slides http://dt.pe/lY4rb0
- What Is a Startup?
- A new found business build to grow rapidly (NOT like a barber
shop)
- search a new niche with a huge market and be the first one to take over the place here
- often new technology is involved!
- its about going from 0 to 1, not 1 to N
- Startups are in
- people are optimistic, huge successes, the Facebook class
- Silicon Valley as the Center of startups
- a startup solves a problem for your users and you have two tasks
- a solving this problem
- b making everybody knowing about and using your solution
- most important: targeting your growth rate each week (5 - 10 %), use new registrations, active users, shares, etc (whatever makes sense to make this stats)
- there is no speed limit when starting up
- A new found business build to grow rapidly (NOT like a barber
shop)
- Startups in the Past
- 1800s -> startups for oil, steel, pharmaceutical, telegraphs
- 1900s -> automobile, aviation, telephone
- many similarities between past and today
- new technology involved new markets
- many business were started in a non-regulated environment, because it was so new (NON-REGULATED MARKED)
- many started with a common name pattern (e.g. .com phase (amazon.com) OR name car company after founder (FORD, CHRYSLER, …)
- startup costs were low -> startups in flats (eg. one who sold oil on a one barrel base from his living room), they grew rapidly, scaled very well
- many companies pop-up during such a start, only a few survive and take over the whole market
- the mistakes they make kill people, thus, the government screems for more regulation, market is fitted with a few big companies, new laws make starting up impossible
- SO WHAT IS IMPORTANT?
- ONE: low entry costs
- TWO: few / no laws
- MVP (minimum viable product) - lean startup - has to be cheap!
- Startups in the present
- technological ground: Internet starts in 1980, broad spreading around 1990 (TCP/IP WWW in 1991)
- political ground: collapse of soviet union + National Science
Founadation Acceptable Use Policy was removed (which banned
commerce on the internet) -> huge, global market existed // fall
of iron curtain
- acceptable use policy -> existed because of the fear of wide-spread of drugs, porn and spam, malware AND users academia and military did not search for traffic
- fractions: the globalizations coefficient G (the more juice states there are equals allowed transactions, higher = better)
- first of all, technology was available, but market not ready, then, the market WAS READY
- -> rise of the internet start up
- key features of internet startups
- scalable -> only servers
- market size -> global
- generality -> software eats the world, form everything out of nothing
- low capitol barrier -> computer is cheap + open source
- low laws / regulatory barriers -> code is law, but this might change (PRISM, SOPA, …)
- long tail -> endless specificity
- failure tollerance -> still virtual, not physical, probs if it gets real (global stock market, airplanes, …)
- what is startup engineering
- startup engineering like chessboxing
- getting something to work well enough for people to buy!
- academia like zero customers -> chess
- architecture astronauts -> planning for infinite number of customers -> boxing
- in between of both lies startup engineering / software engineering
- most of all: systems integration (new technologies, snapping pieces together)
- design, marketing and sales
- in a startup, you have to do all this side tasks (can't concentrate on programming only)
- you have to solve real world problems (office, furniture, garbage)
- it is all about problem solving as fast as possible -> HN meetup
- at start you need to do a lot of things on your own, because there is no money
- later on, you can move this tasks to other ones
- BUT to start and hire great people, you also need brochures, pages, etc.
- why mobile html5
- mobile is the future
- responsive design
- location independence = bigger scope
- simplicity
- ubiquity
- JS as future