The Making of qrisper.com - Latest Comments

Re: The 7 Levels of Entrepreneuriness

Jason Cohen — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:47:58 -0000

Hee hee! Love this.

Having completed all your levels, I can say that levels 6 and beyond you summarized already with: "But at this point, I don't really give a crap."

For me, this was the ultimate goal: To get to the point where I could choose what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, with priorities being "happiness" and "family" and "interesting shit" and even "ego-stroking," and not "financial."

P.S. Level 5 is optional.

Re: Who’d be dumb enough to copy my unproven idea? (Don’t fear the copycat)

jung — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:10:17 -0000

@Jason - Now you're heading into the reputation territory, where your network is king. It's not impenetrable (developing your rep/expertise/network) but definitely a major timesuck when you're just starting out and all you want to do is build your product.

I always wonder how some of those zany web startups get millions in funding. I'm sure (hope) that in more situations than not, investors are investing on the person and not the business. But to take such a gamble, one must assume that a previous relationship existed.

As for what makes me defensible, still working on it.

Re: Who’d be dumb enough to copy my unproven idea? (Don’t fear the copycat)

Jason Cohen — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:49:22 -0000

You're exactly right not to fear copycats. Several reasons to pile on, some overlapping with yours:

1. Big companies have other problems you don't have. Slow, politics, having to defend existing revenue streams before going after new ones.

2. Big companies have to attack big markets, otherwise there's not enough money to make up for the big costs. Small companies don't run after big niches anyway.

3. If the other company is small, you have first-mover advantage.

4. Just "copying" someone's look or features or even text off the website isn't enough. They don't have your reputation, they don't have your eyeballs, they're not listening to your existing customers, they don't have your link-backs, and if they copy just some of it, everything else will be inconsistent and people recognize it.

5. "Having money" doesn't mean they can write a decent product or run a decent marketing campaign or get people to notice them or get people to like them or execute anything else internal to the business.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: The "what if there's a competitor" question, whether about open source, bootstrapped startup, funded startup, or existing company, IS TRUE OF EVERY SOFTWARE COMPANY THAT EVER EXISTED.

That alone is proof enough that it's an irrelevant question.

A GOOD question is: What makes you special? What about you would be HARD to copy? Stuff like that.

Re: What drives this entrepreneur? Overconfidence and poop dreams

Jason Cohen — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:06:16 -0000

It's true that "starting" isn't the hard part, unless part of that means "leave your day job," in which case the clock is ticking and it really is a big choice.

It's also true that these first few months... OK 12-24 months -- are really hard and will test you. Besides the "sacrifice health" article that you generously linked to (thanks!), may I suggest this article that lists 10 specific hardships you encounter and how to address them, and laments that most business bloggers don't talk about them at all:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/blo...

I'm glad you're fessing up -- it helps everyone to know that their pain is shared.

Also kudos for the awesome post title! :-)