The art of getting funding
Ben does it again with an extremely amazing article regarding how to get funding. It is true that nowadays a lot can be done with very little money. A couple of coders can do something very impressive. I myself (not a professional web developer) managed to get a lot done on my project (YulNews) using my own free time (between changing diapers and so on). Yes it’s buggy, no it’s not nice (I’m colorblind too), but the foundation is slowly building into something usable. This is why I’d like to get some financing. To focus on my project full time and not just a couple of hours per day… and to do that, I don’t need $5M, nor even $1M. Just enough to have a very small but dedicated believers working efficiently on the project, to get the word out and to get more attention while creating partnerships.
From my experience, I believe that starting a business is 80% of yourself (your time, efforts, knowledge, promotion, selling yourself, etc.) and 20% money. That 20% money actually helps you move closer to the 90/10 as you can delegate some work to other people (since you now have money to hire someone). When you get a lot of money (big VC deal) then you can work 100% on the project while not having to worry (too much at least) about money.
So why get $5M if you don’t really know what to do with it? It’s definitively welcomed when you want to expand aggressively, but it is too much money just to come up with a deliverable product. Sure, I’d like to have the latest clustering / blade system and a big SAN but why now? These days, it seems like big guys are buying smaller guys so why worry about growth? Let the big guys worry about it when they’ll buy you. They have the money anyway. If you really need storage, consider Amazon’s S3 (Twitter is using it), DabbleDB or even Google base (entire sites are using it). If you need bandwidth, consider unmetered hosting.
Kevin Rose for example, started Digg with $2000, a web developer working for $10 per hour, and a $99 per month hosting plan. They did raise some money (at least $8+M) but now they have a much larger team and a lot of salaries to pay…
