Eric Ries

I'm going to take a guess because I'm obviously not part of your core team so I have no inside knowledge to how or what your doing.

As other have posted in classic purple cow speak [1], you build a better product and remember "your product is not THE product"[2]. Part of Ash's lean canvas[3] even has a spot for alternatives which may even include competitors. The focal point is you need to start testing everything so you can:
create a customer feedback loop of _learning_[4][4b].

Ash's model is a variant of the original "Business Model Canvas" which is also very good. I would urge you and everyone to LOOK at the examples and iterations of these models on the main site[5].

Some of the questions you start asking in this exercise are:
- What is the problem your solving, and what are the possible solutions?
- How will you reach customers, who are the early adopters?

Its never too late, and like I said actually the beginning of the exercise.

Even if you 'know this already', I would urge you to re-test and re-focus on your previous lean canvases/models. Success is in the finer details. Remember, you never stop learning about the customer. You want a 'specific' customer? You develop a strategy - focused on the problem.

So there you go, a 'teaser' on building a better product. Now go read Eric Ries's[6] book[7], Steve Blank's book[8] for overall strategy. See the business model generation book and site[9] (there is an ipad app!) for more finer details. There is also a…

Do you want to do this for fun or business? If purely for fun, then I don't see any major flaws in your current approach. Sure, you end up with unfinished projects but you're hopefully learning tons and having a blast.

But if you're thinking about structuring things so you can better go from ideas to businesses, you need to reevaluate your entire approach. You need tools that can practically guide you through the stages of creating a software business, not just a general philosophy of getting things done.

Currently in the startup world, there's an interesting convergence between customer development and lean as applied to tech startups. Customer development is described in Steven Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and Eric Ries' "The lean startup" is the book on lean startups. Both Blank and Ries have contributed to this convergence that I talk about at their respective sites [1] [2] but there's also overviews available [3] [4]. But why am I even recommending these two approaches? Because they cover business development from start to finish from as applied to software startups, so you know the advice is specific to our industry and very practical in nature. If you're serious about the business of software, customer development and lean startup will help you create a business with better certainty of execution and outcome. Together they provide a very potent combination of roadmap and compass, and principles and philosophy.

[1] http://steveblank.com/

[2]…

http://highscalability.com/ is a great resource for building scalable sites - it has consolidated architectural details (culled from presentations, blog posts, interviews, and more) for many large-scale sites (YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc).

As for testing environments, take a look into the principles of continuous integration (many resources available) and continuous deployment (especially Eric Ries's blog: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/). Some tools commonly used to this effect: Git/SVN for source control; Hudson/Cruise Control/Team City for builds; Selenium for testing.

Finally, applying patches and updates to a server falls into the domain of systems administration, so I'd suggest looking for articles on patching/updating high-availability sites. Note, however, that cloud computing is a huge game-changer here. Whereas at many enterprises, applying patches is an arduous (and tedious) quarterly effort culminating in an late-night maintenance window with many hands on deck (all crossing their fingers), clouds afford their adopters the ability to simply fire up new, updated servers alongside the old ones, allowing them to be thoroughly tested in place before any traffic is redirected.

-Mike (@mikebabineau)

It's hard to answer that question because so much depends on your specific circumstances but I'll try. I'm assuming you're able to do your own programming because $1000 won't get you very far if you need to hire developers.

Find an area where you think you can provide something of value. It could be a hobby or a problem in your community. Figure out how to solve it and have a go. Get feedback early and keep an open mind try lots of things and understand what's working and why.

If you don't already know patio11's Bingo Card Creator story, then probably the best advice you will find is on his website:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/

Read the earlier ones on how to prioritize your time and validate your work (the more recent posts are more geared towards SEO and marketing).

Also Eric Rees's blog about the Minimal Viable Product approach:
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

But you've been on HN for a while, so you probably already know all that?

I wanted to share this blog post from a friend and entrepreneur, who was new to the idea of Lean Startups (you should read Eric Ries's blog Startup Lessons Learned here: http://startuplessonslearned.com). He attended the Paris simulcast of the Startup Lessons Learned conference ten days ago, and this very detailed and personal blog post is his first take on these ideas.

I think some of use are very familiar with this new frame of mind now, and may have forgotten how powerful such ideas felt when we encountered them for the first time. It's very, very exciting to see the potential of the lean approach through his own eyes, and I wanted to share it with YC.

Do you think the impact of such ideas will be felt at the scale of the whole startup industry, or even beyond? I wonder what the impact of this movement will be on management science as a whole?

If you haven't, read up on Lean Startup/Eric Reis(http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/) and also Sean Ellis(http://startup-marketing.com/).

I particularly like the free survey tool provided by Sean Ellis at http://survey.io. Basically it gives you an idea whether you have a service that you can charge for.

Bottomline:
(1) don't assume your product will sell(be open to changing almost every aspect of it)
(2) test, modify, test more whether your product can sell
(3) don't scale marketing until you know from a smaller data sample that there is demand for your product. Simply put, don't scale till for every dollar of marketing spend, you can make more than a dollar. Ignoring that last piece will lead you to having no money in the bank in little time(cough last bubble).