I wrote a little guest post over at FoundRead (part of the GigaOm network). Give it a read!

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/02/ycombinator/

There’s quite a flap over Paul Graham’s recent essay.

The attacking author quotes a comment on Reddit (always a good sign) as a good summary of the essay of why we should all be terribly offended.

“I work with young startup founders in their twenties. They’re geniuses, and play by their own rules. Oh… you haven’t founded a company? You suck.”

I kinda feel like there is a reading comprehension problem here. Paul added a “Cliff’s Notes” version of the article to clarify, but I’m going to boil down what I got.

The point I got from the essay is:

“I work with young startup founders in their twenties [note: he works with me and a mess of other founders who are also in their thirties... at least 1 or 2 are in their forties]. They seem stressed, but they seem happier and more alive. I think it might be a socio-biological thing– human beings are meant to be working in smaller groups, with clearer goals, and more ‘on the line’. Small businesses and startups seem like the best place to find this environment.”

Period.

Saying stuff like “happier and more alive” (which PG did not– I’m paraphrasing) does not mean that everyone else is miserable and dead inside.

Anyways, this isn’t a wild idea. There are piles of studies out there that have found a correlation between self-employment and satisfaction/happiness. Incidentally, there’s also a strong correlation between self-employment and making less money (but that’s good news, because there are ALSO studies that show that money doesn’t do much for happiness once you manage to have enough coming in to cover the necessities)

Well, not all of it. That title was blatant click-bait. You’re here and I’ve won. Nyah!

I’ve long been passionate about reading and digesting every tidbit of information about what it takes to build a successful startup. I’m an avid reader of people like Seth Godin, Paul Graham, Guy Kawasaki, the fellas at VentureHacks, Fred Wilson, Josh Kopelman, Andrew Chen, and more. As a participant in the YCombinator program, I have weekly dinners with entrepreneurs who have “hit it big” (Marc Andreessen, Ev Williams, Paul Buchheit, Chris Sacca, & Joe Kraus, to name a few).

All of the things I’ve learned are incredibly useful and all of it (paradoxically) can be incredibly wrong.

Let me explain my thinking here. Human beings love formulas. Human beings who succeed naturally think that they’ve stumbled onto a magical step-by-step guide on how other people can succeed, too. They blog about it, speak about it, and generally spread their wisdom far and wide.

The funny thing is that when you read/hear enough of this stuff, you start hearing brilliant and successful people presenting advice that directly conflicts with the advice from other brilliant and successful people.

Here are a few examples:

• “Release Early and Listen to your users” VS “Ignore your Users and Build for Yourself.”
• “Seek out Press early and often” VS “go guerrilla until you have a brilliant product“
• “Failure to scale kills” VS “you can have tons of downtime and still grow like gangbusters“
• “Take more funding than you need” VS “overfunding kills“
• “Viral always wins” VS Google Search (which is not REMOTELY viral).
• “Design is critical for user engagement and trust” VS um…. MySpace. CraigsList. Google.
• “Starting a business on Microsoft technologies is ridiculous” VS MySpace or PlentyOfFish (2-3 people, classic ASP, a few MS servers = millions of bucks)
• Headcount! VS Keeping your team lean to force scarcity (CraigsList and 37Signals)

The list goes on. Find me a startup truism and I’ll find you a successful startup which is a living and breathing counter-example. All of the advice that you read and hear is incredibly valuable– but it’s very situational. Add it to your “startup utility belt” and whip it out when you hit a bump in the road that looks familiar. “Andreessen ran into this and solved the problem thusly. That’s what I’ll try!” But don’t think that you can arm yourself with a list of platitudes and expect to build a startup.

The Two Truisms that Aren’t Lies

Now that I’ve finished saying that there’s no formula, I’m going to give you the two pieces of advice that (near as I can tell) EVERY successful founder has followed. Zero exceptions.

1. Build something people want. This will make or break you. Period. The success of your idea is a function of how much people want it and how many people want it. Make your product better on this front every single week. Every single DAY, if you can. Everything else is a distraction. If you can’t say, “What I’m doing RIGHT NOW will make [people want what we have more] or [more people want what we have]” you should seriously question how you’re spending your time. (Which begs the question, what the hell am I doing writing this blog post?!). FWIW, I think you should exhaust the former (increase the how much your users love you) before the latter (increase how many users love you)
2. Don’t stop. Persist. Keep going. The idea of an overnight success is largely ridiculous, even if the press loves to tell you otherwise. (just ask Matt Mullenweg of WordPress). You’ll think you are on the verge of death early and often, but you aren’t– and you can make it through if you start with an idea that people want and keep working on #1. Read Paul’s Essay, “How Not to Die“– it’ll help!

