Comments on: Will 2011 be a good year for Startups

By: SaaS

SaaS — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:37:35 +0000

The thing about SaaS startups is that they have little or no overhead. That is the advantage of it. You can start out small and with the right choices you can make a good living for yourself and help others achieve their goals as well. The thing about starting small is getting the word out and having great custome service as well as a product that will get noticed and used. Thanks for the post.

By: Keith Hall

Keith Hall — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:58:37 +0000

When I set up Cloudware City last year I started thinking the same, and worse of it really was the VAT rise – without much reprieve. The NIC holiday thing is quite astonishing really, unless you’ve got a lot of backing, how many start-ups do you see with multiple employees in the first 12 months!

The whole idea of Cloudware City is to make it easy to offer subscriptions to websites, so it could be good for anyone who has an idea for a web app, service or even just content, and the capability to develop it, but not the resources to develop/manage all the other aspects like payment handling, recurring billing, subscriptions management etc, and do it securely, whilst also marketing the resulting idea.

Small, incremental and recurring revenue is good for everyone IMHO, both affordability on the end customer and predictability in income for the vendor.

Getting off the ground is the hardest part in any start-up, and I think 2011 will be no different.

By: Mark Sadler

Mark Sadler — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:04:47 +0000

A double dip is very likely. I have been predicting that for a few years.
it could be another 5 or 6 years before things get much better.
(I’m not an economist by the way, so this is only my opinion).

You are right it’s necessity that has forced people to start up by themselves.
But we often meet people who were made redundant, but now doing very well working for themselves.

£2,000 is not a huge amount to get anything started with, you would need to look after it.
I suppose it would set up a home office or even build a website, and a bit of print, so better than a kick in the backside which is the sum of all the help which can be expected from the banks.

So will 2011 be a good year for startups ?
There will probably be a lot of them again, but they won’t have it easy.

By: Bruce Greig

Bruce Greig — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:33:25 +0000

Surprised that Gov’t is resurrecting Enterprise Allowance. I thought whole ‘Big Society’ thing was about Gov’t staying out of areas that voluntary sector already covers very well. Isn’t the whole start-up loans / mentoring for unemployed people starting businesses already done well by Prince’s Trust (and others)?

Much easier for a voluntary organisation to dole out money sensibly. Government has to give it to everyone who qualifies, even if business plan is nonsense etc. whereas voluntary organisation can make sensible judgements about who to give money to.

And who are the “experienced mentors” going to be? Newly-unemployed ex-Business Link advisors, no doubt …