-
Bootstrap your business idea with one feature, one month, one person
After a long absence, on the blog, thought I’d post about an interesting podcast on how to bootstrap your enterprise with low risk.Dom Sagolla, DollarApp CEO and one of the co-founders of Twitter was interviewed for a great BBC podcast (uk only proxies link) on how to bootstrap your business idea using the iPhone AppStore.The basic concept is to choose just one feature, one person (developer) and one month to implement the idea. Then you bootstrap the concept by selling the application for $0.99 on the AppStore. If you recoup the development costs then great, if not you have not really harmed anyone but yourself. If you get any kind of recognition and make modest profits, plow this into making another new application. With this model, you can then vary the formula e.g. add one more person or one more feature and you have a concrete idea of the marginal cost plus benefit/costs trade-off.Always apply an idea filter: say no if the great idea does not fit the ‘success pattern’ – how are you going to ship your 1.0 version for $1 in 1 month?So seems an interesting way to bootstrap an idea with low activation-gap. This model may be applicable to many other concepts/delivery models although I suspect that it works best for something like iPhone AppStore because the distribution/to market channel costs are low. I suspect it would not work well for say designing a new CPU for instance :).2 responses to “Bootstrap your business idea with one feature, one month, one person”
-
An interesting related post from Mommy CEO blog to quote "My advice – think simple, launch small, and then as you get traction and revenue, you can think bigger and expand. Don’t get paralyzed into inaction by trying to perfect your product before you get it out there"
http://mommyceo.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/focus-on-simplicity/
-
And the reference to the original artical on 37signals about various businesses that have kept it simple and succeeded.
I love the quote about 'Crackberry' and how would your product sound with "crack" as a prefix!
On a serious note though Porter teaches us that we should worry about competitors/substitute products out to beat you. By focusing on a niche strategy you may lose out if that niche is a temporal fad (perhaps a critique of the original Porter work was it was a static framework). If that niche turns out to be really valuable then watch the imitators come and try and undercut/out perform you/steal market share. Is there a significant barrier to entry?
"How many iPhone torch apps are there out there?" – suggest that the exit/growth/product life-cycle strategy for a one-trick pony company needs careful consideration.
-
Leave a Reply