Building a profitable startup in one week on $500

by Jordan Running Jun 26th 2006

Is it possible to build a profitable web startup in seven days on a budget of $500? Jason L. Baptiste and Brian Breslin think so. On Saturday Breslin, CEO of Viral Ventures (which owns uGather.com) and Baptiste, CEO of Miami web design firm Infinimedia, set out to build WeblogWire from scratch in a week, and in true Web 2.0 style they're blogging as they go. WeblogWire will be "a system that would be a newswire for bloggers and online media outlets," basically providing a direct line between them and companies and PR firms. With five days left to turn out a working prototype I can't wait to see what they come up with. (Hey Breslin and Baptiste, you ought to have a countdown clock.

[Via Nestcape]

Tags: Brian Breslin, BrianBreslin, business, cheap, fast, Jason L Baptiste, JasonLBaptiste, startup, web20

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Claudiu Spulber said 3:48AM on 6-27-2006

Come on, they are not considering their time as part of the $500 budget plust other expenses. You can gather a team of 100 developers and say that you want to build Internet's biggest project in one week with $100 (after all the payment for dev. is not included).

Who knows how many other people from their original companies are working on this too (they're CEOs after all). Plus someone had to do a little marketing for them.

Rob Kohr said 11:52AM on 6-27-2006

Over winter vacation I took an old laptop, turned it into a server, and created software to work with wikimedia to create a wiki hosting site. At one point the machine got so hot I directed an air conditioner through its open top to keep it cool. Fortunately the site made enough money to be moved to a real server.

Another site (a web based flashcard system) never really took off, and took about the same time and resources to develop.

One profitable another not, what was the difference? Mainly one had a higher demand than the other. $1M investment wouldn't change that, and the only thing the money does is buy better service when the demand comes in.

So the moral is, if you have an idea, make it, and make it fast and cheap. You can improve it (put more money and time in it) if it is successful. After that make something else fast and cheap, rinse, repeat...

Who knows one of your attempts may work.

Brian Breslin said 10:50AM on 5-05-2007

Jordan,
Thanks for the post, quick note, you got our roles backwards, I run infinimedia, and Jason runs UGather (two separate companies).

Claudiu, our costs are broken down as such: Domain expenses, hosting (first month), SSL certs, payment gateways, and paying programmers to build this. We are not counting our time or our already owned equipment, thats the sweat equity part of it. We ARE paying for the development though. As far as our own employees of our own companies, they aren't really involved in this (other than telling their friends about the project). This is a guerilla marketing endeavor, we aren't spending any of our budget on marketing, we are trying to get the word out virally as best we can.
Hope that answers your questions, and feel free to ask anything you like.
Thanks,
Brian Breslin
Co-founder theWeblogWire.com

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