Great idea, but you’ll still be eating ramen

Ryan Carson on TechCrunch wrote a great run-through on monetizing your web application yesterday. It’s chock full of useful, high level information on topics relating to figuring out who your target audience will be, determining how you make money, examining traditional options for pulling in the green, and so forth. If you have thoughts of building the next big thing (be it the next SFA or Google Maps or whatever), this is probably a good starting point.

Ryan’s article certainly won’t give you all the answers, but it should prompt some interesting questions that you should be asking yourself before quitting your day job.

You should never plan on being acquired. Remember that getting bought for $1.65B (or even $5M) just isn’t likely for 99.9% of web apps. Profitability should be your #1 goal.

You need to have a viable and serious plan for profitability. If you get acquired, great. Just don’t plan on it.

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March 23, 2007

John Gabriel’s G.I.F. Theory Proven Correct Again

I just read something on MSNBC that reminded me of Penny Arcade’s John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Essentially, a 400 pound woman didn’t realize she was pregnant until two days before she gave birth to a perfectly healthy child. You know what: there’s no reason to mock her, to say things like “A pig is a pig.” Should she strive to eat better and exercise more? Sure. I could say the same about myself, and you could probably say the same, too.

There’s no reason to take your insecurities or your sense of pettiness out on other people, even in an anonymous forum, just because you can. If there is one thing that differentiates us from thirteen year old boys on Xbox Live, it is our sense of civility.

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March 21, 2007

The ‘big’ payoff

Hillel Cooperman (who is one of my heroes, by the way) writes what I think is the best-and most sobering-blog post I’ve read in a very long time. Bear in mind that when I say “sobering,” I don’t mean it in a ’screw your startup dreams and go become an accountant’ sort of way. Instead, I think it’s critically important to have a solid understanding of your goals and the practicality of accomplishing them. It seems that Microsoft doesn’t go after any market which is not or will not evolve into a billion dollar business. Bear in mind that there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but I don’t believe that building a billion dollar business is the end all or be all of financial calculations.

[A]re you going to hire a lot of people? Don’t you want to scale up? Don’t you want to be a billion dollar business? A 100 million dollar business? Go public? I string together a series of polite “no”s for them…

For example, I make enough on iRooster to pay for my car and car insurance (and remember I’m under 25, so my car insurance payments are friggin’ ridiculous), plus a little extra left over for beer (but not enough to bring me over the 0.08 B/A limit :) ). I’m perfectly fine with this situation; I’d love to make more money from iRooster, but I don’t lose sleep over it.

When I go searching for new products (or web apps) to create, I tend to think about it from the perspective of building a $50,000 or $100,000 business (a million would be fantastic, but working 60 hour weeks tends to preclude that sort of thing). I love my day job, and don’t want to give it up, but I still love to create new stuff in my spare time. Building a sustainable “lifestyle” business while maintaining my day job is what I strive towards. Increasing my income by 8-10%? That’s neat. Doubling my income would be fantastic.

Anyway, I think Hillel’s words (and Tim O’Reilly’s, as well, which prompted Hillel) are worth taking to heart.

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March 19, 2007

Scoble’s Videos Suck

Or so I hear. I’ve never actually taken the time to watch one, as I’m absolutely opposed to his employer’s name on grounds of taste.

 Also, I’m happy to hear that Maryam has banned Robert from discussing Twitter. This is a relief. I had gotten into the habit of shift-deleting Scoble posts after a couple weeks of his unending discussion of Twitter. (yo, Robert: there’s a keyboard shortcut I bet you forgot about!)

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March 14, 2007

Update on end of year predictions

I made eight predictions at the end of last year. With 2007 now about 18% finished, how am I doing?

  1. Apple has not released Leopard yet. We’ll see what happens. I have a sneaking suspicion that its UI will actually end up looking very much like the iPhone demo we saw in January, which means I’ll be wrong.
  2. The word “innovative” has not been used with another Microsoft product, yet, but I have high hopes for this one :)
  3. I have yet to start offering more thoughts on Web 2.0-ish stuff, but this will certainly start happening soon. I still have a lot of thoughts on UAC to churn through.
  4. CORRECT! Slashdot has already fallen below 300 (at 325 right now), according to Alexa.
  5. Podtech.net has yet to change its name, but I still hold out some hope that I will be correct.
  6. Kinda sorta right. There’s only IMAP push, and no Exchange synchronization.
  7. DB has yet to post anything to his blog :P
  8. We have yet to see MGS 4 or a Final Fantasy title announced for Xbox 360, but I still have hopes. On a related note, though, Dragon Warrior 9 will be a Nintendo DS exclusive.

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March 9, 2007