Startup Success Podcast, Open Source For-Profit Startups, One Laptop Per Child 2008, and $19 Usability Testing

The Startup Success Podcast – After the demise of The Micro-ISV Show, Bob Walsh is back discussing issues affecting software startups. A good weekly listen.

Open Source, For-Profit Startups – “FairSoftware is the place to start and grow your online business. We help you team with others, track revenue and share it openly and fairly. Hire people in return for a share of your income stream instead of upfront cash. You save money and they have more incentive to collaborate.”

One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One 2008 – For $399 you get one XO laptop for yourself, and one is sent to a child in a developing nation. The keyboards are small, but they run Linux and have wireless NICs.

$19 Usability Testing -  This is awesome. For around $19 (you can add bonus money to get your tests completed faster), you get a 15-minute video of a real user going through your site or web app, and a written summary of their findings. I’ve used it on two projects and it has raised a slew of issues we had no idea people would have problems with. Definitely worth a look.

And finally, from Paul Graham’s essay Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (emphasis added):

If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s a rounding error compared to the founders.

Startups for the Rest of Us...
If you're trying to launch or grow your startup you've come to the right place. I'm a serial web entrepreneur here to share what I've learned in my 11 years as a self-funded tech entrepreneur. Luckily several thousand people have decided to stick around and listen.

I cover topics that affect software and web startups of all sizes, but mostly relating to startups you can fund yourself. For more on my story and the purpose of all this, visit the about page.