Henrik Werdelin

I am getting increasingly convinced that will see a lot of smart people starting companies that are build to be small. The ‘build to be bought’ mentality by some start ups of past years seems to have been exchanged with a ‘build to be lived’ mentality. More and more of the people I met who have interesting business concepts are looking to build business that can be maintained virtually (sitting on the beach) with a small amount of staff. This can now be done because of the new amazing amount of services that allow you to build a proper business using web 2.0 services to do what normally required a lot of staff and thus investment.  A few worth mentioning are:

• Amazon S3  for hosting your servers. Allowing you to scale your expenses with your revenue
• Get Satisfaction for doing clever product/service support
• Google Apps for email, document sharing and creation
• ScreenFlow for easy making support and introduction videos
• Balsamiq MockUps for easy making wireframes and proto types
• Jungledisk for backup of all your stuff on a secure cloud server
• Basecamp for product management and communication with external partners/staff
• Odesk/Rentacoder for staff and ad hoc resource needs
• Tumblr for having a blog what is easy to use
• Issuu for good looking manuals and brochures

… and the list goes on.

With the virtulization of the different areas needed to run a business – I look forward to many more small clever start ups that make a good living powered by the power of the web. H