dizablo's soup

Jason Fried, co-founder of noted web developer 37signals and author of Rework, made a pretty good case for ignoring people at work. In a newer interview, he explains how starting your business should involve seriously, drastically paring down your ambitions.

Fried isn't suggesting you just give up or conclude that janitorial service is the only logical path for your entrepreneurial idea. What he's advocating for is not killing yourself over the peripherals of your business—physical space, mailing lists, logos—but focusing your limited energy and time on your core product.

... Doing all that stuff when you really got to focus on the product first and keep it as small as you can and if you're going to open a bakery, open it out of your house first. Just make – I mean, that's probably technically illegal in some place, but make some... if you want to open a cupcake bakery, make some cupcakes and sell them at the Farmer's market for six months, for a year first, on the weekends. See if it works. If it works, okay, now you have some people who like your cupcakes, you're selling out every weekend. Now maybe you can move into something else. Instead of saying, "I'm going to open a bakery" and go buy a storefront and some expensive machinery and stuff like that. So I think people kind of start a little bit too quickly sometimes too and they should just make their time and starts something on the side and see where it goes.

It's not a new idea, but the bakery example seems like a nice down-to-earth example of why you see businesses that seem to have great people behind them fall down in their first year.