A: When it’s just a website.
Many threads on Hacker News begin with “Review My Startup”. Yet often these “startups” are nothing more than simple websites or webapps. A website is not a startup. If a website were a startup there would be about 100 million web startups out there right now, in the U.S. alone. For a startup to truly be a startup it needs to be your job. It needs to be a company. You don’t have to be incorporated, but you have to treat it like it’s your job.
99.XX% of websites are hobbies. Some even earn revenue. But even if a site earns revenue, it’s still just a website unless it’s your job. Your hobby website could turn into a startup and if that happens great–such was the path of most succesful startups–but until that happens your site is just a website. It’s just a collection of files sitting on a webserver somewhere. You could spend all of your time on your website and thoroughly enjoy every minute of it–but if you don’t think of it as a job (in the “this will put food on the table sense”, not the “ughh, I hate my job” sense)…it’s just a website.
I have no problem whatsover with taking a look at someone’s new webapp/site, but unless it’s a startup, please don’t call it a startup. Just call it a website or a webapp.
Why does this bother me? Because some websites can make great startups and other can’t. Thus, if you call your one-page-silver-Twitter-skin a startup, the feedback should be harsh, even though it may be a cool website.
Let’s take an example from my own portfolio: qDuke.com. qDuke is a start page for Duke students. If you are a student at Duke, you will probably find it very useful(if you aren’t a Duke student, it won’t be of any use). qDuke gets many thousands of page views per day, so it’s a pretty useful website(due to na). However, it’s not a very good startup. qDuke is not a company. There’s not much revenue in it. It’s not going to put food on the table. If I wanted feedback on qDuke, I would say “Review my Website”. I would not call it a startup. Maybe I would post “How Can I Turn This Website Into a Startup?”, which would also be fine. But I would stick to calling websites websites and startups startups.
Now, it could be that a few of the recent posters on HackerNews do consider their silver-Twitter-skin like sites startups/jobs. If that’s the case, then I think the comments weren’t harsh enough. However, I think in the majority of cases Hacker News readers just guessed that the poster meant to say “website” and not “startup”. I think it would be helpful if people thought a little bit more about the difference between the two terms.
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