Start a StartUp / Blog

The one thing you must do is, talk to as many people as possible about your idea. Talk, talk, talk. Talking is cheap. You will get lots of good and bad feedback. Filter it and adjust accordingly. Wait for the right time and leap.

The best way to talk is to start your own blog, plug-in to the community that you will be catering to and think your idea out loud. Don’t fret over someone copying the idea. Finding problems fast and solving them well is what ultimately matters.

The business pundit has 10 more things to do before you startup.

Sk8 Silueta, originally uploaded by EPIDEMIA_.

Tim O’Reilly has an excellent speech on three things that kick started his company. All the three boil down to one core principle. Predictions are very difficult. IBM couldn’t predict the software revolution. Microsoft couldn’t predict the importance of Search. Google won’t be able to predict the next big thing.

Planning a big master plan and implementing it is impossible. The only thing that works is, finding problems fast and solving them well. Agility! Grand plans are good. But implementing those with your head in the sand is a recipe for failure. Grand plans can be agile too if you have a small team and less things to change.

Onstartups by Dharmesh Shah has some really good practical advice for startups. He recently asked if Less is really what it is made up to be.
On another note, Kathy Sierra says “Don’t give in to User Demands“. I understand her point, but don’t think categorizing comments by user type or paying for feedback is the right way to solve this problem.

I have an article posted that deals with exactly the same topics. Is less really good for you?

Define: Moonlighting - To work at another job, often at night, in addition to one’s full-time job.

Define: Intrapreneur - A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation.

Eric Schonfeld of Business 2.0, editor-at-large, has post collecting How-Tos on starting a StartUp with out quitting your day job. An excellent read. Lots for great tips.

I absolute-diddly-doodly love Flickr. A Flickr picture a day keeps you blogging away.

Water drops: fragile and beautiful, just like a StartUp.

I have been waiting to do this for a long time: Start blogging again! So here it is, I’ve done it. I’ve started blogging again after two and a half years! Yay. Feels great.

We develop web applications, using agile development techniques with Ruby on Rails. Other tools like Basecamp, Trac, Subversion, Blogs and Aggregators enhance the joy in development.

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing powerful database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern, accessible using any internet browser.

Rails is built on the:

• Interpreted
• Dynamically typed
• Pure object-oriented
• Scripting language, from Japan named Ruby.

It’s Simple, straightforward and extensible.

Scalable, reliable, maintainable and easy to use applications can be developed in weeks instead of months using Ruby on Rails. Some cutting edge Rails features:

• Ajax using RJS
• Object-relational mapping (ORM)
• Convention over configuration promoting simplicity
• Generators to automate repeating tasks
• Integrated test framework
• Automated application deployment promoting frequent releases to production
• Web services integration
• Migrations with the ability to deploy/rollback database schema changes.