How to Build a Web Startup

Steve Blank has another distillation of the startup process.  I love this stuff!  It's like popcorn.

Business model development

The NY Times just published a fascinating article on a guy who sold reviews for ebooks on Amazon, B&N, and other venues.  It didn't last long (goes against Amazon's ToS) but at its peak he was drawing $28,000 a month.

I love reading about business hacks like that.

Here's an exercise for the reader (and for me, should I ever get the time) - design the business processes for that business, including any interface code for the various roles (reviewer, author, etc.) and the interface code to Amazon for submission and tracking of reviews.  (That latter should be done with Javascript in the reviewer's own browser.)

It should be brain dead easy to design and iterate a business of this nature.  Less than a day, at most, between idea and execution.  That's my goal.

Update: just realized I saw the same story in an NLP context last week: textual analysis to determine whether a review is false or not, with the same usual counterintuitive linguistic markers.

Adapting price points for SaaS

Patrick Mackenzie again, this time with an article about adapting price points in software as a service.  He's all about the autostartup.