

Golden Rule for Startups - prosa
http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/golden-rule-for-startups.htm

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kakooljay
Just a caveat to anyone who DOES want to start an "easy business"...

In Founders at Work (another great book from Apress), Paul Graham talks about
starting Viaweb (which Yahoo bought to power Yahoo Stores):

Graham: "We had this angry phone conversation where he [co-founder Robert
Morris] said something like, 'We’ve been working on this thing for a whole
month, and it’s still not finished.' It’s funny in retrospect, because we were
still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about how
to get him to keep working on it for another month..."

In the same book, Max Levchin talks about starting Paypal:

Levchin: "It was pretty funny because we met with all these people in the
banking and credit card processing industry, and they said, 'Fraud is going to
eat you for lunch.' We said, 'What fraud?'"

Levchin ended up spending almost all of his time writing software to tackle
fraud, which turned out to be Paypal's core competence. He now calls PayPal "a
security company pretending to be a financial services company."

So, again, keep that caveat in mind when you're looking for an "easy"
business. Letting people email money? What could be easier? Muahahahahahaha...

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antirez
In theory I agree and a few years ago this were exactly my words. Now look at
the successful web sites and acquisitions of the latest years and tell me if
you think there is a match.

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awolf
"Instead, given your skills, time and money investment and other constraints,
you must choose the hardest possible business."

I'm not so sure about this golden rule. A lot of overly complicated ideas that
consumers will never grasp seem to fit what you're describing.

I'd argue it's the easy to grasp ideas that are the ones that go viral and
become successful. DropBox comes to mind. Posterous and Mint are also pretty
straight forward. I don't know that these businesses were "hardest" thier
founders could have chosen.

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pgbovine
i didn't RTFA, but perhaps what that quote is trying to say is that you should
choose something that's VERY hard to implement properly but easy for consumers
to use. simple interface is key, but if the implementation is also super
straightforward, then there will be tons of competitors or opportunities for
scooping.

ideally, it would be something that you have special skills in implementing
but other founders might not. one example is start-ups spun out of university
research projects (e.g., VMWare, biotech start-ups).

