after the domino effect--where one powerful idea spreads down the line, pushing from person to person.

I have two audacious goals: I want to change the people who read (not enough do) and I want to change the way books are published (they’re too hard to find and spread). I honestly believe that a book can change a mind like nothing else, and that’s our focus. To help anyone to do work they’re proud of and to make a difference.

Question: Why Amazon?

Seth Godin: I partnered with Amazon so we could leverage what we both do best--Amazon is the leader in global distribution, multiple format production capabilities, and reaching people in the right way, and I want to spread powerful ideas to the people who want to read them.

For 15 years, Amazon has been building an audience and gaining our trust. Many surveys identify them as the most-trusted new brand in the world. Now that Amazon is interacting with more people more often, they have a chance to bring those customers new ideas in innovative ways. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bring ideas worth spreading to a huge and eager audience.

Question: Who is Seth Godin?

Seth Godin: I’m an author, entrepreneur, and a person who starts things.

Systrom explains on Quora:

The story starts when I worked at Nextstop. While I was there working in marketing, I started doing more and more engineering at night on simple ideas that helped me learn how to program (I don’t have any formal CS degree or training). One of these ideas was combining elements of foursquare (check-ins) with elements of Mafia Wars (hence the name Burbn). I figured I could build a prototype of the idea in HTML5 and get it to some friends. Those friends ended up using the prototype without any branding elements or design at all. I spent weekends working on improving the prototype for my friends.

At a party for the Hunch folks I ran into a bunch of people who would basically make starting Burbn a reality. At that party were two people from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. I showed the prototype, and we decided we’d meet up for coffee to talk about it. After the first meeting, I decided to take the dive and leave my job to go solo and see if Burbn could be a company. Within two weeks of leaving, I raised $500k from both Baseline and Andreessen Horowitz, and started work on finding a team.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012
How Big Data is Going to Change Entrepreneurship
At the GSB’s 2012 Conference on Entrepreneurship, executives from three startups explore the rise of big data, the size of the opportunity, and the economic value of personal data.

Weil ihm die bisher erhältlichen externen Lautsprecher für seinen MP3-Player nicht gefielen oder schlicht zu teuer waren, hat sich der Berliner Designer Axel Pfaender seinen selbst gebastelt - aus Karton. Gestaltet wie ein klassischer Ghettoblaster sucht er jetzt Unterstützer für die Vermarktung seiner Boombox.

ANZEIGE
"Berlin" hat ja vielerorts einen coolen Beiklang. Die Stadt gilt als hip, trendy und was man sich da noch ausdenken mag. Ein bisschen setzt Axel Pfaender auch auf diesen Effekt, wenn er seine Produktidee "Berlin Boombox" nennt. Man sieht sie geradezu vor Augen, die Intellektuellen, die Kreativen, die Hipster, wie sie sich für Retro begeistern können (oder war das Vintage?).

Wer das Projekt finanziell unterstützen will, kann das auf Kickstarter tun. Aktuell sind es noch drei Wochen bis zum Ende der Laufzeit. 14.000 Dollar braucht Axel Pfaender. Derzeit kann man die Boombox noch für 50 Dollar bestellen, später soll sie 59 Dollar kosten. Für 100 Dollar gibt es eine Version im speziellen Kickstarter-Design. Ab 250 US-Dollar kann man sein eigenes Logo integrieren lassen. Und wer gar 500 US-Dollar ausgibt bekommt den Designer gleich dazu - jedenfalls für einen Abend. Denn mit so großzügigen Spendern geht Axel Pfaender Essen und zeigt ihnen Berlin Mitte.

Vier Monate und drei Jobangebote später hatte Roggenkamp eigentlich seine Rückkehr nach London beschlossen, ein Vertrag mit der Investmentbank Bear Stearns war unterschriftsreif. Doch als er nach dem finalen Gespräch in einen Supermarkt ging und dort einen Becher Suppe aus dem Kühlregal nahm, beschlichen ihn Zweifel an der Rückkehr in sein altes Leben. Warum, fragte er sich, gibt es solche Suppen eigentlich nicht in Deutschland?

