You can compete with anyone

Really. I'm not lying. Regardless of the industry you are in, I bet you can find a way to compete with whomever you want. On SportsLizard, I recently wrote an article entitled Proof That You Can Impact and Industry where I showed how one article about the problems with autograph authentication now ranks in the top 5 when someone searches for "autograph authentication". Large authentication companies like PSA would KILL to have that article removed from the results because of the negative publicity it gives them.

And that's just one example. I'm competing with established price guides like Beckett and Tuff Stuff with SportsLizard's Price Guide. Psst - here's a secret: I spent $0 developing it. The only expenses thus far have been for our massively successful PPC campaign. Yes, I am a pretty good programmer. And yes, I leveraged the existing SL user base and strong domain to maximize impact. But to be honest, in the life of SL (2004-2007) I know I've spent less than $20k. And that includes every programming book I've ever read, every marketing dollar ever spent, and every other business expense....including three computers.

But Adam, don't big companies with tons of resources do it differently? Not really. It's like it's some big secret - they develop in the same programming languages and struggle to get pages indexed in Google just like you and I do.

Take this example: Guy Kawasaki's new site Truemors. When I first read about it on his blog, I assumed it was a site that he developed in concurrence with his venture capital company and figured he had a ten person staff and $10 million in venture capital. And then a few weeks later the truth came out in his post By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.

Guy shows us dollar-for-dollar how he built Truemors. If you take a look at the $12k he spent, most YE's could cut that down to a few thousand dollars if they could program themselves and didn't spend $5k on legal fees (we spent about $1,500 on legal fees incorporating Pure Adapt, and Pure Adapt involved merging several established businesses together...you should never have to spend more than $500-$750 in legal fees in my opinion starting a business). In looking at the site, I know I could program it in a week or two, and I only consider myself an average/above average programmer. If you aren't a programmer and don't have the desire to learn, then either pay someone in cash or stock (hint: college programmers love to work for stock).

The other golden nugget in this post: no business plan and 7.5 weeks of development. He launched a new business after 7.5 weeks. There's really no need to spend more than a month or two developing your site. If you do, you either suck at programming or you're adding to much unnecessary crap to your site. Read a (free) copy of Getting Real by 37 Signals if you need to know how to rapidly deploy an app. The faster you get it out, the faster you get real feedback and make real money...it's as simple as that. Again, for reference, I developed our entire Price Guide in about 5 weeks...and if I hadn't been stressed out and losing sleep from my chronic back pain, it would have been 3 weeks.

I suppose the lesson is this grasshopper: don't let people tell you that you can't compete, and don't let people tell you that it takes years of planning to start a business.