FIXZR

Before founding your own consumer facing start-up, I suggest you ask the following two questions:-

1) How many start-ups to you use yourself?

2) How old was the start-up(s) you use when you first became a customer?

My guess is that for many people the answer to 1) is close to zero, and that the answer to 2) is close to 3-4 years, meaning the company was far from ‘new’ and probably well behind plan (FYI Twitter was founded in 2006, and Facebook came out in 2004)! Worse still, I’ll guess that you probably became a user after the company had secured multi-million pound VC investment, and not as part of a boot-strapped, garage led, marketing offensive (FYI, in Twitter’s case it raised around $5 in Mid 2008).

My heavily leading questions are not designed to put people off consumer facing start-ups, but simply to highlight the time required to breakthrough to the masses, and the millions of pounds behind the big successes despite their ‘free’ virally led marketing dynamic. If you’d like it to be different, and great ideas to take off quickly and cheaply, make sure you yourself are using the best of the new stuff out there!