A short manifesto for web startups

1. You must run it successfully with a handful of people, possibly just one

One myth about startups is that they take a lot of people to create. The opposite is closer to the truth. You need a small number of talented people to keep the noise down, to avoid dilution, and to solve the hard problem of making something simple.

On the web you need someone with peerless graphic design sensitivities, one great developer, and possibly someone leading you and the idea. This can be three people, two people that can finish each other’s sentences, or one uncommon individual with…

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Thoughts on building social software in .NET

Social software is, before anything, just software. Presuming we have a goal of developing a social application in .NET, we can deliver that goal however we wish. That said, there remains a growing number of people who are actively searching for guidance on how to build social networking applications (and their better-dressed cousins, web 2.0 startups) in .NET. I offered some quick suggestions in the past, but they were a little bit-specific.

Choosing .NET

I believe that .NET is both an excellent choice for startups and a strong platform for social software. Where it seems to lack the most is adoption, which…

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Books vs. blogs: the value of technical books and ideas to improve them

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Six recommendations for starting a startup with ASP.NET

Update [04/22/2008]: Now includes a bonus recommendation!

There seems to be a well-deserved observation that very few web startups are making use of ASP.NET, choosing instead to leverage more open platforms like LAMP, and ROR. As a web developer who has launched a startup in ASP.NET, I have to admit that there is some truth to the difficulties presented in the discussions that exist online (here are three examples), and as an ASP.NET startup developer, I’ll offer five recommendations for you if you plan on going this route, not based on simple personal preference (I disobeyed many of these to the detriment of my…

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