A Brave New (Startup) World
Every day I usually start my breakfast, lunch, and dinner by meandering about the startup blogosphere and finding out about the new and exciting startups coming to market. Through all the noise of this firm funding startup A, startup B reaching X milestone, and startup C launching Y feature, I've noticed a fairly interesting trend. Some startups are starting to base their business models around servicing a particular part of a website. In other words, startups are beginning to outsource non-core technological functions of their websites.
In my mind, this the beginning of a potentially huge sea change when it comes to web based development. For a few reasons:
With plug-n-play services that can do search, analytics, content management, and other 'non-essential' competencies, time to market will significantly decrease, allowing startups to spend time focusing on what truly matters and what is going to lead to startup success... differentiation (and we all know that's the fun part of building a startup)
I didn't think it possible but the cost of building a web based startup or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) will begin to decrease even more than it has over the past 20 years. I don't know about you but I would much rather pay $50/month (or whatever it may cost) to copy and paste a few lines of code into my web app that automagically works instead of paying a developer or myself to build, maintain, or improve features.Â
If more startups begin to follow this model, we could see a huge wave of new web based startups that are started by non-traditional programmers. Lowering the barriers to entry even further could actually give people the courage to take their idea and run with it (especially if they won't have to commit a significant amount of time to get up and running).
I'm a huge proponent of outsourcing non-core competencies, especially if the incremental cost is significantly lower. This actually led to a major change (I won't say pivot) in Lokalite's strategy in how we think about distribution and we're even applying this to our website. In the next couple of weeks, we're going to implement Swiftype to replace our search. We've even worked with the guys over at ReportGrid to supply our customers with custom analytics (we've since changed our strategy but can't say enough good things about ReportGrid... we highly recommend them if you're looking for custom analytics). Hell you can even test a quick version of your site with Verify (all you need is some screenshots or mockups) and sign up beta testers with BetaBait. And I'm sure there are numerous other services out there that I have yet to find that will help anyone get started with their startup idea.
So what are you waiting for? Isn't about time you stopped thinking about starting a company and actually start it?Â