Ausgestattet mit dem Selbstbewusstsein eines erfolgreichen Investmentbankers ließ der damals 36-Jährige die Bankkarriere sausen und gründete im Herbst 2006 Roggenkamp Organics. Kaufte, gegen den Rat seines Vaters und den eines lokalen Bankers, für 750.000 Euro die Produktionsanlagen einer alten Corned-Beef-Fabrik, die die BSE-Krise nicht überlebt hatte. Ein gutes Jahr experimentierte Roggenkamp, der schon im Studium als Koch gearbeitet hatte, mit Rezepturen, die er gemeinsam mit befreundeten Spitzenköchen wie Thomas Bühner aus dem Sterne-Restaurant La Vie in Osnabrück entwickelt, bis er die ersten Produkte auf der Kölner Lebensmittelmesse Anuga präsentierte: frische, kalorienarme Suppen, hergestellt aus regionalen, biologisch kontrollierten Zutaten, ohne Geschmacksverstärker oder Farbstoffe, verfeinert um exotische Gewürze wie Sternanis oder Anapurna-Curry. Erste Edeka-Händler orderten die Suppen, doch erst nach zwei Jahren produzierte er profitabel. Um die Maschinen nicht nur im Herbst und Winter auszulasten, begann er mit der Herstellung von Speiseeis und Salatsoßen, demnächst sollen Majonaise, Sauce béarnaise und hollandaise hinzukommen.

When I taught at Stanford Law School last year, I asked students what they planned to do with their lives. Most were headed to big law firms but didn’t expect to become partners and didn’t know the next step after that. They didn’t have long-term plans about what they wanted to achieve in their lives. I think the educational system has become a major factor stopping people from thinking about the future

Um Antworten auf diese Fragen zu erhalten, kann man etwa nach Herzebrock-Clarholz zu Stefan Roggenkamp fahren. Als der an diesem Montagmittag die schlichten Produktionshallen inspiziert, ist kaum etwas los auf dem 7.000 Quadratmeter großen Firmengelände im Gewerbegebiet der Kleinstadt in der westfälischen Provinz. Trotzdem huscht ein Lächeln über das Gesicht des 42-Jährigen. "Morgens einkochen und abfüllen, dann aufladen und ausliefern – so soll es sein", sagt Roggenkamp. Und greift sich einen kleinen Becher "Feinste Bio-Eiscreme Erdbeere", abgepackt in kleine 100-ml-Portionen, bestellt von einem Stuttgarter Feinkostladen. "Man muss heute in der Lage sein sich selbst neu zu erfinden", sagt der Unternehmer, der Fertiggerichte in Bioqualität herstellt und sich "eine steile Lernkurve" bescheinigt. "Diese Realwirtschaft, das ist noch mal eine ganz andere Herausforderung als früher."
...
Die Wirbelstürme richteten zwischen Ende August und Ende Oktober 2005 verheerende Schäden an – auch an Roggenkamps Karriereleiter. Über Nacht pulverisierten die Stürme ein Gros der Gewinne seines Derivatefonds. Kurz darauf verlor er seinen Job. Er nahm sich eine Auszeit, kehrte auf den Bauernhof seiner Eltern zurück und bezog sein altes Kinderzimmer, in dem immer noch die Fußballposter von früher an der Wand hingen. Er half seinem Vater bei der Pflege der demenzkranken Mutter und dachte über seine Zukunft nach.

The myth of the overnight success

Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recently said that they had “catastrophically small numbers” in their first year after launch, and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.

You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.

Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game.

Me: “What’s your favorite Pixar movie?”
Matt: *SIGH*
Me: “Haha! Why the sigh?”
Matt: “This is such a tough question, because they are all good. And yet at the same time, it can be hard to watch one that you’ve worked on, because you spend so many hours on it. You know all the little choices you made, and all the shortcuts that were taken. And you remember the riskier things you could have tried but ended up not, because you couldn’t risk the schedule. And so when you are watching the movie, you can see all the flaws, and it isn’t until you see the faces of your friends and family that you start to forget them.”

