Web-Startups: Build Fast, Fail Fast

Are you looking for a fast way to raise money? Why not try a web-startup? It is quite cheap to build and it will give you almost instantaneous results.

A month ago I had an idea for a web platform. It failed. It failed fast. That’s OK. I’m glad I got that out of my system just with the lose of a few days out of my exquisite vacation.

This is basically how it went down

Because I use Java in my daily job, I went along with it as a choice for my project. Well, to be honest, this wasn’t the only reason. I could have picked Python or PHP, but I believed somewhat more into this project, so I wanted to use a faster programming language (scripting languages are known to be slow), you know, in case of success not to change too much infrastructure. Plus I got to learn some of the frameworks around it.

In other words: you are building a proof of concept! Choose a programming language that you are comfortable in. If something goes wrong at least you gained some experience in that area and, in my case, I also learned a framework or two. Do not learn a language just to make a proof of concept (unless what you are trying to do is not doable otherwise).

So! – Got the idea, established the language. Now, I need a free web hosting service. Boom! Google: Free Java web host. Boom! Openshift by Red Hat. Uuu! What’s this? Click!

Well, it appears Openshift is a Public Platform as a Service. And it has a free sign-up. Nice! In other words: In half an hour you have your very own web server up, you have your database up, continuous integrations tools, kinda’ all that you need and more. It has support for Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Go, Perl and others. So just with a few clicks I got Tomcat up, MySQL up and Jenkins up. Every user has its own Git repository. And another great thing: You get access to the file system containing the applications via SSH (I’m just a sucker for SSH). And it’s all free. All you have to do is to spend your time writing the app.

Cool! I got my dev environment for free. It’s time to start writing some code! But I don’t want to implement all the stuff it requires. It’s hard work, man! And it’s just a proof of concept, remember?!!
I don’t want to spent half a year writing security components and social integrations or other stuff that I dream of, just to prove that it can fly. I’ll go ahead and assume that there is a lot of free stuff around there that can help me. So I did some soul searching and found Spring. Well, it appears Spring is one of the best frameworks out there for Java. And luckily for me, it contains a web component (Spring MVC) which does the trick, it has social media integration (Spring social), a security component (Spring security) and a lot more that can be applied to satisfy other funky needs. Boom! It’s all there! And free! I just have to learn Spring and how to integrate all it’s components and I got my platform. Good thing Spring is open source and has an enormous community at its feet, right?

But wait, this solves only my back-end problems. What about front-end? I am not a front-end dev. I’m lucky enough to be a back-end dev. So what now? Bootstrap! Hmm… Great! I do not need a fancy design. It’s just a proof of concept. So what if it looks similar to other platforms? I will change it afterwards.

With only Openshift, Spring and Bootstrap I got all that I need for my first version of the app. I don’t really need the fanciest design out there. I don’t need the fastest app out there. I do not have the users yet.
Build the app as fast as you can! If it fails, great! Now you know something more about the technologies you’ve been using. If it works, great! Now you can do some profiling, detect where your bottlenecks are. Now is the moment to integrate a caching system or write your own security component or God knows what you need for your beautiful app. But now it makes perfect sense to get serious.

This is one way of doing things. Of course if you are without a background in tech, you will probably want to just setup a free CMS platform or whatever as fast as you can. That’s fine. Go nuts!

Web-startups are cheaper than ever. All you need to spend is time. And pay your electric bill at the end of the month. But you spent both of them anyway, so why not benefit from it?

 

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