Smash Robot

We’re in pretty interesting times – 20 years ago, businesses needed bank loans before they could start. They needed business plans, and partners and stakeholders and suits and ties. If you wanted to advertise a brand new product, you needed a marketing budget – you needed to think about advertising in the yellow pages, press, billboards & TV to get an audience. You needed to test your product before launch with focus groups, and a committee. Once you’d launched, it was very difficult to change your product based on feedback that you got.

20 years later, everything has changed. There are obviously still companies that launch this way – but if you’re a developer, those rules don’t apply to you.

The barrier to entry has never been lower – and the access to a market has never been easier. You can design an app that markets itself to more than 500 million people via Facebook as a way of spreading. You can design your app to be worth tweeting about, and be seen by people that otherwise wouldn’t know you existed. You can test whether there’s a market for your idea by buying some cheap hosting from somewhere like Hostgator, getting a free $100 Google AdWords voucher with it and buying a $4 theme from Themeforest.net to collect email addresses of people that are interested in your project. If it’s popular, you can go ahead and build it – if not, you could have just saved yourself a lot of time and money.

What took businesses years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do, you can now do in an afternoon. All you need is an idea and a laptop.