This is why I don’t like reading Guy Kawasaki. Here is a guy who was great for Apple, but has no experience building a company, yet loves to distill terrible startup advice. His book is a compilation of startup clichés and his blog is a rehash of the same.
Truemors, is his latest project, and Guy is running around hyping how amazing it is that he built it for 12k. I am happy for him that he is getting some hands on experience, and on the whole he is a pretty smart guy. My problem with him shouting and screaming about how little it costs to start a business is that he is giving false hope to thousands of people out there who think they can build a Google with that kind of money.
Forget about whether Truemors is a good site or not, the point is those 12 thousand dollars were entirely spent on developing the software and legal fees. That’s not a business. Heck, there are countless high school kids who could build the same thing for 2k. How do they then get distribution? How do they generate revenue? How do they put together a sales team?
A little website is nothing but a little website. Guy is maybe one of a handful of people who can get the kind of exposure he did. Almost no one else can, and so they will need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on PR, Marketing, Business Development deals to get the traction he did.
I have made a lot of these points before, as have some other people. It’s just irresponsible of Guy to misinform and misdirect aspiring entrepreneurs this way. If someone has 15k saved up, they shouldn’t start a business thinking that will be enough…don’t encourage that kind of very dangerous behavior, because this is why the startup failure rate is so high.
Stop evangelizing yourself and let us use the power of blogs to disseminate real, from the trenches, information that is actually helpful.
Popularity: 80% [?]
June 5th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Good points. Agreed.
(There certainly are a lot of people who spend millions on technology that should cost far, far less but that doesn’t change what you said.)
Keep it up.
–D
June 6th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Great post — this earned you another subscription to this blog.
Other things that guy missed out on was necessary personal expenses that will hit the entrepreneur in college regardless of savings — rent etc.