A few weeks ago, I was reading a special article on AM NY (the free daily newspaper) on the 10 best technology start-ups in NYC. As someone who lives in New York, and operate a profitable tech start-up, I eagerly finished the article. Near the end of the page, I saw this:
“The 10 start-up companies were selected based on the amount of venture capital raised, and presented in alphabetical order.” I felt I have just wasted my time.
It fells like the last time the general media followed this thought process was during the late 90s dot com bubble, when every company with the .com suffix followed a systematic road-map. Angel investors, venture capital, investment bankers, fortune. Yet somewhere missing in the process was the keyword that defines success, in the traditional sense: Profit.
Many of these start-ups speak about creating the next twitter, and how after burning millions of dollars in VC money, they are trying to come up with ways to “monetize their current success”. This is mind boggling to me. If they don’t even have a concrete plan to monetize when they took on the venture capital, then what have they been doing?
I believe the root problem is in how people perceive the venture capitalists. Some people like to think of VC as the definition of success, but that’s not entirely accurate. VCs don’t go for base hits, they swing for the fences. Which means, for those less well versed in baseball, VC will make big money on a few deals, but fail on many other deals at the same time. Ultimately, they count on the successful exits to be a larger dollar figure than the failures.
Some research states that a third of start-ups going through the VC stage fails, so 3 of the start-ups mentioned in the papers shall be gone in a few years or so.
VCs can be described as legalized loan sharks, tempting you with capital (be it necessary or not), and taking controlling stakes in your company. In fact I would say that perhaps many of the third died because the founders lost control, and the passion of working to break even. It’s difficult to maintain that level of focus when you have just picked up a few million dollars and can now afford to pay yourself a nice salary.
Which leads us to another issue, is what to do with all that money? Hiring outside talent blindly disrupts the start-up atmosphere, and having all the advertising dollars makes it less necessary to come up with marketing that will set your company apart. Then there are the Herman Miller chairs that all of these companies end up getting….
It so happens that my day job and my start-up are both profitable, and without any assistance from Venture Capitalists. The drive to break even, without a hefty padding in the bank account, has forced these companies to thrive and excel in tough conditions.
For aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to follow the traditional road-map, make sure to add “profit” on your way to success.
I’m pretty certain I’m speaking for most developers, but we hate testing. Like proof reading your own paper, not only can you never find your own errors, but the more you look at it, the less excited you get about your creation.
So some people choose to automate the testing process, through the solve it all word of the IT word (to managers at least), “Scripts”. There are now programmers who make a living designing testing scripts, and plenty of consultants out there who would gladly take your money to help you with some testing scripts.
Testing scripts are designed to mimic user behavior, and truly excels at stress testing. It can also successfully find many bugs that a user would encounter as he navigates your software or website. However, while a script might be able to find a 404 error, it wouldn’t know if a link is pointing to the wrong area, or that Chrome is rendering your image a few pixels off from where Firefox does it.
This is where human testing comes into play. Fact is, most of us never report bugs and glitches to the webmaster. For every time someone finds a glitch that actually report it, you know thousands have seen it. This is a huge loss of confidence for your product, unless you are Google or eBay, people seldom forgive glitches and continue with a purchase.
Pay4Bugs is a system designed to solve this problem. Our global team of testers use a wide variety of platforms, and each behave differently from the other. The key is our testers will report everything they see, so you can fix it before your real paying customers see the inevitable error.
The best part? Pay4Bugs is free to use.
