Caterpillar Cowboy

thegongshow:

Ethan Kurzweil has a presentation posted on his blog from 8 months ago that I just saw for the first time today.  This is my favorite slide in it. I would love to see the fit curve on this slide proved out with empirical hosting/development costs data from startups over time. Considering how long Bessemer has been in the business, I’m sure they could do this if interested.

This graph feels intuitively right to me… but what does it mean when it costs pennies to build and host a high-scale web service?  As costs approach zero, I’ll bet there will be an explosion in the number of vertical-specific services that serve small niche audiences. By explosion, I mean increasing by orders of magnitude. I can already feel the reverberations of that explosion today echoing backwards in time as the number of web services launching everyday is accelerating.

Very few of these services will be businesses, but that doesn’t matter because they’ll cost nothing. That’s the point… businesses are hard to create, web services will be trivially easy and cost zero.

None of the startups I speak with (which is far fewer in number than you, I assume) cite time or money as an obstacle for building a web application. It’s always customer acquisition and occasionally monetization strategy. Launching is the easiest part.