How Hard Could It Be?: The Unproven Path | Printer-friendly v...

• Open an indoor bicycle parking lot in lower Manhattan, where people can keep their bikes safe and dry. For bonus points, offer gold memberships with showers and fresh towels.
• Make a power strip with a built-in Ethernet hub that clips onto the back of a desk. That way when you bring a laptop into work or need to charge your cell phone, you can plug it in without crawling on the floor. Hotels catering to business travelers have something like this, but it's always custom-wired by electricians.
• Be the Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) of high-end office furniture. Reduce the lead times on nice cubicles and partitions from 12 weeks to two.

All three of these ideas came from needing something and failing to find it in the marketplace. I don't have time to do any of them, so, like I said, if you could, that'd be great. 'K. Thanks!

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Well, yes. There is a lot of competition. But it all struck me as stunningly flawed. I had a couple of ideas about how to make a more useful website. For example, I thought that visitors to the site should be able to vote, giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to every proposed answer.

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That was the basic idea: a programming community Q&A site with voting and editing. But like all my other ideas, nobody around here had any time to do it, so the idea went nowhere.

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Second, I'm a big believer in putting everyone in one office, because I think that face-to-face communication is crucial. But the people who set up Stack Overflow are scattered geographically: I'm in New York; Jeff is in California; and he manages programmers who live in Oregon, Arkansas, and North Carolina.

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Of course, I'm not sure how this will work out. The good news is that the site costs almost nothing to run. We're not going to need big racks of computers; it turns out that Jeff and his programmers were so good that they built a site that could serve 80,000 visitors a day (roughly 755,000 page views) using only one server that costs a few hundred bucks a month.

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As for what this all means, I'm still trying to figure that out. I abandoned seven long-held principles about business and software engineering, and nothing terrible happened. Have I been too cautious in the past? Perhaps I was willing to be a little reckless because this was just a side project for me and not my main business. The experience is certainly a useful reminder that it's OK to throw caution to the wind when you're building something completely new and have no idea where it's going to take you.

For his part, Jeff says he didn't want our new venture to feel "like work" -- that if Stack Overflow wasn't fun to do, he didn't want to be doing it. If I had tried to make him play by my rules, I don't think the project would have come together, at least not as well as it has.

The truth is, the three guys who coded Stack Overflow are great programmers. They're smart, and they get things done. And in the end, that's what really matters. Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done. Need proof? No problem: Check out stackoverflow.com.

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