Starting up in 2010

Whilst in an airport newsagent this holiday season I ventured away from my usual selection of publications and picked up a copy of .inc magazine.  As I expected, the issue was yawn-worthy - in it was a piece (why oh why did Time Inc shut down Business 2.0?) entitled 'Five years of Start-up Insanity' that described some hurdles a chap by the name of Philip Walker experienced whilst attempting to launch a new Life Insurance company.

The piece itself didn't get me thinking too much - but it did trigger some reflections on projects I launched under the Design Guru banner this past year and whether or not they were themselves capable of being 'start-ups' - in the tech/business community there's a lot of hyped lingo and expectations around what that term entails which, in the rapid world of agile-(web)development is easy to ignore.

I haven't quite written out a list of New Year's Resolutions for 2010 but when I do, I'm certainly going to include 'take another look at the projects Design Guru has started and incubated (http://designguru.org/project-incubator) over the past few years to asses their potential for financial sustainability'.

You see, in-between developing projects for clients its always fun to develop new skills and ways of thinking by very quickly trying to solve a problem on the web without being hindered by a profit motive - but once that solution's first iteration is live we often don't find regular time to go through further iterations or ('development rounds') which could turn these passion projects into vehicles for turning profit...

Perhaps some articles Om Malik just posted will help this thinking process... More to come soon...

The Essential Startup Reader: 10 Lessons In Entrepreneurship:
http://gigaom.com/2010/01/02/startup-company-lessons/