
Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005) - bitsweet
http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp?hn=true
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skrebbel
Wow, nine years old! I like how some of these ideas have become _completely_
commonplace since then. It's cool that we as a community are progressing.

Also I'm impressed at how some of these ideas are still neglected, or
controversial at best. Think about how much of the startup world, leading
thinkers like Paul Graham and Sam Altman included, still haven't figured out
#10 on this list.

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pjgomez
You took your words right of my mouth, well my keyboard. It is surprisingly
true almost nine years later, it is probably more true now than it was then,
or at least it has been proven to be more true, if that is even possible.

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meowface
Makes you wonder which of the blog posts giving advice today will ring as
surprisingly true in 9 years from now.

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gtzi
Meaningful stuff always remains such - a classic.

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prottmann
Take the Top 100 Startups since 2005 and explain me, compared to this list,
why they were successful.

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pjgomez
Well, 100 is a lot of work, but I think some of the YC top startups fit quite
well: let's say Dropbox, Disqus or Stripe.

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jdawg77
Take money in six months - and do it with Paypal, rule #7, I think is very
accurate to a degree. However, it also depends on if you're doing a media
startup or a Saas startup. Most of the bootstrapped businesses I've done were
professional services or (a few times) download software. In both cases, we
took money but in the media business, it was always indirectly - eg, CJ sales,
Adsense, etc.

Rule #10 I've seen tossed out the window too many times, as a consultant, to
admit it. Thing is though, when I review my own performance, it's always when
well balanced with actual life that I get the most work done, even if I'm
putting in a paltry ~50 or less hours per week of work.

As an employer and manager, I've also seen the difference between people's
engagement and output at peak and at "overclocked performance," where they put
in an extreme amount of overtime. Perhaps I'm missing an instance, but I've
yet to see the team win where they gave up everything that meant something in
their lives in an effort to somehow make the business better.

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sebastianconcpt
Great rules. I'd spread the advice except that I cannot stand that it advices
to be greedy.

Greedy is self-serving and it will block things sooner or later.

Way more interesting is to advice Ambition.

Positive ambition.

Possibilities-expanding-for-all kind of ambition.

Subtle you might say. Yet greedy and ambition have different ethos in the long
term.

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jickmagger
Write article in 2014.

Edit post date.

Instant visionary.

PS. And this article is just a bunch of generic small business advice where
grocery store was replaced by web startup.

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nedwin
This was written by Ev Williams of Bloggers / Twitter / Medium fame. Not sure
visionary is the right word but it's close enough.

I don't think he has much reason to back date his posts but you would think
he'd at least put it on Medium versus Blogger.