I can’t think of a single startup that has died from an over-emphasis on these two points. Can you?

Someone posted an interesting “Ask YC”, asking:

“How to start becoming an entrepreneur while still being an employee?”

Having done this twice (started a company that eventually turned into a full-time startup), I settled in to reply. Before long, it was clear that my response was long enough to justify a blog post.

I’ve done two part-time-to-full-time startups (one resulted in a startup the sold, the second is RescueTime– currently a YC-funded company– cross your fingers).

At the end of the day, I think Paul Graham is right when he says:

“The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble. Bob’s going to grad school, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re moving back to Minnesota, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to “we’re giving up on the startup, but we’re not willing to admit that to ourselves,” because that’s what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”"

In the beginning, however, it’s not always practical to dive in full-time. And sometimes when your idea is off-the-wall and also easy to build a prototype for, it’s smart to whip something out just to see if what you’re building is as cool as you think it might be before you take the plunge.

So if you’re too poor or too unsure to do the right thing for your business and dive in full-time, here are a few things that seemed to work for us when we did it part-time:

1. You need a co-founder and some cheerleaders… If you can’t find 2-3 friends who are really excited to be beta testers for what you’re building, ponder changing your direction. The arguments for a co-founder are many and varied. For a part-time effort, they are essential to keep you on-track and working. At some point, you’ll hit a motivation wall… If you have a partner who is depending on you, you find a way past that. If you don’t, you’ll often lose interest and find something else to entertain you.
2. Pick a day or two per week where you ALWAYS work, ideally in the same room as your co-founder(s). ALWAYS, no exceptions. We did 1 weekday evening and 1 weekend day. That doesn’t mean we weren’t working other days, but having a fixed schedule helps you through the phases of the project that might not be so fun.
3. Have a boat-burning target. What will it take for everyone to dive in full-time? 5,000 active users? 10,000 uniques a week? Funding? That should be a shared understanding. You don’t want to have one founder ready to go full-time when another has reservations. This is easy to gloss over, but you should really nail it down. I’ve lost 2 co-founders to this issue (they weren’t ready to dive in full time and I was). It wasn’t fair to them and it wasn’t fair to me.
4. Pick an idea that is tractable. Every business is a theory. If your theory is, “we can build a better web-based chat client”, that’s something you could test quickly. If you’re theory is “we can build a car that runs on lemonade”, that’s just not going to work as a part-time effort. The scarcity of available time should force you to distill the idea to the absolute essence that is necessary to test the theory. No extraneous features!
5. Understand that your v1 ia probably going to suck. Read David of Weebly’s post on persistence. It’s a long road. My first startup was a ridiculous fluke (2 months and then sold). 99% of the overnight successes you read about were slogging in the muck for 5 years before the night in question. Be prepared for a long journey and be surprised if your startup is an immediate hit. So with your v1, look for the tiny little flicker than you might be on to something to motivate you to make it better. Every week, make it better than last week and see if that flicker of light can be fanned into a tiny flame.
6. If you’re going to screw off at work (everyone does), spend it getting smarter about the stuff you don’t know. If you’re a coder, read a few design/usability blogs. Read up on what motivates angel investors. Research competitors and write down what they do well. Get brilliant at SEO (it’s not hard). Write a LOT more (blogging helps). Think about virality and research the heck out of it. This is all more valuable (and hopefully just as fun) as looking at LOLcats on Reddit. All that being said, be aware of the fuzzy line between using your cool-down time at work for your startup and stealing time/resources from your employer. If you’re paid to do a job, you need to do it.
7. [edit: Thanks to Ivan in the comments] Be sure you own your startup. I’ve had the fortune to work in places and companies where there was very clear ownership of “after hours” work. If ownership of your personal IP is not clear, do NOT rely on the good will of your employer. Greed can do funny things to people, even if they were initially big supporters of your startup.

