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

Ideally, by the time I code it up, we’ll have many customers using the platform which means I’ll be working on a product I know is viable, and that’s paying for the time I’m spending to automate it. Agile Development, meet

You can’t consume and produce at the same time – when you’re in high-producing mode you have to temporarily step away from your magazines, blogs, and other forms of distraction for a while.

If someone is talking about a problem that you can solve, make an intelligent comment or contribution and include a link to your product. You must be careful to walk the line of sounding non-commercial, especially when commenting on a blog.

But by getting over the need to automate everything to infinite scale and putting a VA in charge of manually creating new hosted accounts, the time investment to get this feature launched dropped from 160 hours of work to about 10 hours.

Once you make it to the other side, you’ve learned what it takes to launch and maintain a product. The next time you launch a product, you will have a monumentally better chance of success because you are now a more savvy software entrepreneur.

“warm” niche is a niche where you have some kind of association. Perhaps you worked for a credit card company for a few years, your wife is a lawyer, you collect comic books, or your brother is a plumber. Each of these would be considered a warm niche, and introducing a product into this niche will be much easier than choosing a completely unknown

This is so important that I want to say it one more time: only certain marketing tactics will benefit your startup. Those tactics will change, depending on the niche you’re in.

In the same market with equal marketing, the product with the better design aesthetic wins. Sure, a few people will dig deep enough to find that the “ugly” product has better or more functionality, but the product that wins is the one that has the best looking website and user interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_occupations • http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm