This week, we have a bit of a theme: getting from an idea to a viable app or product in as short of time as possible. Sacha Greif and Joel Gascoigne offer two very different approaches below. We’ve also got a look at how a hardware startup can bring in money on Kickstarter and a discussion of whether you should use credit cards to fund your startup.
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- Thursday
Incident’s gTar tops $120,000 on Kickstarter (that’s $110K in less than 24 hours)
Hardware startup Incident managed to launch its gTar (a guitar that docks your iPhone and teaches you to play) on Kickstarter and at Disrupt on the same day. Twenty-four hours, the Kickstarter project was fully funded. It’s now on track to raise far more than Incident’s original request.
The Toolbox: From idea to launch in 10 hours
Sacha Greif got the idea for The Toolbox from reading an article suggesting that there should be a one-page website curating web design tools. It took him ten hours to build exactly that. In its first week, the site received 138,419 pageviews.
Could you – should you – fund your startup with credit cards?
There are pros and cons to using credit cards as a source of money to found a company. This ReadWriteWeb article from Rieva Levonsky breaks down the options, including show what’s happened to one founder who put $60,000 on his card and another who put $8,000 on a card — you may be surprised.
How Startup America is helping Americans become more entrepreneurial – with Scott Case
This may be a long interview (it clocks in at 68 minutes), but Scott Case has a lot ot say about his own experiences with Priceline and with Startup America.
A whole new U
This profile of Udacity and its competition examines how startups are attempting to disrupt education, particularly by teaching users to program. The article offers an interesting outside-in viewpoint from a writer who went through a Udacity class and explains where he struggled.
The mid-market briar patch
The idea of selling to mid-market businesses — companies small enough to be nimble, but large enough to pay for whatever you develop — is appealing to startups. Jason Cohen takes apart what opportunities are actually available and makes it clear why so many companies targeting these types of businesses fail.
From ACT! co-founder, VIPorbit is changing the way you manage your contacts on the go
I remember using ACT! in my very first job. It created the CRM industry, practically from scratch. Now Mike Muhney is back and looking to turn the same industry on its head.
Retro link of the week:
Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it
Buffer’s founder, Joel Gascoigne, knew he had a viable idea on his hands — he’d gotten a slew of sign ups for a mailing list before writing a line of code. But he actually needed to deliver. In 2011, he wrote out how he went from a signup form to a full fledged service customers paid for.
