Stubbleblog

I had a nice talk last night with a friend who’s working on a web startup. I’m excited for him - the barrier to entry for starting your own company has plummeted.

Software and software techniques have solidified. An agile, keep it simple, release as soon as you have value development methodology is emerging from the bureaucratic promise everything and deliver crap, marketing driven dot-com mess. There’s also a much better understanding of how to get and keep users and how to market your company on the cheap.

Here’s the list of reading material that everyone starting a web company should be familiar with.

Ruby
Ruby on Rails is a web framework that lets you get web sites out fast. Very fast. And it has all the flexibility and robustness that you hope you’ll need down the road when your site becomes popular.
www.rubyonrails.com/

KISS Development
Ruby’s brought to you by 37 Signals, the company behind Basecamp. They’re also on the cutting edge of low overhead development methods. It’s worth following their blog (although they’ve watered down their content with generic blog entries).
37signals.com/svn/
37signals.com/svn/archives2/scoble_wonders_if_37signals_is_influencing_microsoft.php
37signals.com/svn/archives2/entrepreneurs_angels_and_the_cost_of_launch.php

Passion
Kathy Sierra, who created O’Reilly’s Head First Series, has great writing on what’s going to make your users enjoy their experience and come back for more.
headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/
headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/building_a_succ.html

Blogvertising
Hugh Macleod’s blog, gapingvoid.com, teaches blogvertising by example. You think he’s talking explicitly about blogvertising or maybe making crass commentary on society. Then you realize that you want to buy some stormhoek wine and a english cut $3000 tailored suit. You just got sold to. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. All I do know is that I want a new suit.
www.gapingvoid.com/

Tags: blogvertising, ruby, startup

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 11:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.