I’ve been meeting lots of people and getting lots of feedback here in San Francisco.

Here are some of the consistent ingredients of successful startups I have collected from observation and feedback.

Note, these elements will probably not leave you with the next Facebok, but just know, for every Facebook, there are 1001 companies who tried to be Facebook and failed.

• Solve a problem
• A focused product of which the core feature set can be built relatively fast and cheap
• Recurring payment model
• The core feature set (MVP) should be good enough that you can actually charge people for it
• There is the ability to grow out to different markets/features to increase your customer base and how much you charge (aka scale potential)

This is similar to what 37 Signals teaches. Basically this will remove the NEED for funding, but you can still take it if you want. It will allow you to grow based on revenues of your company, and the fact that it is recurring will create a more stable model.

Vitoto – has almost none of these ingredients. But then again, we want to be the next Facebook 😀

Quite the conundrum….