Successful and Unsuccessful Start-Ups

I have a new start-up project underway, and I’m really excited about it. I have been lucky enough to get some fabulous people on board to work with me on it – some old salt collaborators of mine on LibriVox and other projects, as well as some new talented and smart people. And the project, I think, will be great.

As we progress in this very early phase, I though it was worth taking a peek at this old presentation I did for DemoCamp last year, about my experiences with Collectik.net, my first commercial web project. I still think Collectik was a great idea (so great that google reader’s shared items implemented the base principles a year after us, but they have a slightly bigger budget). We built good technology too, and really, when you got into it, the UI was solid and understandable. But it was hard for people to “get in,” and because of various mistakes and lack of resources Collectik never really got off the ground.

This presentation looks at some of the mistakes we made, and suggests some ideas about how to make a successful, rather than unsuccessful web project.

Nice to jog the memory a little bit.