Think Small - Or when small works fine for you

October 1st, 2008

People in startups want to change the world. They usually like to help out and produce something new and innovative.

People often have this grandiose idea that startups will either make it big or crash. After all, we’re always bombarded by multi-millions acquisitions and big funding rounds. Google buys this, Microsoft buys that, Yahoo! too.

But wait, there’s another world out there. And this is what I’ve slowly came to realize.

What really matters is your return on investment. What if you work 20h a week on a side project only to see it fail miserably? That’s a lot of wasted time.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could work less than 10 hours, just one time, and make just a little bit of money of recurring money every month? Of course earning a few hundred dollars per month isn’t as sexy as having a lot of stock options but then again, it’s real money. It’s profit that most startups won’t even see!

That’s exactly what happened with my latest mini project (DailyDollarDeal.com). It took me initially less than 4 hours to build this site from scratch.

I read the eBay API.
I found a free template.
I wrote a few lines of PHP (just 2 API calls actually!)

Just a few hours later, boom, I had a site up and running. I was actually surprised at how easy eBay’s API was.

Total investment: 10 dollars for my domain name. Of course I’m cheating a little bit as I’m using my blog’s hosting service to host the service but even if I had to get another hosting company, it would’ve been profitable. It’s not lightning fast but it works fine. In fact, the delay comes from the API calls so there’s not much I can do other that implement a caching service but I don’t even want to mess with this for a simple reason: it works “good enough”!

Can this get any easier? I don’t think so. Can it get better? Of course. But in terms of return on investment, I’d do another project like this anytime. The goal actually is to parallelize them in order to bring decent income. In theory, it’s easy. If you earn 100 dollars per month then make 10 other sites and you will earn 1000 dollars per month. In reality however, things don’t work the same way…

I experimented by adding an Amazon section where people can look for clearance items (up to 90% off). It took me less than one hour to setup everything. Although it allows you to find great deals on Amazon, people prefer the one dollar auctions on eBay. If I had only done the Amazon site, I guess I would’ve called it a failure…

The moral of the story is not matter how small your idea is, take it to the street and let people play with it. Who knows what will come out of it? Many successes started very small. In my case, I know for sure that Venture Capitalists or Google won’t be knocking at my door to give me buckets of cash (although they are welcomed to do so!) but I know that I can make some extra money even while I sleep.

Although my idea is not geek or sexy, that’s a good feeling!

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