The other day I came across a talk given by Dharmesh Shah at the Business of Software 2008 conference entitled Insights From in and Around MIT.

In the talk, Dharmesh touches on just about every aspect and cycle that a young software startup will go through, all from personal, tangible experience; Idea inception, sales and marketing, Google adwords, VCs and funding, partnerships, data mining, being small vs going for the golden ticket, etc. But my favorite bullet point, “Your product sucks. Get over it.”.

Dharmesh highly advocates getting the business rolling, getting your product out there no matter what it is or how much it sucks because it is going to change. And the only way it can change to become software that people actually want is to present 1. something to them and then 2. listen.

Dharmesh is really good at keeping the process of building a software business simple, making it feel attainable and not complicating the things with anecdotal “proof”. This is one of my favorites talks I’ve watched in awhile. Enjoy.