Miami Bus Group Shot
Miami Bus Group Shot

Brainstorm an idea, and launch a fully-functioning company based on it… in 72 hours. On a bus.  If it’s good, it will become a real company, backed by serious venture capitalists. P.S. Don’t expect to sleep.

Linked with Austin, SXSW (SouthBySouthWest), the Startup Bus is like a mobile Startup Weekend, with elements of Amazing Race. Six busses leave from six different cities, carrying about 30 or so “buspreneurs” per bus. They hit the road at the same time, and dream, code, design, collaborate and project manage their way to Austin, to present their business to a group of venture capitalists at the SXSW conference.

Dreamt up by Elias Bizannes and a group of like-minded entrepreneurs, nerds and VCs, the first Startup Bus took its maiden voyage from San Francisco to Texas last year. It was such a roaring success that Elias convinced six of last years participants to act as bus conductors, on a six-fold larger venture. The conductors’ job is to advise, mentor, and help sleepless buspreneurs differentiate between workable business concepts and those that are completely nutty.

Tampa Team Sponsored By Lagunitas
Tampa Team Sponsored By Lagunitas

The buses left from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland and New York.  I was on the Miami bus with a ­ mix of geeks from Miami, Baton Rouge and Tampa. The Tampa folks took an Amtrak down to Ft. Lauderdale, strategizing before being thrown into the fray. We rendezvoused with our fellow Southern nerds, enjoyed a night of merriment and then packed our digital cameras, MacBook Pros, Android tablets and other tech geek junk, and headed towards Austin.

Once aboard, our conductor, Steve Repetti, was ready with a microphone. Anyone with a business idea could pitch the business plan to the rest of the bus, to attract others to the nascent company.  Once groups were formed, the work began.  The Tampa group had mostly split itself between two projects: First was Story-Set-Go, a mobile phone application designed to allow budding film makers to easily shoot events using narrative templates in storyboard form, paired with an online marketplace for experts to sell their storyboards to users; Second, and one of the strangest ideas, was MyNewman.com. Touted as “The Anti-Social Social Network”, MyNewman.com would be an anonymous social network where unlike-minded users would be matched with others who they would naturally dislike. From there, they would be encouraged to argue with each other as well as purchase digital pranks to play on each other’s profiles. I somehow ended up working for both of these projects.

The Startup Bus Tampa Crew
The Startup Bus Tampa Crew

What was truly astounding was the quality of the people I got to work with. In a world were finding highly competent people is extremely difficult, I was surrounded by folks from right here in the Bay area who were not only competent but inspiring. Their creativity and follow-through often left me wishing that I could afford to hire people like this. And after four days of living, eating and working together without sleep, we had accomplished something extraordinary: Business, financial and technical models of our companies were presented to our illustrious panel of VCs. In fact, out of around 40 teams, MyNewman.com made the final six only to be beat out by a group from New York and a team from Silicon Valley. However, both Tampa teams are continuing to peruse their projects outside of the bus, and I cannot wait for next year’s trip.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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Don’t Fall Into the Trap: Why Startup Software Development Isn’t Like Corporate Development

So, you’ve left the corporate world, and now it’s time to build your own startup. You’ve probably managed dev teams before, overseen product launches, maybe even helmed some fancy project management tools that made everything run like a well-oiled machine. You’ve done this before, right? Not exactly. When it’s your startup, everything changes—and, as I’ll explain, if you assume it’ll work the same way, you’re heading for a few surprises.

Startup founders often fall into a dangerous trap when starting a software project from scratch: thinking it’ll be just like building software inside an established company. Here’s why it’s not—and some advice on how to navigate the differences.

1. Switching from Product Manager to Teacher

In an established company, a software team already has two things that give them a serious edge: an existing market and a deep understanding of the business. They’re working within a proven model. Developers in that environment know what questions to ask, can fill in gaps intuitively, and likely understand why they’re building what they’re building.

At a startup, however, your devs are going to need a whole lot more context. They’re not working with familiar requirements—they’re working with your vision, which may be abstract at this stage. If your development team doesn’t understand why something matters, it’s a recipe for ambiguity and frustration on both sides.

Advice: Think of yourself less as a product manager and more as a teacher. Your job is to make sure they understand the core problems, not just the features. Teach them why each requirement matters, help them visualize the end-user, and create that shared language for decision-making. It might feel tedious, but it’s essential to avoid future misalignment and expensive rewrites.

2. Beware of Perfectionism — It’s the Budget Killer

In a large company, products with an existing user base often have to be polished. Features need to be rock-solid, invoices have to be perfect, and everything needs an audit trail. Startups, however, have a different goal: get an MVP in the hands of users fast. It’s a classic trap for first-time founders—focusing on “perfection” and “polish” before knowing if the business model even works.

Startup perfectionism is budget poison. It’s shocking how quickly adding “nice-to-have” features can chew through funding, especially if you’re paying a dev team to build things like automated invoicing or churn management before you’ve even proven people want what you’re selling.

Advice: Ruthlessly strip down your MVP. If a feature doesn’t help you validate your market, it goes on the “later” list. Keep the scope laser-focused on what helps you test your business assumptions. Let the non-essential features wait until you know you have customers who’ll use them.

3. Zen and the Art of the Startup Pivot

Building software for a startup means embracing one cold, hard truth: the business model will change. According to research, 93% of successful startups pivot at least once (and often more). Imagine being asked to go out and passionately sell something that you know might not look the same next year—or next month. It takes a level of zen acceptance that your original idea will likely morph, but that’s what keeps you flexible and ready to capture new opportunities.

For founders, that requires a mindset shift. You have to believe in your product, while also knowing you might be building the “wrong thing” in some way. The focus should be on preserving capital and brainpower for what’s next. The game is less about proving you’re right and more about staying adaptable.

Advice: Budget with pivots in mind. Set your burn rate assuming you’ll need to make big changes. Don’t let ego get in the way of listening to the market, and keep enough gas in the tank for at least one big strategic turn.

4. The Hard Work of Being Your Own “Internal Customer”

Here’s another big one. In a corporate environment, you have internal customers—departments or stakeholders with specific goals that align with the overall company mission. For a startup, the only customer you have is you. You don’t have a preexisting feedback loop from various departments, and you don’t have established success metrics. You have to create that from scratch.

Advice: Start by building an internal customer profile based on your target market, then use that to set clear goals and success criteria for your dev team. If you’re focused on, say, usability for early adopters, set KPIs around usability testing and build from there. By acting as your own “internal customer,” you’re setting a clear direction and saving your team from working in a vacuum.

5. Get Ready to Build AND Sell

Corporate software development often has the luxury of a separate, dedicated sales team to deliver the product to the right audience. As a startup founder, you’re both the builder and the seller. That means you’re not just iterating on software—you’re iterating on messaging, product-market fit, pricing, and maybe even distribution models.

Advice: Factor in time for sales-ready iteration in your dev cycle. As you build, keep track of how each release or update affects the user experience. Ask yourself if the changes make your pitch clearer or simpler and how they align with the current market’s needs. Ultimately, this approach will help you bridge the gap between building the product and ensuring it’s market-ready.

Conclusion

Building software as a startup founder requires a whole different toolkit than you may be used to. You’re part-teacher, part-salesperson, part-zen master, and always the chief budget officer. By recognizing the unique mindset shifts and traps of startup software development, you’re positioning yourself—and your team—for the best chance of success. Focus on creating clarity for your team, set ruthless priorities, embrace change, and never lose sight of the fact that the first version is just the beginning. In the startup world, adaptability isn’t just a skill—it’s the entire game.