Good enough engineering to start an Internet company
I gave a guest lecture in an undergraduate software engineering class (CSCE431) at Texas A&M University a few days ago. Now I’ve turned this lecture into a blog post here, and hopefully some people on the Internet will find this useful.
I’m running a small Internet company — Listen Notes, Inc. — with only one full-time employee (me), as of March 10, 2019. We built a podcast search engine website ListenNotes.com and a podcast API.
I’ll share with you my experience about starting an internet company. Building an internet product is not like building an iPhone or a pyramid. Your product doesn’t need to be perfect at the beginning. If you are building something useful, other people will tell you what to do next. And you’ll figure out what’s next. Generally, you should be comfortable dealing with uncertainty, if you want to start your own company.
The first version of Facebook was launched in early February 2004, which was an undergraduate student’s mere four weeks worth of work. It was a good enough product with good enough engineering. Every Computer Science college graduate nowadays should be able to build the first version of Facebook over a weekend, using a modern web programming framework (e.g., Rails, Django…).
