After selecting a business name and securing the domain name, the next item on the agenda is a website. For many startups, WordPress will be the best choice for your website. Unless the business is a website, you will be better off leveraging the extensive built-in capabilities of a WordPress blog. WordPress and its plethora of plugins provides the easiest method for most businesses to start and develop an online presence.
This brings up a key startup question: What is at the core of your new business? You need to completely control the core. Everything else is context and should be outsourced wherever possible to allow you to focus on what matters. For most businesses, an online presence is context and using WordPress is an example of outsourcing a function to a tool. A contrary example would be an online commerce site, for which WordPress would ultimately be too limiting.
One of the first aspects you need to address with your startup is defining the core. Once you have defined the core of your offering, many early decisions become much easier. One mistake I see CEOs make frequently concerns whether to hire or outsource software development. The right answer depends on whether software is core to your value proposition. If it is, you need to directly control production, which means software developers should be employees. I occasionally see software startups attempting to outsource software development. This is a large mistake. If software is core to your business it needs to be in your business, not someone else’s.
Let me give you one metric from the acquisition side of the startup equation. One way a big fish looks at a little fish is by counting the number of software developers employed. Big fish will often buy little fish as a means of acquiring developer talent in a given space. Depending on the technical space and the employment economy, that valuation can be several hundred-thousand dollars per developer. If you have outsourced that skill your value to the big fish can drop dramatically.
I highly recommend this brilliant seven minute presentation by Geoffrey Moore, explaining the concepts behind his Core/Context/Mission Critical evaluation Quadrant.
The delineation between core and context will drive many other decisions, and enable you to focus your finite resources on what truly matters to your success.
So, having determined that a website is context for Flashstarts I have selected a WordPress hosting solution.
WordPress sites comes in three basic flavors; WordPress.com, WordPress hosting services, and WordPress installations. They range as listed from least flexible to most flexible, and easiest to hardest. Here is how to decide which solution is best for you. WordPress.com is ideal for personal websites and simple blog requirements. WordPress hosting is recommended for most other solutions if you lack in-house development skills. If you have in-house software talent a WordPress installation will provide you with the greatest flexibility. FlashStarts fits into the middle category of WordPress hosting services.
After a quick search and some brief research flavored with a little experience, I selected WPengine.com for our WordPress hosting service. They take care of the WordPress installation but still allows selection from the wide range of available enhancement plug-ins.
Finally, because I expect this website to change dramatically over time, I have included a screenshot of this WordPress site on Day One.
