Penetrating the psychological startup barrier

I’ve read a few great books lately about living your dream to launch your startup idea or just pushing yourself on executing your idea. One of the common key points each author makes is just get out there and do it. Stop making plans; stop thinking about it; stop trying to get everyone together to figure out the next big thing.

If you have something you’re passionate about and love, just go do it.

I absolutely love this approach. It’s one step they always leave out when explaining in school how to be successful and start your own company because people have a psychological barrier. In todays world, especially the tech startup one it’s extremely easy to cut a lot of the initial fat out of forming your own company. No longer do you need to spend thousands of dollars on marketing and legal fees, and having to form your complete business plan before writing one line of code. The idea here is to ship fast, ship often and learn to pivot.

Now I’m off to work on that idea.

Dreams of a Startup

While sitting idle tonight I started to think about if I was to launch my own startup from a fresh clean slate, what technologies and stacks would I use? Most people don’t get this opportunity so it’s actually a really interesting question to think about.

My first thought is being from a Microsoft background, would I want to go this route or learn something new. Using something like Python or Ruby would be fun don’t get me wrong, but in reality I’m wanting to launch a startup not spend my time learning new languages.  Even then, after being out of a super stealth mode this is completely appropriate and probably applauded.

So here’s my ideal architecture. I actually have some ideas brewing in my head so these are based on the needs of these ideas.

Fx

• ASP.NET MVC3
• C#
• jQuery
• Backbone

Storage

• Redis for Session State
• MongoDb for structured document data storage

Services

• WCF

Events

• NodeJs

Cloud

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon S3
• Amazon SQS

IoC

• Unity

Testing

• nUnit
• Selenium or Visual Studio Test Suite

In a nutshell the above is probably what I would begin focusing on and working with. It’s definitely a mixture of both Microsoft and non Microsoft technologies but I think that’s what makes things great; you shouldn’t lock yourself into one technology and should be flexible enough to adopt what’s best. I’m still probably need to update a few items here and expand reasoning but it’s a start. Also, I’m torn on the testing tools because honestly I think Microsoft’s suite of test tools that you can get with Visual Studio 2010 are not bad. It allows really nice integration but then again from what I understand, you need to use all of their tools to really make use of these components.