10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me
People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say
You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options
Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone
My head spins thinking about how much is changing in our world right now

Ex:

- Millions of creators who need support
- Communities that are ripe for tokenization
- ↑ social commerce
- ↑ sustainability products
- ↑ internet usage across the globe

This won’t last forever
Everything is unbundling before our eyes

- Facebook groups
- eBay
- Zoom
- Etsy
- Reddit
- Udemy

What a wonderful time to be building a startup
No-code/low-code tools

Launching isn’t the hard part anymore. It’s community building
There's so much available to learn online

The right Discord servers or Podcasts are worth 10x more than a Harvard Business Degree

Bonus: it's a pandemic. You have more time. Seize the day and find these sacred sources of wisdom
You can attract niches easier than ever

Start with the community, then build software

vs.

Start with software, then build community

Point: you increase your odds of success by building community-first
You can run a $100m/year business from your iPhone

I have a friend who’s company makes $100m/yr

Facts:
- He started it in 2018
- It’s niche
- Unbundled from a FB Group
- Moved from SF to Malta because he likes the vibe
- He runs his entire biz from his iPhone on an island!
I hope you enjoyed this thread

If it gave you a little extra confidence to start/join that startup, I'm extra happy

Or if you disagree with me and think this is a terrible time to be building. Prove me wrong

Either way, follow me on Twitter @gregisenberg for more threads
I write a free newsletter where I share more detailed posts about startup insights, community-led product building and internet communities

If you think it's a good time for startups, you'll enjoy what I write there

https://t.co/F3G2HRaeqB

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There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.

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