"Our plan was to allow users to upload an image file, and display the uploaded image in the browser. Back in the 90's this would have qualified as a business model for an IPO."
Reading it now; excellent introduction! I'm what you might call an "experienced developer" - I've been writing code since I was a little kid typing in Basic games to an Apple II - but I still find this back-to-the-basics approach more helpful than the usual high-level intro.
Er, um...he was suggesting you learn the difference, but I think you simply did not read the article carefully enough. The statistics are not misleading, as the article properly uses the median, not the mean.
"By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170"
That's MEDIAN, not AVERAGE. Average is even worse, as you say drawn up by the few very wealthy. But with median, the wealth disparity is already astounding. It's a racial issue. We can debate the reasons, but the fact remains. Middle class and even lower class white households still have much more wealth on average than their black counterparts in the same income group.
If you've ever read Henry Ford's autobiography - a man who once took apart an entire car to the last bolt and reassembled it by himself - he says much the same.
You coded it in six months and the whole project start to when you gave it up was only a year? Most startups I know of take several years to get any revenue at all. You need to have brass balls and a rich friend / family / side consulting to keep eating and paying rent / expenses.
You received 3000 GBP in startup money competitions, no strings attached, the first year. That's pretty damn good. I know startups that have raised a million dollars and don't have that much revenue.
Don't forget advertising. Sure you need lots of hits to make good revenue, but I know guys living off only ads for their apps. They also offer paid versions, but these tend to be a minority of the revenue. Don't underestimate what adsense/admob plus some social media exposure can get you.
You probably don't realize how successful you are already. That leads me to believe that if you stick to it, you're going to be quite successful. It may take 20 years, but eventually you're going to get some traction.
It's not the idea. It's not really even execution. It's persistence. If you keep trying your startup long enough, you'll eventually make enough to live. Maybe not be rich, maybe not make as much as you could have in a big corp (TM), but you'll survive, and you'll be your own boss.
My family has been doing startups for literally generations. I'm not rich, and neither are they, but we've survived. We did it by being persistent.
Stick with it, and I know you'll succeed. Don't give up.
No, I think he was right. After that year he still has zero revenue - not a single person has actually signed on for his service. I think he has made a wise decision by realising that the market that he expected is simply not there.
I wouldn't have expected that it takes several years for most startups to see revenue. Profitability, sure, that's a harder thing, but for something like this you would surely expect to have a few customers after a year if it was going to work?
Persistence is a great thing, but surely there has to be a point where you realise that you're selling fridges to penguins and therefore it's time to try something else?
sticking with a project that has no momentum for a long time can be a huge waste of time. better to focus on finding momentum as quick as possible either in the current project or abandon and find new one. there's a lot of interesting things to do in the world
Agreed. Better to go out and find the zeitgeist than to wait for it to come to you. For a first failure without mentorship I would actually consider this a pretty fast one. :)
