Guy Kawasaki has posted a few recent entries over on his blog about starting a company without venture capital and without the typical lofty business plan. Instead, just test the idea in the real world. Thanks to open source software, cheap hardware and hosting services, the barriers to creating and testing ideas has never been cheaper. To prove his point, Kawasaki created a site called Truemors for all of $12,1 Guy Kawasaki has posted a few recent entries over on his blog about starting a company without venture capital and without the typical lofty business plan. Instead, just test the idea in the real world. Thanks to open source software, cheap hardware and hosting services, the barriers to creating and testing ideas has never been cheaper. To prove his point, Kawasaki created a site called Truemors for all of $12,107.09. Truemors is sort of a combination gossip site and ranking system. Think of it as Digg meets Twitter via WordPress. The site managed to get huge traffic at the get go and has settled into a decent 40,000 page views per day. Whether Truemors is successful or not is beside the point. Given that many startups fail to get traction in their first year, it makes sense to test and prune ideas quickly rather than throw a lot of money at them. And today’s economics of software development via open source and offshoring makes it possible do so. While some folks thought Kawasaki spent too much money on Truemors (he could have skimped on some of the domain names and legal fees), compared to most venture-backed startups it’s two or even three orders of magnitude cheaper. Kawasaki is one of the most insightful investors, writers and speakers in the industry. His books “Art of the Start“, “Rules for Revolutionaries“, and “The Macintosh Way” are classics, delivering practical ideas with humor and insight. Kawasaki spoke at the MySQL Conference back in April and it was our best keynote presentation ever. Open Source