At the end of the day, you want to prove whatever you need to prove as quickly as possible, so you can dive in full-time. Near as I can tell, there are plenty of startups that have started as “hobbies”, but you need to take it out of that phase as soon as you can. There is nothing that drives a team forward like the fear of public failure, debt, and starvation. Leap off the cliff and start building the airplane on the way down and you might be surprised with what you can pull off.

There has been a lot of chatter lately about alternatives to Silicon Valley. There is no denying that Silicon Valley produces more startup success than any other town. But is it cause or effect? Does SV add some secret sauce to the startup recipe or is it simply a place where a lot of geeks tend to congregate?

For starters, it’s a good idea to read Glenn Kelman’s outstanding post on Seattle as a startup hub, inspired by the New York Times piece on the same topic. TechCrunch fairly quickly blew the post out of the water, causing Glenn to post a solid (and humble) response. And, causing Alan to point out that Arrington is “being a wanker”. Fun stuff! I I’m a big Arrington fan, but I’ll second the sentiment… It’s easy to crap on an upstart. Windows people have been doing it to Mac people for years. “You’re so far behind, why are you even trying? It’s almost pathetic,” they say. Strange that you don’t hear that too much anymore from the Windows camp. Never count out an upstart!

As a founder who is currently hip deep in the YCombinator experience in Silicon Valley, my initial inclination was to return to Seattle in March. I’m currently rethinking that sentiment (but haven’t made any sweeping decisions). The purpose of this post is to publicly run through some thoughts on this and get some feedback.

As mentioned by just about entire world, Silicon Valley births more startups than anyone. By a huge margin. It’s ridiculous how far it is ahead of upstarts like Boston, Seattle, Austin, etc. It’s obvious to me that there are many more startup PEOPLE in SV (which is a big reason for the number), but are there factors there that make startups more successful? I’m going to run through the thing I think are critical for a startup and how I think SV adds to them. Call me out if I’m wrong or if I’m missing anything:

• First and foremost, a startup needs to build something people want. I don’t think SV really helps here. In fact, the “echo chamber” effect might cause founders to thing that people around the world actually think and behave like the geeks in SV. If you buy the argument that SV people are smarter/better than other folks, then maybe SV would get an edge here.
• A startup needs a great team. People who destroy problems. People who prioritize the right problems. SV certainly has the edge here in supply, but it’s difficult to determine how the demand effects that availability of these people. I will say that, while I have been pretty damn impressed with the people in SV, I don’t think they are any better than the best people in Seattle (but there sure are a lot of ‘em). And they tend to be more motivated, more monomaniacal, and more mercenary. Again, it’s hard to gauge supply and demand here– there are plenty of startup nuts in Seattle. I’m tempted to give the edge here to Silicon Valley because that’s what people smarter than me have concluded in the past, but that seems like a lousy reason to do it. It comes down to this– if I spend 6 months trying to build a small kickass engineering team, would I get a better team in SV? Or is the competition too fierce?
• Startups need to work their asses off. This seems to be one of Arrington’s main points: That Seattle-folk frolic on hiking trails and in kayaks instead of working on their startup. I think that’s pretty ridiculous. Passion and dedication aren’t geographically bound. There are plenty of SV people who bounce from party to party and conference to conference when they should be coding or slinging pixels. This is a personal trait, though you could argue that SV attracts more monomaniacal folks. Again, however, there’s no denying SV has the edge in supply– but does the demand outstrip it? Does more = more who are available?
• Startups need money and time. And, oftentimes, money can buy you time. Here, Silicon Valley bitch-slaps any of the upstarts. Anecdotally, it seems that funding in SV happens quicker (allowing founders to get back to building products). It also seems more available for early-stage companies. For companies who can’t bootstrap their way to a 12-18 month runway, this is huge consideration. This is also a big deal for companies without an obvious revenue model (Twitter?).
• Startups need blog and press coverage. SV wins here, too– by a healthy margin. I’m tempted to break out my “marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable” quote (I wish I could recall who originally said this). I firmly believe that you’ll get coverage if you’ve made something exceptional that people really want. There’s no arguing, however, that that you’ll probably get more if you go to the right parties and conferences, and manage to chat with bloggers like Scoble or Arrington.
• Distribution and deals. Technologists can often be snarky about the idea of bizdev, but it can be damn powerful. At the end of the day, many of the people you want to be doing deals with are probably in the Valley, and deals happen better if you can meet face to face ( and meet often, if necessary). There’s something inherently more comfortable about doing a deal with a company down the street. SV wins here, hands down.
• Lawyers and accountants. SV has more specialized services folks, but I’ve literally never heard of a startup who died from lack of a great startup lawyer. I think there is a healthy supply of these in any of the upstart hubs. Am I being naive here?
• People who buy startups. Acquisitions are like any other deal. They oftentimes happen because of face-to-face meetings and are probably likelier to happen if you are right down the street from your potential suitor. Seattle has Microsoft and Amazon. SV has just about everyone else who buys startups, notably Google and the ailing Yahoo(soft). Your mileage will vary, depending on your startup. A financial software startup might have a better chance of getting bought in NYC.

