One of the magical things that the internet has done for us is to reduce the fixed costs of starting a business so now they’re close-to-zero.
Everybody loves the way the internet has reduced the marginal cost of goods and levelled the playing field so anybody can take part.
When Derek Sivers first set up a shopping cart for CDbaby in the early 2000’s, it took thousands of dollars, face-to-face meetings with bankers, and weeks in development.
Now, fast-forward a decade and a half.
When I wanted to prelaunch The Tiny Product Manual, I set up a Podia account, connected Stripe, and was selling product 15 minutes later. I pay $30/mo for Podia and Stripe is so close to free that I don’t care about the cost.
Now, we’re so accustomed to the great democratisation of production / distribution / marketing / attention, that we take it for granted.
But what if it wasn’t that easy?
What if it still cost $10k to launch a website? or $20k to set up a company?
What would you do differently?
How much time would you spend figuring out what to work on?
How would you check?
How long would it take to get to cashflow positive?
How much runway could you bear?
How would you validate your idea?
How many products would you build?
100?
1?
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kudos to Peter Spaepen who first got me thinking about this.