Preston-Werner’s bet has paid off. GitHub is now profitable. Users can sign up for free and start contributing, but they pay money if they want to privately host code there — starting at $7 per month. GitHub also sells an enterprise product that lets companies run your own version of GitHub behind the corporate firewall. That starts at $5,000 per year, but can cost hundreds of thousands annually for companies with hundreds of coders.
...
When Scott Chabon wrote a book about GitHub, the first fork appeared within a month. It was a German translation of his book. Now, three years later, it’s been translated into 10 languages, with another 10 translations in the works. Half of the traffic to the book’s website comes from China. “Tons of people in China are learning Git because they can read [the book] in Chinese on my website, because somebody provided that,” he says

Sources

Technical Underpinnings
net@night Interview
Personal Email

Stats

16.3 million bookmarks
52 million tags
9.4 million urls
989 GB archived content
A little under 1 hour cumulative downtime since July 8th, 2010.

Platform

MySQL
PHP
Perl
Ubuntu
APC
Sphinx
Cron jobs
S3

Hardware

Machine 1: 64 GB, runs a database master, stores user archives and runs search
Machine 2: 32 GB, runs the failover master, crawls various outside feeds, does background tasks
Machine 3: 16 GB, web server and database slave

Architecture

A copy of the database is kept on all three machines.
The website runs on the 16GB machine. The database fits entirely in RAM and page load times have improved by a factor of 10 or more.
Master-master architecture with an additional read slave. All writes are pointed at one DB, these include bookmark, user, and tag tables.
The second master runs:
Aggregate calculations like global link counts and per-user statistics.
Nightly DB backups using mysqldump. The backup is stored to S3 in a compressed format.
Perl scripts run background tasks:
Downloading outside feeds, caching pages for users with the archive feature enabled, handling incoming email, generating tag clouds, and running backups.
Perl was chosen because of an existing skill set and the large support library available in CPAN.
Features like most popular bookmarks are generated by a cron job that is generally run each night, but are turned off when the load becomes too high.
PHP is used to generate HTML pages:
No templating engine is used. No frameworks are used.
APC is used to cache PHP files.
No other caching is used.
Sphinx is used for the search engine and for global tag pages.

Lessons Learned
Have a mantra. Pinboard has the goals of: being fast, reliable, and terse. They think these are the qualities that will earn and keep customers. When a problem comes up, like massive growth, they always prioritize so that these system qualities are maintained. For example, their first priority is preventing data loss, which dictated changing their server architecture. So the site seems conceptually confusing during a period of growth that's OK...if the site is quickly and reliably saving links.
Start as a paid site from the beginning. The advantage of being a paid site is you don't get the rush of new users, so you can stay small. When the demise of Delicious was announced, if they would have been a free site they would have been down immediately, but being a paid site helps smooth out the growth.
Charge based on the number of users. Pinboard has a unique pricing scheme that is designed to scale better than services with free accounts. The price is based on the current number of users. As the number of users goes up the price goes up. People are paying for the resources are using. This is similar, but enticingly different than the Amazon or Google App Engine payment model. This is a one time fee. For an extra $25/year all your bookmarks can be cached and searched.
Use boring and faded technologies. These help ensure the site will never lose data and be very fast.
A rule of thumb: if you are excited to play around with something, it probably doesn't belong in production.
Make switching as simple as possible. Pinboard removes adoption objections by automatically importing and exporting to Delicious and by supporting the Delicious API.
Staying small is much more fun. When you can offer personal customer support and interact directly with users you'll have a much better time.
Compare machine costs based on dollars per GB of RAM or storage. Pinboard originally ran on Slicehost and Linode, but they moved to a different service when the cost expressed in dollars per GB of RAM or storage was far higher, without any offsetting benefits.
Turn off features under load. Turn off search, for example, if you need performance elsewhere.
A medium to large site is the most expensive. Small sites are relatively cheap to run, but at some point during the growth curve the marginal cost of each new user increases. It costs more because data has to be split across multiple machines and those machines must be bought and managed. There's a scaling cost. Once you get into millions of users it gets cheaper again. Those first steps from where you go to a tiny site to a medium or medium large site are painful and expensive.
Call the shots on your own product. Depending on who you believe, Delicious was harmed by the continual layoffs at Yahoo, but the real problem was the Delicious team were not the decisions makers. New features were prioritized over reliability, stability, and innovation. It doesn't matter how hard or long you work when your fate is in the hands of others.
Small doesn't always work. A storm of new users added over seven million bookmarks, more than were collected over the entire lifetime of the service, and traffic to the site was over a hundred times normal. As a result normal background tasks like search, archiving, and polling outside feeds were suspended. An elastic strategy to handle spike loads like these isn't all bad.
Look at outlier page load times, not median page load times to judge the quality of your service. It's not acceptable if a page can take multiple seconds to load even is most of the page load times are acceptable.
Punt on features to build quickly. Pinboard was built quickly partly because social and discovery features were deferred by saying "go somewhere else for that." Other sites will let you share links with friends and discover new and interesting content, but no other site acts like a personal archive and that's Pinboard's niche.
Segregate services by machine. When a web server shares a machine with other services the web server can take a hit. Another example is once each day the search indexer would wrestle with MySQL over memory while it did a full index rebuild.

