Top ten geek business myths
From Ron at Rondam Ramblings: For the geek turned entrepreneur, this list seems pretty right on. I think Ron does a great job describing the pitfalls of owning a geek business.
Some key points I took away from this article..
“It’s the customer, stupid” and never “It’s the stupid customer” You don’t make any friends by calling people names. If people can’t immediately grok what your product will do for them, you are fighting an uphill battle. Case in point, by using the word grok I’ve lost half of my audience of this blog post. Clickety, clickety, on your merry way. For example my interests probably only appeal to a pretty small niche, so I need to think about what my customer will be concerned with, and not how cool this would be to build. Not everyone wants to maintain a webserver in their house. It is ultimately about what the customer wants and it doesn’t matter how good your idea is.
If you don’t think that your business is worth giving up your nights and weekends for, how are you going to convince an investor that it is worthwhile. I think that this is true, there are no shortcuts, as much as I hate to admit it. There have been people a lot smarter than me (Brin and Page of Google, maybe?) and even they didn’t just have a great idea and then sit back and watch the money come rolling in. It hardly ever works like that, you’ve got to work for it.