Not so ironclad rules for starting a tech venture

In this month’s Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky writes about his journey to creating stackoverflow.com, basically a programming community Q&A site with voting and editing - Digg for programmers.

It seems Joel normally has some ironclad rules he follows when developing sites and businesses, which include;

1. Vet programmers carefully
2. Put everyone in one office
3. Plan - create documents and diagrams
4. Intense bug tracking
5. Test
6. Create a software schedule
7. Think about monetization before launch

Joel explains how after briefly talking with programmer, Jeff Atwood, he basically abandoned all of these principles and still ended up with exactly what was planned (Caveat to rule 7, turns out this one is important to consider upfront - currently StackOverflow has no monetization model).

While Joel didn’t exactly follow his first rule, by thoroughly vetting his programmer he used his experience and instinct when he decided to move forward. And, in the end, partnering up with Jeff seemed to have made all the difference.

On the flip side, here is an article from last year where Joel documents how he broke all these rule and things went horribly wrong.

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