What do you need to get a small company off the ground? Some of it depends on what you consider “off the ground”, see for example Y-combinator for examples of just how much of a traditional company you don’t actually need, if you’ve got an angel taking care of the rent.
Let’s assume you’ve got an idea and a few engineers, and want them to be able to
- work together on the idea
- deliver something to customers
- get paid
- improve the product based on customer feedback (and/or internal brainstorming)
- add more engineers as more money comes in
These use cases map to existing services, like
- shared whiteboard/shared document services
- pbwiki
- Google Docs
- messaging/conferencing
- Skype
- Google Chat
- payroll/hr
- Administaff
- FreshBooks
- Intuit Online
- customer issue tracking
- SalesForce.com
- Gossamer Threads Hosted RT
- recruiting