Marilyn A. Bosito                                    07/01/08 0A                                  OOA

SYANAL

Chapter 15-17

           

Case Study in:

 Viaweb/ Paul Graham

del.icio.us/ Joshua Schachter

 ONelist/Bloglines/ Mark Fletcher

 

 

Before I don’t hear anything about Viaweb, and as I read the story of Paul Graham in his startup Viaweb I learned that it started in 1995 together with his friends Robert Morris, they did it to make software for building online stores. They launched at the beginning of 1996. Viaweb is one of the first companies deliver on the Web’s promise of creating level playing field .Using Viaweb software , small business could make online stores as good as those built by catalog companies ,. And many did by 1998; Viaweb store was the most popular e-commerce software. It acquired by Yahoo in June 1998 and remained in Yahoo store. Viaweb start as startup through the problem about art galleries online, Graham and Morris realized that if they could write software that could generates sites for galleries , everyone seemed want to be online stores.

 

During they work in Viaweb they felt it was pretty excited, because for them it means they can start a company without having to learn windows. The first people they showed demo are the their some potential inventors, they initialize not to make money from their, because they wanted  majority share of the company for a comparatively small amount of money, but the existence of these potential investors did spur to them to write the first version and to get the demo working.

 

They first customer are a pair of technical bookstores. Their relationship with their first customer, they felt like they need to have five to six customers launch, they basically do whatever customer do wants in order to make it as their customer, and they gave software for free for as long as they wanted.

 

There are some points Graham wants to quit that are during the time when investors telling to them that they are going to refinance the company. The most surprising thing is during the day that the deal was going to announced, there are the points that he wanted to change the front page to read Yahoo instead of Viaweb and then it really hit him.

The most interesting part is the advice for startups founder He said if you make something users want, they will be happy, and you can translate that happiness into money. That is the basis of startup.

 

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After I read the story of Viaweb I go with the next story which is del.icio.us.

After I read the story I learned that Joshua Schachter started the collaborative book marking site called del.icio.us in 2003. He needed a way of organizing his collection of 20,000 bookmarks, and he hit in his idea of “tagging” them with brief text phrases to help him find links later. For the first several years he works in   del.icio.us and other projects, like Memepool and at Morgan Stanley. In early 2005 he decided to turn del.icio.us from hobby into a company. In December in the same year, Yahoo acquired del.icio.us for an amount rumored to be about $30 million.

 

I learned also from this story which technology they inspired in their start up, it is Perl, My SQL and Apache, that was their standard mechanism for every thing. Some of their turning points is a bunch of conceptual revelation on how to build stuff.

The most surprise for him in making startup is His combination of sudden freedom to run things, he said that other people are very different but he said every step is was sort of inevitable, inexorable progress.

The things I learned from him is “Made the thing like it is the only choice because it was only the things you make sense a time. Everything that had to be done you must do.”

The most interesting is the advice he gave to the technical person who wanted to start startup he said reduce, do as little as possible to get what you have to get done, do less of it; get it done.

 

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The next story is about ONElist , Bloglines  before I don’t know the ONElist, Bloglines, what is all about and what is the function of it and how can work for it? But after I read the story I learned that the founder of Bloglines is Mark Fletcher and he was a senior software engineer of Sun Microsystems he started Bloglines and it is a free Internet email list service in 1997 and in 2003 he crated it as a web based news aggregation service.

 

The reason why make it is just to mange his own bookmark list but when he lunched it publicly it became fast on its way to becoming the most popular news aggregator on the internet. It got to one million users before it took outside investment.

 

After I read the thing I learned that in simple things you can start startup like you cab start from your own needs then generalize it then think of what can you add for it to make other problem solve.