What Are You Waiting For?

There are no more excuses, if you ask me.

I remember the days when it took literally a full time systems administrator, engineering personnel, and hundreds or thousands to millions of dollars in order to build and deploy a static web site, let alone the incredibly complex applications that we are seeing today. I personally remember the days of buying hardware, finding a place for the actual servers to sit, T1 lines, locked cages, hosting services, the differences between shared and dedicated hosting etc etc etc.

It took forever, a specialized set of skills, and a ton of money in order to setup and run an internet business.

Not any more.

Today, almost anyone with a basic set of skills can fire up an internet application in no time. Leveraging cloud services for the hosting, which provide you with a complete, scalable infrastructure (Heroku, Engine Yard), application frameworks which allow you to rapidly build applications (Ruby on Rails), cloud based services which support those applications (ZenDesk, Get Satisfaction), and APIs which allow you to build applications on top of applications which already provide a lot of the base functionality that any application requires (such as user logins via Twitter or Facebook), it takes very little effort to light up an idea.

All of the above services are free, or have free packages and trials that you can offer. And if you light up your app and there is traction, they can all scale up.

So what are you waiting for? Now is the time to take that idea and turn it into reality and see if it flies. It has never been easier to build and launch products as it is today.

Living example: we lit up http://tweeb.us in less than 6 weeks.

What ideas do you have in your head right now that you can spin up?