This video shows an interesting panel of people who’ve started web companies:

• Marcus Kazmierczak, VP of Engineering, MayasMom.com
• Marcus Frind, Founder, PlentyofFish.com
• James Hong, Co-Founder, HotorNot.com
• Dave Lu, CEO, Fanpop.com
• Karen Northup, CEO and Founder, CoreFino

Check out a hilarious story around the 18:57 mark from James Hong about how he bootstrapped HotOrNot.com for literally zero dollars. By the way, if he were to do it today it would have been even easier by simply throwing some Google Adsense on the page.

I have always had a certain respect for people who understand the idea that starting a business today doesn’t require much money. You’ll notice that Marcus Kazmierczak in the next breath after James’ story talks about how MayasMom was funded with $100,000 and they just took on a $100 million round of financing.

I have to wonder what in the world they were thinking.

Correction: Marcus wrote in to say it was $1 million, not $100 million. Sorry for the error!

As we’ve seen before, taking on investors is almost always a bad idea. Why would they give away a huge percentage of their company and take on all that debt? If it is a good enough site, it should be bringing in income from almost day one, and there is absolutely nothing on that site which required $100k much less $100M.

It made sense later when I did some research on the site. Basically Marcus Kazmierczak had no business being on the panel. First of all he is an employee, not really a founder. Secondly, the other websites shown on the panel are true blue internet success stories, all among the top 5,000 most popular websites on the internet. MayasMom.com barely breaks into the top 100,000.

If you don’t see the video below you can click here.

By the way, here is Marcus Frind’s check from Google for $900,000 that he talks about in the video. It is from just two months of Adsense earnings.

To learn more about how to start your own business for little or no money, grab a copy of Breaking Free. Thanks to all who have enjoyed it and written in.

I’ll have some more guest posts coming out this week. Stay tuned!
Brian Armstrong

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