I want a series of folders, each shareable with a difference group of people. The folders should be accessible via my naive drag-and-drop GUI in Windows and OS-X. They should also be accessible via my mobile and tablet. The folders should be automatically sync’ed over the internet (being hosted either locally or in the cloud).

The service would be a bit like drop-box, except it would allow multiple different ‘drop boxes’ per machine (with different sharing profiles). It also would have full integration with the host OS (for drag and drop in standard GUI). The fact that it could leverage local storage instead of cloud resources would help to keep the service costs (and therefore fees) nice and low.

I’d use the service to share photos with relatives (the kind who don’t use Facebook etc…) and documents amongst co-workers and across machines. It’s not much of an ask, but nothing seems to offer this setup in an easy to use way straight out of the (drop) box.

Marketing is tough, but playing with the product (your train set) is cool. You add a new feature, it’s there for you to see. You change the design and hey presto you’re achieving something. On the  , the 5 sales calls you made have gone nowhere. Over time, to keep your spirits up, you turn to the product for a bit of a pick me up. Soon your laying out all sorts of funky new train tracks and having a great time playing with Thomas and his Friends. The more fun with the train set, the less appealing those sales call seem - you may even be waiting for Version 2 before you make them (now this is a sure sign you’re in trouble, and need to put Thomas, Percy and James away).

To avoid ending up like a chimp in a cage playing with his what-nots, make sure to set hard boundaries and objectives for externally facing activities. If you don’t have the luxury of having dedicated departments to perform each function, make sure you are forcing yourself to allocate enough of your day to each task. This is not rocket science, but it is easy to go astray. Be proud of you product now* and go sell.

* eBay and Twitter never got round to site design or graphics consulting, yet they are all doing fine and will sort these problems out later!

Now I started using the product and (despite some infuriating annoyances when I couldn’t witch it off) was impressed by some of the use cases it could enable. For example, I ‘bumped into’ people reading web-pages about IE6 browser testing - how else would I find such people, and find them at a time when they’re ready to chat about such things (the temporal nature of he interactions is actually very useful).

Weblins however suffers from some limitations, not least that it is new and prone to the negative side of the network effect. I’d like to see a similar service based on Twitter and Skype. Perhaps a Firefox plugin that showed all Twitter comments relating to a web-page, and (through email look-up) the Skype IDs of anyone who Tweeted in the last few minutes about the page. If you build it, I will come (if you find an effective marketing channel that can reach met that is).

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!

I now view ’start-up’ in a very different way. The risks I knew from before all still stand (in fact I’d be even more wary on some fronts), but at a personal level I can’t imagine a more rewarding and dynamic environment to work in. But should big businesses work with them? - Yes, but just not for mission critical services perhaps! What a start-up can do for you with £/€/$40k is amazing, that amount wouldn’t even buy you a quote from a large corporate (someome has to pay for the coffees you know). I look forward to seeing more ‘dating’ services to bring start-ups to the attention of relevant businesses (something the better VC’s do well for their portfolio companies).

The other area I used to pooh-pooh the word ’start-up’ was on people CV’s (I’ve changed my view now I’m on the other side of the fence you’ll be surprised to hear). I think I equated ’start-up’ experience to being semi-unemployed/unemployable! However it is (with the odd exception) untrue, in fact the qualities I assumed lacking (drive, commitment, team leadership) are in fact perhaps even more present in those betting on themselves (an inspiring others) in start-ups.