How a six-month-old startup got bought by Google

Interesting how-to item from Business 2.0 -

The article discusses the successful efforts of Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker, who co-founded Zenter to develop an online version of Powerpoint. It was bought by Google even while still in private beta. Helpful tips to other entrepreneurs -

• Don't focus on getting acquired. That's like being a single woman who desperately wants to get married. Of course you want it to happen, but 99% of the time if you purposely try to get acquired (or married), it won't. The way to get acquired really fast is to not focus on it. If people get the impression that you want to get bought, you won't.

• Instead, focus on the user. This is possibly the single most important thing for entrepreneurs to remember. "Every startup that dies fails to do this. A lot of startups focus on their competitors or lawsuits, but what really kills startups is if users think it's boring. It's a much quieter and dangerous reason, but if users don't care about your product, that will just kill a company."

• Ignoring limitations lets you tackle problems from a different angle. Zenter looked at how they could build a slideshow application that really takes advantage of the Internet, like adding community slideshows, delivering presentations online in real-time and dragging and dropping content from the web into a presentation. "Every system and every platform has limitations. Some people look at a problem and say, You can't do that because a browser won't let you and proceed to work around those limitations What we (Zenter) did was look at what we wanted to happen and then found a way around the limitations."

• Don't be afraid to tackle the giants. Big companies like eBay and Microsoft may have more manpower and financial resources, but they also have disadvantages. Often times, they're not as driven. They're not willing to make the sacrifice, like two guys sleeping on air mattresses, to make their product really good. Case in point. Google bought YouTube, which was far superior to Google Video. eBay bought PayPal because clearly, no one was liking eBay's Billpoint. Big companies also have restrictions that startups don't have to worry about. E.g. Microsoft has to think about web-based applications that don't threaten Windows. A company like Zenter doesn't care about hurting Windows. All they want to do is make the best application.

• Pay attention to the details. When your product is 80% done, that means you have another 80% to go. To get something pretty close is easy, but you need to concentration on the little things. That's what will set you apart from the competition. You can have the best algorithm in the world and the fastest process, but at the end if the day, if the user struggles to find out how to click a box or delete something, then you don't succeed.

The question now that begs to be answered: How much?