Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup

Building a portfolio of products and quitting your day job while still writing code.

The other 70% is debugging, optimizing, creating an installer, writing documentation, building a sales website, opening a merchant account, advertising, promoting, processing sales, providing support, and a hundred other things we’ll dive into in later modules. Some of it is great fun…other parts, not so much.

Find the website(s) where your real market hangs out. These are the people who will actually buy your product. The competition will be less and your conversion rates will be orders of magnitude higher.

podcasting until you’ve built an audience. You’ll find there is so much to learn about creating content that trying to do so in multiple formats will require too much of an up-front time investment.

10 links per month for a year,

Reason #2: Members of a Vertical Talk to One Another Small industries tend to have a handful of thought leaders. Even industries like pool cleaners or countertop installers have business owners who are pushing the industry forward, finding and adopting new techniques, and communicating those techniques to the rest of the industry through conference

The search engines are smart these days. If you build a large number of links pointing to your home page in a short period of time, all using the link text “Invoicing Software,” you’re going to set off a red flag.

Even if the conversion rates are low, a few hundred (or a few thousand) people seeing your content for the first time every month is a solid asset.

The product with a sizable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing, a bad aesthetic, and poor functionality.