
Be Yourself - iamdave
http://blog.twitpic.com/2008/12/be-yourself/
======
rokhayakebe
There are cases in which you would not want your audience to know that you are
running your operation from your apartment let alone that it is a one-man-
show. Twitpic is a free service geared towards consumers. So the founder can
do whatever pleases him and does not have to act big. But if you were to sell
SAAS to small businesses you had better design an enterprise like website and
imply (however you can) that you have hundreds of customers, dozens of
employees etc...

~~~
bestes
This _seems_ very true to me as well. I'm working on a business that fits
directly into this category (SaaS that sells to businesses) and so I'm very
interested to know if there are any facts, studies, etc. to prove it is
actually the case that you need to look big. Or, at least bigger than a 1-man-
show.

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iamdave
I was thinking about this very thing earlier today. Everyone is talking about
business models and funding when it came to Twitter, Facebook and more
recently Digg. What's wrong with staring up a big web service just because you
want to do it?

Kudos to Twitpic

~~~
patio11
Heresy! First you start with self-funding single-founder startups and next
you'll be talking crazy things like "charging users money" and "making
profits" and then where would the world be!?

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axod
Very cool. Always impressive to see other 'lone founders' making good stuff.

~~~
stanley
I give the guy credit for being upfront about it, but an upside in being an
entrepreneur is being able to step away from the nitty-gritty details of the
day to day stuff. If you believe in your idea, you should be concentrating on
growing your business and more often than not that requires bringing someone
else on board.

~~~
axod
_or_ you could just concentrate on growing your profits.

~~~
stanley
Well, the easiest way to grow profits is to grow the business. You'll never be
able to create new products to sell to new customers if you spend all your
time doing customer support. The revenue:profit ratio might decrease but the
pie is much bigger.

~~~
mattmaroon
Most web 2.0 startups just plain don't do customer support. He's not running a
poker site.

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alaskamiller
The new coolness -- or, rather a completion of the cycle -- is to convince
everyone you're just a two-bit operation. In a time of firings and recession
that's real geek cred.

~~~
zandorg
And a really cool black & white portrait photo?

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rscott
I'm loving his server rack. <http://twitpic.com/ulfk>

~~~
Shamiq
I wonder why he chose to buy vs rent.

~~~
bprater
I think everyone has to go through that cycle at least once.

At one point, I had 12 servers in our study. Eventually the wife decided that
the ungodly humming and tangle of wires had to go. Haven't hosted "in-house"
since.

~~~
axod
I went through that cycle too. I had a couple of profitable websites hosted in
my garage in a rack cabinet. They had a UPS.

I went on holiday which was a 6 hour drive away. On the way out, I got word on
my mobile that the sites were down. It was too late to turn back with the kids
in the car etc.

That night I drove 6 hours home, reset our houses power switch which had
tripped for some reason, and spent another 6 hours driving back. (This time I
left a key with a neighbor). I got back to the holiday house just in time for
the kids to wake up...

2 weeks later when we returned from holiday I got a dedicated server at a
hosting co.

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braindead_in
awesome. its really tough running a one man show. great job!

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mhartl

      s/advise/advice
      s/ran/run/g
      (Or, better yet, switch to the active voice; e.g., "I run TwitPic.")
    

Cool story nonetheless.

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mattmaroon
Why would anyone care how many people work at Twitpic? Does he or the people
giving him "advise" think he's running a bank or something?

Lamest coming out ever.

