Here's my suggestion.<p>Pick a niche market. A market that you don't have to create and a market that is already lucrative. At this point you are not building a product to test a market/theory because it already exist, and proven. Then build something that's better than what's out there and compete on features/pricing because you can obviously build products fast and this can give you an edge.<p>Personally, as much as I like building products for consumers I learnt (the hard way) to avoid them (for now) because they will most likely fail for reasons like: audience is hard to reach, requires viral-lity most of the time for people to hear about it and use it, and requires a very well polished UI. Not to mention that they whine and expect things to be free. :)<p>Before you create a product, answer these two questions accurately: 1. How will I reach my audience? 2. Am I solving a real problem? (don't kid yourself)
I'm kinda baffled by memcachier. Who is your target market? I would think everyone who uses memcache would be frightened by WAN latency to your service.
Very interesting to read about each product and the lessons learned. Looking forward to the follow-up article.<p>I'm a bit concerned about how long the writer can continue, though. There isn't a single mention of sales or income, both in terms of actual results (which is fair enough) and hoped-for goals (more worrying). Is the aim to get by with funding and deal with revenue later? Sounds high risk to me.
Good post but surprised by his understanding of cash-flow positive:
<i>Being cash-flow positive is...when your costs not including salaries are lower than your revenues</i>
Pivoting is great, but sometimes you have to give it some time. You need to pivot strategically. Almost every startup experiences a curve, first you launch. Maybe you make some news sites, growth goes up. Then people promptly forget about you. Usage plumits, and you fall in to a depression. You don't come out of the depression until you 'make it'. Starting a new projects puts you right back at beginning.
Here's the promised follow-up article, One Year, Six Products: 16 Tips for New Entrepreneurs:<p><a href="http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-products-16-tips-for-new-entrepreneurs/" rel="nofollow">http://alexlod.com/2012/07/11/one-year-six-products-16-tips-...</a>
> Unfortunately I can’t talk about it because it’s still in a closed beta<p>This makes me a sad panda every time I hear it.<p>A good way to spot a first time founder is to see if they're concerned about competition before they even launch the product.
I'd strongly advise looking at other areas than the memcache cloud service. The whole point of memcache is to be incredibly fast to prevent having to do a much heavier weight process, like making requests to databases.<p>While you offer locating the memcachier product within some datacenters this is such a narrow offering, and for something that's already mind numbingly simple to automate anyway.<p>While 'cloud' anything is hot right now, this just doesn't solve a real problem.<p>I think you're rushing into building something, without looking at the market and what problem you're trying to solve for customers.<p>If you'd had a good mentor they would have saved you a lot of hours wasting time in ideas that are obviously doomed, they neither solved a problem, nor provided entertainment.<p>Except one you discarded, the celebrity photos from twitter. With a great front end, and preferably an iPhone app that served up celebrity photos in a magazine style format might very well have legs. People seem to love celebrities, and they seem to love looking at what they are getting up to. This app would have the advantage of twitter's speed at disseminating information, and people like knowing first so they can send the photo to their friends and show how cool they are.<p>Forget the tech for a moment, think about psychology - what human need are you targeting, then think about the business, the market, how you'll reach them and finally the tech. I hope this helps.<p>*edited for spelling and typos.