It’s probably safe to say that each of the above points carry different weights for different startups. A company like mine might not care much about great startup lawyers, but a company like Avvo might. A company like Twitter clearly cares an awful lot about funding– it’s a big play with a ton of upfront expenses and no immediate way to make a pile of money. But for a company like mine (which, ultimately, is probably going to live or die based on the value we can provide to businesses), will living in Silicon Valley give us enough of an edge to justify the expense and distraction of moving?

This Tuesday, I’m going to get a chance to meet Kevin Hale, who is the designer behind Wufoo and proprietor of ParticleTree. Kevin wrote a blog post last month that I think is one of the better summations of what it means to be a web designer. While I don’t want to dwell on the negative, Kevin has a pretty good description of why I hate to refer to myself as a designer (whether it’s “web designer”, “ui designer”, “interaction designer”, or whatever).

“For most designers, the relationships they care about most is the one they have with the design. They seem to only love the design and more often than not, they tend to love the design too much. These designers focus on their legacy at the expense of the audience. The user can suck it. You can hear it in the way they talk about the design and how they talk about their users. They’re arrogant and defensive.”

“…When I started working on Wufoo, I was definitely a bad designer. I thought I was hot shit and knew all the answers. I saw the user as a wild beast that needed to be tamed. He got in MY way. Use the tool the way I designed it, fool—not the way you think it should work. Thinking back, I remember being angry all of the time.“

Another great bit:

“On a web application, the design breathes and exhales through customer support. I’m so glad we have Chris on our team. He’s our customer evangelist. Through him, I’ve come to believe that there’s nothing more important than to monitor and man those incoming emails and respond as quickly as possible to every single inquiry, request and comment. It’s the pulse of not only the application, but the business as well. It’s in support requests that Wufoo lets us know when something isn’t working. It’s there that she lets me know when I’ve done something right.”

Give it a read.

A reader took the time to shoot me an email with a few questions about design and startups… His questions were interesting enough that I thought they might be worth blogging about. So here goes:

Question #1 – What is the priority balance between programming and design/UI?

In my opinion, it totally depends on your startup, and where the core of your innovation lies. Take a hard look at the problem that you’re attempting to solve and why the current solutions to that problem are inadequate. As Paul Graham says, there’s no shortage of things that suck… presumably, you’re setting about to make something suck less.

How? Are you going to make it faster? More fun? More reliable? Cheaper? Sexier? More powerful? More viral? More social? When you’ve got a match between how you propose to innovate and the skills that your founding team has, you’ve got an exciting opportunity.

I should point out that brilliance can (and often does) manifest outside of a person’s core skillset… I think a person with a background in marketing would never conceive of the viral marketing machine that is Feedjit (the person who did is a PERL coder with a background in systems engineering). I don’t think a person with a journalism background would think that Digg or Reddit were such hot ideas. Innovation can (and often does) come from people who aren’t familiar with the “common wisdom” that maybe shouldn’t be so damn common.

But assuming a big part of your innovation revolves around “creating a better user experience for X”, you need someone who can create great UI. And while people who don’t dream in pixels and CSS can have flashes of UI brilliance, there’s no substitute for a great UI guy on your team.

I’m not going to go into detail, but obviously there are about a billion scenarios where coding is AT LEAST as critical as design. I’ll leave that blog post to someone else.

