That's why I will never invest any money in your company (opens in new tab)

"Even if you have 100,000 users and 1,000 pay for your paid account. If you charge $10 per month, you are still making only 10k per month, barely making the salary of one person. No one will invest in a company like that."

If I have a side project pulling in 10K a month, I don't really care if nobody wants to invest. I've already succeeded.

While I agree that most of the "review my <whatever>" here are pretty Lame I must say that this post entirely misses the point.

So what if the authors of these project chooses to call them startups. Nobody has a right or the power to decide what is a startup or not.

Especially not some guy with a whiny attitude.

The tone of your post smells of too much hate. You sound like someone who could write a cool-headed post explaining when you think startups should try to raise money and when they should just enjoy the passive income from a weekend project.

Also, don't forget the biggest hit of this decade(facebook) was a college kid's side project just some years ago. As was twitter. And many others.

Are the people who are making "weekend startups" asking for investment money? Post seems more against weekend projects as "startups" than investments.

So you've got this little website you run from your dorm room at college. Something to let all your little friends chat back and forth.

I not only don't want to invest in your little 'startup' but don't ever call me again young mister Zuckerberg.

That's ok, I probably don't want any money from you if you can't even keep your own website online ;)

Facebook was a dorm room project, which you could argue originally fell into the 'non-startup' category. There are many, many examples of how your vision at start may be entirely different than where you end up, and its often difficult to see how that path looks when you are standing at the starting line. "Stuff happens" when you execute.

Also, the quality of a start-up should not be measured against scale potential. How a VC sees the world is deeply influenced by their own goals of 10x returns. A cynic might say that VC's promoting this view do so to produce more fuel for their business model.

This raises an interesting question actually. What works better, scratching your own itch (hobby project) and then putting a business idea around it (e.g. http://www.couch.io/) or putting business first? I think some VCs might prefer putting business first.

I suspect the prior works better but may need some patience. I have a bunch of projects in various stages of completion and now I am working on (enjoying!) something new and hoping to make it useful.

IMO make-something-useful and then bother about business should work better, but then I haven't made much using this approach yet.

*A company to make money based on advertising has to be able to reach a very large audience. Do you think that your application that your geek friends like is going to be like that? If not, forget the “ads” model.8

Is this actually true? It would seem to me that ads could work for a small, but focused web site, because the ads could be targeted really well.

The weekend project is a good way to find out what it takes to work a project from start to finish. Then when you get a group together you have already been-there-done-that once before, just on a smaller scale.

> Real startups (companies) are in business to make money!

What about twitter and youtube?

mirror?