Todd Garland of BuySellAds.com recently published 10 Key Takeaways from Getting Real:
The book is AWESOME. Really, if you are building, have built, or work on ANY product (web-based or not) you must read this book. I could have titled this “50 Takeaways” and gone on much longer, there is just so much good content in this book. It’s short, to the point, and is a great way to find some inspiration and new ideas to give you a little extra hop in your step. Please, go read it now: Getting Real.
One takeaway Todd mentions is "Constraints force creativity / Stay lean"...
When I first launched BSA I was working another full-time job. And, being the honest chap that I am I could only work on BSA before 9am and after 7pm (I was at another startup that I was truly passionate about too, so it wasn’t the standard 9-5). That meant waking up at 5 or 5:30 and answering support emails, all of them, and then working on the site late at night. Having those time and bandwidth constraints forced me to be really good at solving problems quickly. Which, in turn, helped set the pace for quality support here at BSA.
Another: "Don’t sweat the small stuff at first, just get something live"...
Who cares if it’s NOT going to scale - worry about that when you get there. Surely, if you need to scale your app because it’s growing quickly and bursting at the seams, you will figure it out. Do you think we planned to serve billions of impressions per month when we first launched BSA? No way, but it became a possibility very quickly and we then figured out how to scale (and we’re still figuring out how to scale it beyond that now).