2. Should we have a layout/ UI figured out before programming has begun? (this is actually in retrospect, because we’ve already begun programming)

I’m a big fan of agile/scrum style development and the iterative design that goes along with it. That being said, I think the idea of having a cohesive vision in the form of a visual prototype is a great guide to build off of (just don’t be married to it). Making design shoot-from-the-hip-agile from start to finish can oftentimes result in a bit less focus and a product that looks duct-taped together.

3. If we are planning to have Facebook app/ MySpace widget a la Slide or YouTube, would it be best to focus on destination site, or on the widget side first?

Joe Kraus recently spoke at a YCombinator dinner and espoused the virtues of chasing the trends. I’ve always referred to it as the idea of “finding a parade and then marching in front of it”. I’d want to know more about what you were building, but on the surface I think that jumping on the Facebook bandwagon is worth doing if you think Facebook users will sign up. A lot of things won’t play well on Facebook (you won’t see us building a RescueTime Facebook app any time real soon). That being said, I’m not real bullish on Facebook’s long term future (from a platform perspective). A lot of the top Facebook apps are down as much as 70% from their peak usage.

One of the recent YCombinator dinners that we attended featured Joe Kraus (who founded Excite and then later JotSpot, which sold to Google).

Like all YC guests, Joe had piles of startup wisdom… One of the things that stuck out to me (which I’d never heard much) was when he said, “when we launched JotSpot in beta, we launched it to too many people.” Huh? Too many users? That’s bad?

But as I look at my current workday, there are times when I wish that we had fewer users.

There’s some common wisdom about usability testing: Beyond 5-7 people, you really aren’t going to get much new/interesting data. There are diminishing returns.

Similarly, in a beta test where you are trying to understand your market, figure out your users, hone your funnel, hunt and slay bugs, and make your product better, there has got to me a point at which you have enough users to get the data that you need. For us, given that we have a web app as well as an installable app for both Mac and PC, our need for a diverse body of testers (in terms of the technologies they use) is probably higher than most. But I have no idea what the magic number is.

But we opened it up. To give you an idea of the consequences of this, here’s roughly the amount of communication that I do in a given day:

• 3-8 emails from our contact form – I respond to every single one of these. Sometimes that results in a follow up email that requires a second response.
• 20-30 feedback emails. We have a tiny form in our app asking for any thoughts a user might have. Even though we say below the form that we can’t respond to all of ‘em (and we point them towards the contact form / support forum if they want a response) I read them all and tend to respond to some.
• 3-5 posts on GetSatisfaction, which weird forum-sorta-thing. We try to respond to all of these, and many times they require some ongoing discussion.

When you add all of this up, it’s a pretty tremendous amount of communication. Say it requires an average of 3 minutes to digest and/or respond to each entity (this is 7 days a week, mind you)… That’s about 2 hours and 10 minutes PER DAY. Every day. Not counting the times that some emails require that I involve the whole team in a solution/discussion. That’s a lot of time for a company where all of the founders really ought to be spending almost all of their time working on development. And, as an effectively bootstrapped company, we don’t really have the budget for support staff.

On the Brighter side…

Still, despite the “costs” mentioned above, there are some pretty huge advantages to launching early and openly.

First off, you get over the biggest early hurdle that can slow most startups to a crawl. I think all founders are terrified that when they finally launch their business, no one will want what they have. So they’ll find any reason to delay it. Maybe they should focus on patents? Trademark research? Clever and innovative stock plans? Business cards? Fancy spreadsheets? Business plans? Marketing plans? Anything at all that will allow them to delay the possibility that people don’t like your app. When you’re out there and getting buried in feedback, all of that other stuff falls away… It’s incredible how much it focuses you on your app.

Second, you get to test your inherent marketability. Do people like talking about you? Do they tell their friends? Do they blog about you? Does your app have any virality? A closed beta really doesn’t allow this.

Third (and most important), in the sea of people who reach out to you is (hopefully) people who LOVE you. We’ve gotten feedback emails that simply say, “I love you” (3 so far!). We get long essays from users talking about their time management strategies and how RescueTime has helped. Literally 1-3 emails a day make me walk on air. Reduce that number to 1 a week and I’m not sure I could manage to make the sacrifices I’m making now to push the business ahead.

Fourth, there’s SEO. No need to get into the nitty-gritty, but starting the campaign of building incoming links and pagerank is something you should start as early as possible.

