Allan & Steve from LessEverything have a great list of rules for web startups. I learned a lot about # 9 at Nakama. It was all about staying just ahead of the growth curve, and near real-time scheduling. The piece that was missing from our efforts was a revenue model (who paid us for what). And I think that # 1 & # 7 are key for most web startups. Figure out who pays you and why. Then build a product that they love, that they will evangelize for you.
- Build something people need and love. People will talk about it.
- Release, release and release. Release it before you think it’s ready, you’re wrong, you don’t need that feature.
- Your app will probably fail, most of them do.
- Be Ballsy, don’t follow the herd, make a courageous moves.
- Build something you want to use. Continue to use it, feel the user’s pain.
- Google Adwords isn’t a revenue model.
- Find the cheapest, fastest way to 500 paid users. People will pay for your app, if it’s good.
- Design is an iterative process, not just development. And you won’t get it right the first time, so don’t sweat so much.
- Don’t scale until you actually need to. (The front page of Digg does not count as need.)
- Don’t spend any money.