Related Articles

What The “Great Delicious Exodus” Looked Like For Pin-Sized Competitor Pinboard by Erick Schonfeld. The service wasn’t handling a huge number of requests to begin with—a few hundred per minute at peak—but that number increased about tenfold to over 2,500 requests per minute.
Quick thoughts on Pinboard by Matt Haughey
Back To Basics: Ditch Delicious, Use Pinboard by Michael Arrington
Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Bookmarking Service by Ben Gross
del.icio.us, Thank You : Pinboard, Welcome by Stephen O'Grady

Being an entrepreneur isn’t really about starting a business. It’s a way of looking at the world: seeing opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others take refuge. Entrepreneurship has always driven innovation in the private sector, but increasingly it’s essential to progress in government and the nonprofit sector, too. Whatever career you’re in – or want to be in – The Start-Up of You holds lessons for success.

Are you leaving behind an easily found trail of accomplishment? Few people are interested in your resume any more. Plenty are interested in what you've done. The second thing you'll need to do is regularly note what you produce in...

Last July I posted on Hacker News about an experiment to start a Japanese candy subscription service. I live in Japan, so the idea was to send surprise candy stuffed into envelopes twice a month to subscribers directly from here and charge around $24 / month for that. How did the experiment turn out?

If you're a tech company or a marketer, your goal is to be the first thing people do when they start their day. If you're an artist, a leader or someone seeking to make a difference, the first thing you do should be to lay tracks to accomplish your goals, not to hear how others have reacted/responded/insisted to what happened yesterday.

“The biggest failure you can have in life is not trying at all.” ~ Emil Motycka

New blog post: "You can't quit being an entrepreneur" –

Gastbeitrag von Thomas Jakel, IdeaCamp: Eine Anleitung zur Unternehmensgründung in drei Tagen (Teil I): Ist es m...

Jeff Moser on software development

Not a secret, often overlooked: "Keep your promises." If you say you'll show up every day at 8 am, do so. Every day. If you say your service is excellent, make it so. If circumstances or priorities change, well then,...

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YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didně°˝€™t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

To get started on one of your lingering interests, you probably don't need to read about it as much as you think. Go. Do it. And learn from there.

When I talk about assets, cash is the least interesting of all of these. Instead, I'm talking about more intangible assets like skills, reputation, relationships, attention & fame. I'm of the strong opinion that the most reliable path towards startup success is to focus relentlessly on acquiring interesting assets and then execute on the startups that naturally fall out of them.
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Without great software design SO would not have been able to retain users at the rate they did. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood had both been thinking very deeply about the structure and organization of social software for a very long time and avoided a number of obvious mistakes in the fundamental foundations of the software. Here's a blog post from Joel in 2003, thinking about these issues: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar... and the Stack Overflow podcasts are a secret mine of excellent social experience design insight: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ca...

Neither Joel or J...

Thomas Grüderich stellt sein Unternehmen testCloud vor. Um Softwarefehler zu finden, setzt testCloud auf die Intelligenz des Schwarms und lässt Applikationen durch die Crowd testen.

Startup buds! Listen up...We're starting to get some flak for going a bit over zealous on the minimum viable product strategy. Robert Scoble just ripped into us for approaching him with too many poorly-constructed concepts that are not ready for the light of the day. Dismiss his criticism at your own peril. I think he was right.

Reid Hoffman's Rule #6 is "Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product release." He's also right.

