12 years ago I founded my first startup. Everything was impossible. I literally had to invent every piece of it myself. The only thing we got free back then was a copy of Linux. Everything else we had to pay for or basically invent on our own. Just hosting a simple video clip about our server appliance was going to cost us a fortune if more than 1000 people watched it. And since we had to develop everything ourselves it took several months to get the smallest idea off the ground.
Today I can have an enterprise ready application with a distribution channel, online/mobile multi-media broadcasting capabilities, unlimited space and bandwidth, with all the social bells and whistles ready over a weekend. And it's all free, or almost free.
Between the Amazon AWS, Google Applications, WordPress, Facebook APIs, Google Maps, and YouTube alone I am probably saving millions of dollars in infrastructure. Think about it! Ten years ago in order to put together a video streaming application, I would have to build a huge server farm, buy some ridiculous amount of bandwidth and space, and then pay a few dozen developers to develop an application for me. Today I just embed a piece of code from a 3rd party API and I'm on my way. These applications have also reduced the launch time required for new ideas from months to days. There is really no excuse for not trying to execute a new idea these days.
The challenge has gone from creating something, to creating something that's earth-shattering enough to garner the attention of a few hundred thousand people. The nice thing now is that you can try your idea right away, if it doesn't work, then you can move on to the next idea. This level of agility is increasing in a break-neck pace and the number of products on the market has exponentially increased over the past three years.
As an investor, when startups tell me that they need millions of dollars to develop their app nowadays I turn and run for the hills. There is absolutely nothing that should cost that much to do a real proof of concept. Recently, with DishClips, I realized that most of what we were working the hardest on was available for free from FourSquare. I have since realized that there are very few things that we need to develop on our own. Information is freely available all around us. It's the ingenuity it takes to turn that information into actionable decisions that adds value. And doing that, often costs very little.
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