Simplicity is hard because complexity happens.

I love where meteor is headed. There are now a ton of really good open source apps that can quickly be deployed to container hosts like Amazon, Modulus and Heroku. It's starting to feel a lot like something is emerging that could replace the LAMP stack... and it's high time that happened.

This last week has been ... awesome. First, we added a new founder to Work Here: Howard Bates. Then we incorporated in Delaware and registered to do business in Indiana. Somehow during all of that we managed to get our first customer lined up.

Side note: It is amazing how much paperwork is involved in setting up a company.

Expecting a sale on the first call is like expecting to get married on the first date. Instead of focusing on getting the sale in the first interaction, focus on getting the opt-in.

A few years ago, I blogged that you should code in a language you like.

Six years later, I'm glad I followed that advice. It's so much easier to enjoy life when you enjoy work... mainly because for at least 40 hours a week, life is work.

Once you hit the startup scene, no matter what city you are in, you'll notice one thing:

There are a ton of awful startups.

Remember, the founders, funders and people connected to even an awful startup can help you.

Be nice. Be honest. It pays off.

What Your Technical Cofounder Isn't Telling You

Here are a few whoppers that I've overheard other technical cofounders telling their non-technical cofounder:

We need to have our own servers.

Call me maybe. Right now it's really inexpensive to start on cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and a host of other cloud platforms. Self-hosting means your dev team / cofounder will be spending a chunk of time managing hardware instead of building new features.

The cloud is too expensive

This might be true for your startup. You might be the color of unicorn that happens to have a couple $50,000 servers laying around and just needs a data center.

But development time costs $1-$2/minute. Amazon's biggest, baddest instance costs around $5.50 per hour (it's a lot less if you commit to a [reserved instance])(http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/).

We should build on iOS only.

iOS is awesome. But it's like only selling to people who buy luxury cars. That's 11% of the market. Yes, there's more money there, but the rest of the market behaves differently. Usually the motivation for not wanting to go to market on other platforms is simple: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

X is Awesome and Everything Else Terminally Sucks

This really means, I only know X, and I'm unwilling to learn anything else. Get a new cofounder, or you'll end up doing so later on when you have to migrate off X.

The two rules of marketing:

1. Do something.
2. Do it better next time.

I've been doing a lot of JavaScript lately... and had a chance to spend some time on VPSpay.com - a really mature Python app.

Wow, Python is clean.

It's so easy to pick up Python and just start coding. Readable code really helps.