Was ist, wenn man irgendwann eine Idee entwickelt hat, damit aber nicht mehr weiterkommt?
Was erfolgreiche Gründer ausmacht, ist vor allem ihre Beharrlichkeit. Henry Ford arbeitete 18 Jahre lang an seiner Idee und musste zwischendurch viele Niederlagen einstecken. Fast alle Zeitgenossen erklärten ihn für verrückt. Es geht darum, das Problem immer wieder neu zu betrachten und anzugehen Und oft ist es nicht gleich die erste Idee, die zum Erfolg führt. Eine Idee vom ersten Einfall bis zum fertigen Konzept auszuarbeiten dauert seine Zeit, es gibt Höhen und Tiefen, man wirft vielleicht sogar zwischendurch alles hin und fängt wieder neu an – bis irgendwann ein Konzept steht, das besser ist als die vorfindbare Praxis.

In my eyes, if you start some project and you bet the house on it you gain tremendous respect, no matter what the end result. Failure isn't an option, simply because failure is inevitable.

In diesem Video sehen Sie Dr. Gerhard Huhn zum Thema Personal Development und Self-directed Learning.

His eyes were red. His head jerked around a lot when he spoke, and he seemed overly excited about everything he said. He stated off with a long monologue about Berlin. Then he told me about his new startup, which apparently had already hit $20k/month in revenue 3 months after launching. I asked him how he did it so fast, and he tapped his nose, winked and said:

“This was not my first idea. This was about the 7th idea. I went through 6 ideas within a space of 6 weeks, and discarded all of them. Then I came across this one, which is not even a new idea. It’s something that already exists. I guess that’s why there is so little competition. Everybody thinks it’s already done 100s of times. That’s why nobody does it!

But you are probably curious, how did I go through 6 ideas in so a short period of time? I will tell you the secret right now! When I get back from the toilet”
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“So, basically, to validate a startup idea, all you have to use is twitter. Create your brand name on twitter. In the description field, write your 1 or 2 sentence pitch. Spend time picking the brand name and then the pitch. Afterwards, find a famous person on twitter who belongs to your target group. For example, nerds or women, or mothers, or joke-lovers. Whatever you define as your target group. Start following the followers of this person. If you get a follow-back rate of 10% and above, then you have a good idea. If your follow-back rate is lower than that, then you have a bad idea.

This method allows you do several things:

- Pick a brand and logo that appeals to your market

- Simplify your idea down to 1 sentence

- Select who your target market is

- Find out if your target market is interested in your service at all

And all of this is completely free. You can do this in a single afternoon. Where you have high follow-back rates, you are likely to have a business. That’s it. That’s the big secret that led me to the idea that’s making me $20k a month and allowing me do all this”

Im Rahmen des Entrepreneurship Summits 2011 wurde Lars Hinrichs, Gründer des Netzwerks XING, von Prof. Faltin interviewt. Lars Hinrichs berichtet das Gründer

Oddly enough, failure wouldn't be such a terrible outcome for Nguyen. "One of the things [LinkedIn founder] Reid Hoffman always says is that if your first product is not a complete failure, you're probably doing something wrong," says Ganesh Ramanarayanan, a Color cofounder. This is a prevailing philosophy in Silicon Valley; what's more, this forgiveness is one of the fundamental beliefs behind the idea that the American innovation process is flexible and great. Failure could actually bolster Nguyen's reputation. "People in the Valley find every reason to believe that a large failure just means you're more likely to succeed next time," says Kedrosky. "I often make the joke that if the financial industry ran like Silicon Valley, you'd have the guys who crashed the mortgage-backed-securities industry being handed billions of dollars the next day on the argument that, well, they must have learned a lot from crashing capitalism last time."

Die Kunst sollte einbezogen werden?

G.F.: Ich glaube, kreativ denkende Menschen sind die besseren Trüffel- schweine. Der Entrepreneur ist heute dem Künstler näher als dem Manager. Nur 15 bis 20 Prozent aller Gründungen basieren auf. Hightech-Entwicklungen. Der Rest sind so genannte konzept-kreative Gründungen, bei denen ein Ideenkonzept im Vordergrund steht. Oft setzt sich ein solches Konzept zusammen aus Teilen, die es bereits gibt, die neu durchdacht und neu kombiniert werden. Facebook oder Skype sind Beispiele dafür.