A note: I’m not in software, I’m in startups—a topic for another day—, but these two are ideals that I strive for in any business. They were taken from a recent interview with Joe Spolsky of Fog Creek Software, on the Venture Voice podcast, a recurring classic in entrepreneurship podcasting.

1. you can launch low-cost, i.e. bootstrap your way to the top: Joe differentiates between those companies that need to get to critical mass fast (the Amazon’s and eBay’s of the world) and pretty much everyone else.
2. instead of making (often) senseless financial projections, you can throw it out into the world and use the infrastructure of the internet to monitor actual sales, and make forecasts based on actual data. Again, if you need external funding for things like launching a comprehensive marketing campaign, you’ll probably need to make some (senseless) projections.

I know, it’s a pretty basic set of principles, and there’s lot’s of other good stuff in the podcast as well, such as SaaS vs. licensed software, but these two are the ones for the books. It reminds me a lot of this recent blog post on the Lessons Learned blog, about “Validated learning about customers.”

Vincent

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