What is interesting about problems is that if you are lucky enough to have a good idea that will help solve the problem you can pretty much do a great startup. Over the last week my startup has been in trouble yet again, and in thinking through some of the problems with third party selling systems is that they really are not friendly towards some kinds of products. This means I will be embarking on another startup again, but this time with a specific issue in mind, and a specific solution to go along with that.
Right now we are in alpha/planning stages, and with any luck will be launching in about a year. We should be shopping for a domain and setup gear in the next couple of weeks. This is going to be so cool.
In all this is a good thing, but this also means I’ll be looking for an awesome web programmer who can negotiate and meet deadlines, an even more phenomenal database person who knows how to design, develop, and manage a transaction oriented database. We will also be building on either Azure or Amazon Web Services, no sense in purchasing servers when we can prototype and build this puppy in the cloud. This is also one important way of keeping costs down while we are in the build phase. I’ll also need beta testers and that alone is going to be very interesting to see how this works later on down the road.
While I am not known for serial startups, this one is going to be interesting. I know I will outsource the development of the project as well. Not because American programmers are too much, but that I will need to do this on a budget, meaning I’ll need the lowest cost developers possible. That does not mean I won’t hire American, there are a number of very good very competitive outsourcing groups here in the USA, and one of them is in Spokane Washington. This is going to be interesting to watch it grow and see where we can go with this. In the mean time, it will be time to get cracking on the design specification, I have specific ideas on what the product should do, must do, and would be nice to have. While the initial product will be fairly bare bones in terms of functionality, what will be cool is as we get out of Alpha and into beta, this one ought to be fun.
For more on what is driving this new startup idea – go here to my current startup and read the blog entry.
(Cross-posted @ TechWag)