And, of course, there are nebulous concepts like “tipping points” and marketing momentum… If you hear about RescueTime enough, maybe eventually you’ll try it?

On the balance, I don’t know the right answer… And I suppose it’s different for each startup. I’d love to get other folks’ thoughts in the comments.

Evan Williams (founder of Twitter, fellow corn-fed midwesterner-turned-dotcommer, and someone I get to meet via YCombinator!) has a fabulous post on how to evaluate new product ideas. To sum up his excellent post, here is the matrix he came up with:

Tractability
Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?

Obviousness
Question: Is it clear why people should use it?

Deepness
Question: How much value can you ultimately deliver?

Wideness
Question: How many people may ultimately use it?

Discoverability
Question: How will people learn about your product?

Monetizability
Question: How hard will it be to extract the money?

Personally Compelling
Question: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

He follows the list by running through a few of his startups through the matrix to see how they fare.

I don’t know if Evan put it first on purpose, but I tend to think that tractability is the most important factor by an order of magnitude. Why? Because there is a pretty good chance that what you think you’re going to build and what you go to market with are radically different. Take a few minutes and ponder this outstanding quote from Fred Wilson’s “Why Early Stage Investments Fail” post:

“…Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold. That means there a 2/3 chance you’ll have to significantly reinvent your business between the time you take a venture capital investment and when you exit your business.”

Another great quote:

“My friend Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, describes a startup as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful deal as figuring out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.”

Given that you have a 2/3 chance of having to reinvent your business (or, as Costolo would put it– you have a 2/3 chance of your first dark alley being a dead end), what could possibly be more important that tractability?

One of my brethren at YCombinator sent out a request to the 2008 Winter Founders list a request for information about design services for his startup. He and his co-founder, like many YC founders, are hackers.

In my career I’ve been a web designer (although I’m only moderately good at it), I’ve hired web designers (for a consulting firm I used to run), and I’ve hired contract resources for design services. Recently, of course, I’ve been doing all of the design work for RescueTime (Time Management Software for Lifehackers, if you’re new here!). In most cases, I was generally dealing with extremely tight budgets (by Seattle or Silicon Valley standards), so I figure I’m uniquely qualified to answer his question. Rather than keep the answer confined to a relatively small mailing list, I figured I might open it up as a larger blog post. So here goes.

First of all, I should stress that I think a UI designer should be baked into your organization as early as possible. Most startups are building software for “normal people”– and programmers are notoriously bad about empathizing with how normal people interact with software. Hell, most of the designers I know are bad about empathizing with how normal people interact with software. If you’re one of the rare startups that’s building products for geeks-only, then you might be able to get away with limited designer involvement. But for most, the idea of “slapping a coat of paint” on an ugly application is a recipe for confused users and poor conversion rates (whatever your conversion event happens to be).

Second of all, I should stress that usability testing should be baked into your organization from day one. Watching people in your target demographic interact with your software is a priceless experience (and doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg). Most entrepreneurs get sensitive around their creation and find all sorts of excuses to avoid getting negative feedback about it– don’t fall into this trap.

Finally, let me emphasize that when I talk about designers, I am ALWAYS talking about UI designers, NOT graphic designers. Sure, pretty websites are nice… But artists are a dangerous breed, and are often tempted by the design equivalent to “guitar solos”: Swanky web forms that have so much CSS goodness that they no longer look like web forms, links that don’t look like links, buttons that don’t look like buttons, etc. Any chance to be unique is an opportunity to confuse users. At the end of the day, a lot of audiences don’t think web UI is actionable unless it’s a form element, a beveled button, or a blue hyperlink. You don’t want Jakob Neilsen designing your site, but you want a designer who will sacrifice aesthetics for usability if the need arises.

So, onto the resources.

Logo Design

As a startup, the first thing that you’ll need is a logo. I am a bit of a logo nut (and designed the RescueTime logo myself). I do believe that a good logo can be powerful, but when money is tight and time is scare, here are a few ways to get an interim logo:

LogoMaid – LogoMaid is a collection of 4400 watermarked logo templates. You can get non-exclusive logos for $25, and exclusive logos for $199 and up.

LogoMarker – If you’ve got to have a unique logo, this is your cheapest option. It’s basically an online logo construction kit– you can try it for free. $99 gets you the logo in a high-quality vector format.

