Believe what you will

There have been a couple emails/comments that flat out claim I’m full of shit:

You’re full of shit. This is a prank.

Why is it unbelievable that a Web 2.0 startup founder would anonymously blog his rants? People don’t doubt the waiterrant guy is a waiter. Waiters aren’t that different from tech startup founders–they’re all broke twenty five year olds. At this point, anyone can start a Web 2.0 company in a few simple steps:

1. Think of a completely nonsense name. Like Squidoo.
2. Put up a landing page that says “BETA” and “WEB 2.0″ and as many other buzzwords as you can think of. Some good buzzwords: RSS, Alpha, Tags, Social Network, Mike Arrington, podcast, Google-please-buy-us.
3. Find a application space that’s completely saturated with other 2.0 startups. Some good places to start looking: RSS readers, online collaborative word processors, or calendars.
4. Troll the internet for dhtml/js scripts that were originally written in 2001.
5. Cram as many of said scripts into your application as possible, in order to Ajaxify it.
6. Launch Beta.
7. Optional: Think up a plausible way you’ll theoretically meet your burn rate if you get to the 300k users mark.

Believe it or not, anyone can do this. It isn’t hard, and those who have made the leap from out-of-work hacker to Web 2.0 entrepreneur-hacker are not the second coming of Christ, despite what you might believe. But that’s just my take on it.

Get out of my space

When we first started the company, there were no other Web 2.0 startups in our space. I will even dare to say that we had a fairly original idea. Now, much less than a year later, there are no less than 7 companies doing the same thing we are. Some people might say that in all odds the founders of those companies probably had the idea near the same time we did. Some people might also say that one of the great things about a free market like the internet is that anyone can compete, and those who deserve to will rise to the top.

Publicly, as a libertarian and Lassez-faire capitalist I can't help but agree with these sentiments. Privately, as a jealous asshole, I say: GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SPACE. Seriously, since we started our company I've thought of at least five ideas I would work on full time that nobody else is doing (several of them that I'd rather be working on). Mike Arrington posted a bunch of ideas here. I'm sure there are most lists of ideas out there. All I ask is that you find one of them, and stay the fuck out of my space!

startup rant launches beta

I am living the Web 2.0 dream. That is, I am working 80 hours a week for just enough to pay food and rent, and living under constant fear that either Google is going to launch a competing service that slaughters our user base leaving only bones in its wake, or Bubble 2.0 will burst before we've had a pay day and I'll be just as broke as when I started, except even broker. This is not what I expected I would end up doing.

Last year I co-founded an internet startup with a good friend of mine. It is in the heart of Web 2.0. Its about sharing. It does RSS feeds. Its built on AJAX. It has a cute-sounding, non-English-word domain name. We have, in the past, claimed to be in "beta" (even though this was a complete lie and meaningless). It only works in two browsers, and doesn't degrade at all. We roll out features that sometimes break for more users than not, because we never bothered to put together good QA/Test. We don't have revenue, haven't bothered thinking too hard about revenue, and don't really understand finance very well at all.

I am starting this blog for a few reasons:

1. Right now I spend 90% of my waking hours at work and I need a place to let off steam. For example, today I woke up, went to the office, worked until 7pm, went to the gym, went BACK to the office, and stayed until 12:30am. I'm going to use this as a forum to bitch about startups, the internet, google, the poor state of our finances, etc.
2. As far as I know, there isn't anyone else doing this. Of course, I haven't looked very hard. I actually haven't looked at all (I may do a technorati search after writing this post). Sure, there are a lot of startups that have company blogs (mine included), but most of these are just used as PR mouthpieces (mine included). I want to give people an honest, insiders look at how my life has been consumed by a tech startup monster.
3. I've always wanted a blog, but have so far had no time since I've been working on my startup 24/7. The last time I went on a date (months ago), I realized I have nothing to talk about any more besides my company. Since I no longer am interesting as a person beyond my work, I figured I should probably just stick to that.

I am writing all this anonymously because I want to be able to say things that would in all probability piss the hell out of my employees/investors/co-founder/users if I said them in public. This is the coward's way out. I acknowledge that. But you don't see the guys at Writely announcing that now that they sold the company they can kick back, stop doing shit, and buy the Lincoln Navigator they always wanted. I can truthfully promise that if we sell our company, you'll be treated to thousands of hi-res photos from every conceivable angle of my new Navi sitting on Spreewells.

A note on my shitty WordPress theme: I sit at my computer for 12 hours a day every fucking day, so if you think I'm going to spend time figuring out how to prettify this blog, you, my friend, are sorely mistaken (this was the least ugly theme I could find on my cursory glance through the system).