One of my (minor) pet peeves is the wide variety of meanings expressed by the word "startup". It's become almost as meaningless as "collaboration software" (I sure get drawn into the fuzzy black holes, don't I?).
Traditionally, a startup meant an early stage, growth oriented company, on the typical path from concept through several rounds of investment to acquisition or IPO; insert point of failure somewhere along that continuum. When you said "startup", people knew what you meant.
What with the change of infrastructure requirements for software companies (you don't need to go off and buy $100k of Sun servers just to get going, and better tools that mean you need less resources to develop many products), there are certainly other options. It's way easier to bootstrap than in the past, and thank goodness for that. Yet it's still called a startup.
Ok, no problem, except for all the advice that says "startups should do blah, blah blah": raise funding, grow fast, give away your product to buy eyeballs..., sorry, what year is this again? True for some types of startups, a disaster for others. The use of the term "startup" though creates a culture where certain expectations tend... well, you get the idea.
I'm not saying this is hurting anyone other than newbies and wannabes who should do more research anyway, it's just a communications issue. Like I said, minor pet peeve.
There were a couple of discussions recently on Joel's Business of Software forum that show the same kind of effect happening with the term "MicroISV". The real meaning is pretty broad (essentially, very small software companies), but over time the predominant form people talk about seems to be what's termed as "clickware" ($20 mass-appeal widgety-apps that you can throw together in a few months, advertise with Adwords, etc.).
Again, no big woop, but it tends to overshadow the fact that there are other types of MicroISV's out there; and for people who want to actually make money, better choices. Ok, you can hit a home run with an app like that, but it's rare.. most people never even get to the financial level where it's a job replacement. Far safer (but still risky) is the B2B very-niche higher-priced software. This blog, which was mentioned in one of the discussions, looks interesting and entertaining, and certainly touches on some of the tradeoffs between different types of small companies.
Again, hate to see some people taking advice that makes sense for one type of MicroISV and apply it to another. Or worse, think that there's only one "right" type of small software company. As always, lots of choices, lots of tradeoffs, so do your homework, and do it with a critical eye. It's very cool though that if you know what you're doing you can actually try to create a company designed to meet your own very special and unique needs.
