You may or may not be one of the roughly 20,000 people who subscribe to the blog KillerStartups.com, but if you are you will notice that they feature 15 internet startups per weekday, and 5-10 per day on weekends. While some KillerStartup features may not actually fall into the realm of startups (namely a recently feature .blogspot hosted website) and some may not necessarily be Killer (5minutesfame anyone?), the editors at KillerStartups still manage to find and feature a number of great online applications that provide excellent services to internauts.

Let’s make sure we are clear on the numbers here. KillerStartups features anywhere from 85-100 new online businesses and services each week. Some of the startups featured are complete knockouts that have recently been funded, recently graduated an incubator, or are in the process of securing funding. Without having gone through each and every KillerStartup archived post, I can say with a high level of confidence that the vast majority of featured startups are run by a team of less than 4 people, and were financed with less than $10,000 in capital – with many even falling below the $5,000 mark.

It is interesting to track the discussions at some of the major internet forums within the entrepreneurship, business, tech, and web-development niches. The vast majority of people who have “ideas with great potential” tend to request in excess of $10,000 to get their online venture off the ground. This is silliness, not just because these people are looking in the wrong place to find startup funding, but also because the venture being pitched is often retail related or a new take on an old/fully functional service (i.e. a website clone).

Most online ventures can be accomplished sans any real capital at all, especially internet and tech related ones. Open source code and software has opened the doors of the web wide open for application development. About a year ago, an excellent interview was conducted with super-startupist and VC Guy Kawasaki. The interviewer and Guy talk about how open source has affected the startup process and the startup funding process. Guy also talks about how his newest venture, AllTop, was developed with PHP and MySQL for under $20,000.

How did that video shape your perspective? Suddenly, an “idea with great potential” is almost worthless. It makes more sense to self-fund an idea and develop it personally or with a techie partner than to shop it around. Once a moderate level of success has been found whether it be through sales, traffic, or user base, then it is time to shop it to the big backers. Investors have lost too much too many times funding a whimsical idea. Meaninful numbers and statistics now dictate where they put their precious dollars. Create something worth using and make it happen. Only then will you be miles ahead of the countless other ideators still looking for milk money to slap together a service of their own.

Image from Diego Cupolo