Guy Kawasaki has a detailed blog post about how he launched his own startup for a mere $12,107.09. If it's that easy for Guy Kawasaki, it must be that easy for everyone, right?

Of course Guy forgot to mention that he is a very well known VC / blogger/ Evangelist / whatever (which is good for him, he really deserves it) in the valley and worldwide. Michael Arrington would link to him even if he was starting a business selling land on the moon, he would post leaked photos with REAL excitement... because GUY is behind this plan...

He paid $4.5k for the total software development. Of course this is because there was not any "real" coding. The wheel is already there, why re-invent it. Wordpress with plugins for digg like functionality. I would say he paid a fair price for setting up a template, customisations and whatever else was needed.

This could really be a true tech povera (cheap technology) story... but, try building (or outsourcing... whatever) code for something more innovative. Let's say something that uses spiders, spam detection, automatic text / link analysis, or any other complex web service, and you will soon find you have to deal with scale issues (something that truemors will probably have to deal with soon), weird bugs, the need for dedicated hosting and so many other technical problems... and then you will find out that $4.5k worth of outsourced development and 7.5 weeks to launch a beta is not really enough, unless you are yourself a developer and have your first hart attack before you reach 40.

No wonder truemors got hacked in 3 hours. Most probably a script kid hacked him. Truly open source software (like wordpress) with open source third party plugins, are prone to hacks! Sad, but true. He got away with it (having his startup hacked 3 hours after launch time) because he is Guy Gawasaki. If this happened to any other un-hyped startup, not powered by one of silicon valley's darlings, it would have all this negative, but REALLY negative PR. TC deadpool would approach really quickly!


I’m a huge fan of cheaply built products. It has been done in the past by a lot of people (digg.com being the most notable example). But sorry Guy, you have so much free press because of who you are and this is a very simple idea to implement, no innovation. I hate to sound negative, but all I want to say is that it’s not always that easy and certainly not for everyone. Especially when you live in Europe or anywhere outside the valley, and you are not already a successful entrepreneur.

Labels: cheap, startups, truemors