How many employees do you have? Where is your office? How much venture capital have you raised? How much will you exit for? In the past, business was all about size.
Right now though you don’t need any of those to create a compelling business. If you’re a web developer with a decent idea you can put your time into the venture and with minimal infrastructure and expenses (webhosting is virtually free now) build a service that has thousands of users.
Twitpic is one great example of a single guy creating massive value with a simple web service.
Noah Everett (@noaheverett) started the site in 2008 to extend the successful system that Twitter was building. Twitter lets you write short text messages and Twitpic builds on this by letting you upload a photo and then link to it from your message. The value this adds is huge. I quite often use it when I’m out and about to share what I’m seeing.
I might be watching commandos rope from a Blackhawk are the Avalon Airshow,
Or listening to someone speak at The Hive,
Maybe I found Michael wearing his twitter shirt,
Working with someone to make an opinion heard,
Saving birds,
But mostly it’s about eating and drinking.
I love the fact that there is just one guy behind it, that he is proud of that and that it is sustainable. He doesn’t need fancy corporate office space because his apartment does the job just fine – here’s the tour.
In this world it doesn’t matter if you are just one guy working from your couch with an internet connection and a few servers somewhere. As long as you can keep your site running and keep your users satisfied you can run a successful business. Now you can use your small size to your advantage.
Twitpic is currently growing at 6,000 users per day.
By Ross Hill - March 18th, 2009 at 6:26pm with 1,148 views - noah everett twitpic
