Graham Readings/Sustaining Capstone

After reading the many pieces of advice that Graham offered us, 18 Ways to Kill a Startup stood out to me as the best advice for keeping a project or business from crashing upon startup. Having multiple founders to startup is a great suggestion. I know, personally, I sometimes procrastinate slightly more then I should because of being so busy. I can vouch for the fact that if you have others working with you which helps create motivation to get it done. The advice about having a specific user in mine, trying hard enough, and choosing the wrong program is directly correlated with my project and require serious thought and work on in order to make my capstone a success. Graham covers all areas that might break a start up company. I find it really helpful that he not only tells you what not to do, but he also lets you know how you can avoid that from happening. I don’t feel the need to go in depth on the readings since we all read them. However, I do feel these tips are absolutely necessary for one to be successful in the business world. I don’t believe I would personally start my own business, but I would definitely make sure that I was a part of it.

If I were to make my capstone project self-sustaining upon graduation, several things would have to occur. I would definitely need some sort of funding to sustain the yearly cost of maintaining a domain name and hosting provider costs. I would probably need to look for a couple of collaborators to help me or completely take over the programming management of the site over the long term. I do not believe that starting a company would be in my capstone’s best interest. Getting an internship might be a possibility for my project. In getting this internship, I could propose this project to the companies’ board and have them take over the project. If there already is a community dedicated to music in some sort of way, I could have my project join their community and collectively sustain each other. Going to grad school might be beneficial for the fact of taking some business management courses and other things of that nature to further my knowledge in being able to sustain my capstone beyond graduation. As far as the content of my website, the users will be sustaining the content themselves.