I think today, startups and businesses are two different things.<p>A business makes money. You see them all around you. Restaurants, companies that sell products (online and offline), web design firms, etc.<p>These businesses impact the rest of society. Real, everyday people buy from these businesses and often rely on them. Your family interacts with them, understands them, knows them.<p>A startup is a game. You play by the rules of the game. You (traditionally) spend a lot of time seeking VC money, get enough VC money to spend the next few years working on whatever you want, regardless of the results, and then either sell the startup, get acquired, or shutdown (exit).<p>The players of the game are often the only ones involved. They're the founders, the customers, the VCs. The game has very little impact on the rest of society.
I think the tech-sector has significantly skewed what it means to be a "startup". But that has mostly to do with that fact that we only hear of the "startups" that are funded by some well-known VC for some large amount of money. Money that is used to build a product and advertise yet have no signs of being profitable in the near future (<a href="http://www.color.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.color.com/</a> comes to mind as an example of this). The media paints a pretty rosy picture of what it means to be a startup making it a glamourous venture to be associated with.<p>There are however plenty of companies that are just starting up, being bootstrapped from the beginning, and are happily putting food on the founders' table, but these are the startups you never hear about.
It's not the terminology's fault that you didn't understand what "startup" meant (even to yourself) when you used it to describe your project.<p>And if "startup" is indeed the correct abstraction for your project, why not use it?<p>Finally, consider your audience when picking your words. Your family is likely to be more interested in <i>what</i> you're doing than the fact that you're doing it in a startup. You wouldn't tell them "I work in a company" either, you'd say "I am a software developer on product X that does Y for Z. I especially like that I get to do W".
Great minds think alike
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242765" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242765</a><p>I think you've hit the nail on the head. Calling it a startup is avoiding facing the fact that you are trying to start a business, which needs to be profitable to ultimately put food on the table.
Seems they didn't even have a minimum viable product or some basic customer research. So they weren't even a startup. <i>That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet - Shakespeare</i> Calling it a business wouldn't have helped.
I'm in total agreement and think we should ditch the term entirely, as I wrote here:<p><a href="http://themodernprogrammer.com/post/ditch-the-term-startups/" rel="nofollow">http://themodernprogrammer.com/post/ditch-the-term-startups/</a>
To me, as a customer, startup has a negative connotation. I am always reluctant to depend on any nontrivial service provided by someone calling itself startup, because I know they are not here to stay and continue to provide the same or improved service in the future. Instead, their goal is to exit by selling itself to whoever wants to acquire them, and that usually means the end of their service.<p>If I have to depend on the service, let it better be provided by a business that is struggling to make money on it for as long as possible.
We may very well see the slow fade of the word 'startup' as we know it.<p>The historical tendency seems to be towards consolidation. The web has been a beautiful chaos for us, but we are already seeing the changes. To name two, SOPA seeks to more rigidly defend intellectual property rights; Google has started charging for excess use of its maps. In other words...people are looking to make money.<p>And that is reasonable.<p>The low hanging fruit of the internet will disappear shortly. Like the land rushes of the railroad era, where pamphlets proclaiming the glories of midwest farming were distributed all around the world, it is important to remember those pamphlets were printed by the railroad companies themselves.<p>Are you speculating? Claiming 160 acres of land in Nebraska in the hopes the town booms? Or are you selling train tickets leaving New York?
"startup" as a term of trade might be accepted within certain circles. Beyond that I think it sounds really dumb to anyone who's been in business for more than a few seconds.<p>One of my favorite WTF? phrases is "start a startup", particularly when uttered with the "gummy" California speech pattern of a 17-year-old.<p>Hmmm. "Start a Business", that's what you want to do. What the hell is "start a startup"? Some kind of a recursive call? Does it imply that you are in that mode forever?<p>When are you done "starting a startup"?<p>I can see someone saying "We are going to launch an experimental business to test an idea" or "We are going to test an idea for a business" or "We launched a business to test a few ideas". Now that make sense. The term "startup" is amorphous and "start a startup" sounds even dumber.<p>Oh, yes, then there's "do a startup".
Sounds like the OP's idea of a startup is just an entity to acquire lots of users (eyeballs), and the money will follow, somehow. Sound familiar? Revenue? Profit? What's that?<p>And reading some of the comments here, it seems many people have the same idea. I am surprised at this. I thought we had all learned this lesson back in the last Tech Crash in 2001. A startup is a business. A business needs to make money to survive. The purpose of a startup is to get the point of making money as quickly as possible. Simple as that.
At the end of the day your ultimate goal is to make money, that's all. I like the change you're suggesting. We're really just riding out the cultural wave that started when all the "dot coms" were startups, and so all tech companies under the meme of "two guys one VC" became "startups."<p>Historically you wouldn't be a startup if you bought three ships and sailed around the map to collect spices from India, but we might consider Christopher to have been a startup which collected VC funds from Spain before three ships came sailing.<p>We call them startups because our clan (two guys one VC) inherited the name from the businesses before us (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft). If you want to go and change the name you will have resistance, because that's what the name for our culture is. We're filled with names that don't truthfully reflect who we are, for instance, American is often thought of as the nationality of people from the USA, but that's silly because the Americas contain many more nations. Why aren't Mexicans considered Americans, yet Germans are considered Europeans? Everyone understands that Americans are from the USA, and Europeans are from Europe.<p>Everyone understands that tech companies are from the land of two guys who are trying to start a business with some funding. I like the idea of changing the name to something with great synergy for a new cloud-based webospher3.0 on the extranet, but to be totally honest it's simple re-branding of something most people involved with startups and VC understand. If your company is stuck starting up, I have a hard time believing it's simply because you called yourselves a startup. Many "businesses" are also in the same "startup" phase, and it's not because they call themselves businesses. I like the re-branding only because the name "startup" is a silly name, just like I wish we didn't call people from the USA a word that represents the population of two continents.
I like this mentality. "Startup" should be treated as a <i>transitive verb that needs an object</i> ("business", usually, although other special cases can exist), rather than as a noun.
Doing a startup is similar to writing a book. You put in the time investment up-front (sweat equity) in the hopes it pays off. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.<p>It's not a traditional business where you sell gadget A to person B and make the difference in buy/sell.<p>If you want to do the latter, go ahead, if the former, go ahead. But don't let labels hold you back from either.
Totally understand your confusion. Best advice I heard when I was learning about startups: forget a business plan and come up with a business model... you can also just call your business a company, that's what I prefer
I didn't quite get form the article, she was a non-technical partner, then what was her role? just a designer?<p>wasn't it her job to make a business from the technology her partner was making?
A startup with users is like tapping a vein in a mountain. You can keep digging or sell your claim to a larger mining firm. That's market share and it can be a valuable commodity on its own.
Advice to call your business a business? Hrm.<p>I think the picture painted here is the larger problem. Someone who gets out of school and immediately sees client work as "just another client" is an issue. When someone sees self-employment as an easier option to the daily grind we have an issue. When someone thinks that their untested idea is worth devoting two years to, when everyone in their life has solid questions, it is an issue. And then to blame semantics for why you thought all of the above...terrifying.<p>When someone introduces themselves as an entrepreneur it is a symptom of an ego. Some people love being an entrepreneur more than they love being a great business.