Jason Calacanis, conocido por su emprendimientos en internet de gran envergadura como Weblogs Inc o Mahalo, habia dejado de escribir en su blog y habia reducido su contacto con sus lectores a una lista de emails. Sin embargo no ha reisistido la tentacion de publicar su ultimo mail en el blog atendiendo al a demanda popular por leerlo. Y bien que lo hizo porque en el vuelca conceptos muy interesantes para todo emprendimiento de internet.

Copio aqui algunos pasajes destacados:

The Zero Cost Startup
==================
The major cost of a startup company today is very different today than
it was five short years ago. Five to ten years ago, the major costs
associated with a startup were servers, marketing, software,
infrastructure (i.e. office space, phones, etc) and, of course,
staffing. Today, many startups have little to no costs associated with
their servers because they are either hosting on cloud computing
platforms like EC2 and Google Apps or they are running commodity
hardware (i.e. $1,500 servers) at co-location locations (i.e. they buy
a rack for $2-5k a month). Previously, companies would fork over
$2,500 per server per month rental fees at “managed hosting” services.
That era of a $20-30k a year server is ending as folks realize they
are not getting full value from managed hosting services and that they
have cloud computing and co-location options.

Additionally, today’s startups don’t seem obsessed with office space
and associated infrastructure. This means the marginal cost of a
startup company is now, essentially, the time of the people involved.
Five folks can co-locate/co-work at a Starbucks or their homes, build
a full application on a cloud computing platform and market their
service on StumbleUpon or AdBrite and be done with it.

The Age of the Microstartup
==================
The zero cost startup has led to the age of the “microstartup.” It’s
no longer two folks in a garage hoping to build a prototype in order
to land a huge VC round, then getting millions of dollars to build out
an office. Microstartups are sustainable from prototype to launch and
on to a core user base, all for around $5-10,000 in costs.

Microstartups are amazing because they can try ten different things
over a year with very little pressure to “break out.” This leads to a
lot of people taking a lot more risk, stating a lot more crazy ideas.
Which leads me to my next trend.

The “Try Everything” Era
==================
If the marginal cost of a business is people’s time, a lot more ideas
are going to be tested. There are a lot of technical people out there
who either have some free time after their day job, or who live on
Ramen noodles, having already quit their day job. The result of
everything being tried will be that every startup with any level of
traction will be copied. I’ve seen dozens of folks “riff off”–as
opposed to “rip off”–ideas from Twitter, digg, Mahalo and FriendFeed.

Everyone is “riffing off” Twitter today, including the winner of TC50,
Yammer. Yammer is, truth be told, a much more monetizable version of
Twitter, and that is the reason why we Michael and I selected them as
the winner of TC50. Yammer might be derivative of Twitter, but anyone
who has ten people from their company in Yammer right now can tell
you, it’s a MASSIVE game changer. Is it the most innovative of the
TC50? Of course not, but we give the award for the winner of TC50 to
the company we think will be the most successful. Last year, we
selected Mint, and they are clearly one of the two most successful
companies from the TC40 event (along with Powerset, which was bought
by Microsoft).

Bottom line: Everything will be tried, everything will be “riffed
off.” In this environment, your job as a startup founder is to monitor
as many products and feature sets in the marketplace as possible, in
order to figure out what is working–or could work.

Features Over Brands & Businesses
==================
Microstartups and the “riff off” culture have created a new category
of startup based not on a brand or a revenue stream, but rather a
feature.

Until you have 10,000 folks a day coming directly to your domain name,
you’re not a brand.

Make Media Time
==================
In a down market, people with free time get creative. The blogging
boom was not born out of a technological innovation–far from it. In
fact, blogging-style software existed for almost 10 years before the
boom. Blogging broke out because so many folks were laid off–and
pissed off–that they took the time to write down their thoughts.

Flickr didn’t boom because it was the first photo-sharing site. It
boomed because in the 2003-2005 period, a lot of underemployed folks
were traveling and wanted to share their photos.

Bottom line: In a down market, folks get fidgety and look for
something creative to do.

Wrapping up
==================
Even with the down market, a looming recession and global instability,
there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Fortunes are
made off companies that are built–or that build marketshare–in the
down market. Be brave, be bold and go for it!

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