LogoLoft and LogoWorks – Not custom enough for you? Well, LogoLoft and LogoWorks are trying to commoditize custom logo design. Presumably they have an army of underpaid designers ready to design to your specifications. Packages start from $99 and go up from there. The more you spend, the more designs you get to chose from, the more different designers get involved, and the more revisions you get… Basically, by spending more money you can reduce risk that you hate what they give you.

Custom development by a designer of your choice – Of course, you can always hunt up a designer of your choice… I’ve seen identity packages range from $1500 to $500,000, and your value mileage will most certainly vary (read up on the history of the Nike swoosh– quite a bargain there!).

Web Design Templates

Web design can be a bit spendier than logo design, depending on what you want to build. A lot of startups will need custom application design, but many might be able to get away with (or at least start with) a web template. Purchased templates usually consist of a layered Photoshop document, an HTML file, a CSS file, and maybe (god help you) a couple of SWF (Flash) files. Some will come with all of the necessary template files to play nicely with Blog/CMS systems like WordPress or Joomla.

TemplateMonster – TemplateMonster is the big boy on the template block, offering almost 13,000 templates that are searchable and sortable. Like LogoMaid, they offer a cheap version if you don’t want exclusive rights to the design ($50-70) and they also offer exclusive rights (which can cost you thousands).

Open Source Templates, Open Design Community and OSWD – These guys have quite a few fewer templates, but heck– they’re free… Yay for Open Source!

Custom Web Design

Custom web design work can range from cheap to ridiculously expensive. As programmers who are hopefully fairly familiar with web technology, you can probably get the most bang for your buck with an individual consultant rather than a firm. Of course, the more you need (graphic design, HTML/CSS, usability analysis, SEO, copywriting, etc), the less likely you are to find a single person who can TCB. If SEO is a big part of your marketing plan, make sure your designer knows enough about SEO to not paint you into a corner (send ‘em to SEOMoz for a primer).

Individual web designers with some experience under their belt can cost you $35/hr to $95/hr on a contract basis. If you are organized and can find a resource with vouched-for work ethic and responsiveness, you can do very well finding resources in secondary markets (midwest or southern USA) or offshore (eastern Europe or India). However, if you can afford it, a designer who is local and can/will meet with you is valuable. As a rule, the cheaper they are, the busier they are. You’ve got to sling a LOT of pixels at $35/hr to make a good living in most major markets.

Make sure you find someone who has experience doing what you need. If you need a complete application flow/design, finding a freelancer who has only built “brochureware” web sites is not your best bet.

SitePoint MarketPlace – The SitePoint marketplace is an excellent resource to find hungry freelancers. For $10, you can post an ad describing what you need and you’ll be buried in responses. The last time I did this for a designer (XHTML/CSS), I got 5 good responses for ridiculously low rates, and about 30 responses from people who either had higher rates than I wanted to pay or had crappy portfolios. Of course, I had two different designers flake out on me (one for a legitimate reason, one just fell off the map). That’s another risk of cheap individual consultants… They are oftentimes not very businesslike.

XHTMLized – If you find a good designer who has lackluster XHTML/CSS skills, these guys are a godsend. For $249 (assuming you can wait 7 days), they’ll take a Photoshop doc and turn it into GREAT front-end code. You can have them do more than one page, but it’s oftentimes good enough to just take a design that has most of the styles/elements you’ll be needing and turn them loose on it. There’s lots of competition in this arena, and Smashing Magazine has an excellent writeup about the alternatives.

Elance and Guru.com – These sites allow you to post a need and get a bunch of quotes from hungry designers and design shops (oftentimes offshore). There’s no obligation. It’s VERY important to clearly define what you want and what deliverables you expect to receive to make sure quotes are accurate.

Design Employees

This is the area where I have the least experience (at least in terms of markets like Seattle and Silicon Valley). From what I can tell, a FT web designer (Photoshop, xhtml, css) can run anywhere from $45k to $95k per year. Obviously, this can flex if you’re generous with stock options, which might be worthwhile for some startups.

I hope that helps some fellow bootstrappers out there. I’m a firm believer of taking the shortest path to testing your startup idea in a real market– these resources should get you there faster if you don’t happen to be a pixel-slinger. But at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for having someone on your core team be passionate about great user experiences.