The Six Phases of Bootstrapping A One-Man Startup

Re:The Six Phases of Bootstrapping A One-Man Startup by mattmanser on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @06:25AM (#740945)

I was wondering whether to hold off on saying the same thing :) He built for a niche which is heavily saturated, had no clear USP, no marketing, seems to have had no customer feedback and spent 8 months of his life doing it before he realised there wasn't a penny in it.

He still doesn't really seem to realise he needs to let go now. Move on. It's not a success.

Pity as the guy's obviously got talent. It's one of these things of keep trying as he's obviously almost there. Just with a different business idea. And something that other hackers won't have done 100 times before. And he needs to massively shorten his time to getting a product in front of customers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Six Phases of Bootstrapping A One-Man Startup by jacquesm on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @06:29AM (#740949)

I think this is the biggest risk for any entrepreneur, to fail to recognize when an idea won't fly.

I've been guilty of this myself at times and I think the reason why this happens is based in having invested X in a project already. If X is already in it then you're going to do that little bit more to see if you can get it to work that way. So, now it's X+a little bit more, and so on.

The longer you 'hang in there' the harder it gets to throw it out.

So, the conclusion of this is: Do your thinking before you invest significant resources in to a project. Test the waters while you can still walk away. Then find something that gets traction, preferably without you pushing it.

then go all out.

[ Parent | on HN ]