Note: This was one of the first things we ever wrote down about SproutBox. It happens to have been written exactly one year before we launched. It’s posted here to give you some insight into what drove us down this crazy path.

The SproutBox Manifesto

We believe startup culture is failing entrepreneurs. Today’s great minds are trying to create a paradigm shifting, socially viral, semantic networked, widgitized platform with integrated user-contributed synergies and enterprise ready monetization—and then sell it to Google while in beta. We take a different approach. We give bright minds the team and tools they need to build focused products. Products that solve user problems. This isn’t to say that we don’t sprout innovative companies. Many of the companies we work with can only be described as revolutionary. They have the potential to be the next big thing—but that potential isn’t the extent of their worth.

We understand that every billion dollar business was once a million dollar business. A company’s first goal shouldn’t be to figure out how to sell their company. It should be to figure out how to build a product that will sell. We know from experience that this can pay off. Entrepreneurs have become obsessed with coming up with the mythical billion dollar idea. They have forgotten that Facebook wasn’t mankind’s first attempt to bring people together or that 37Signals wasn’t the first company to tackle project management.

We believe ideas are less important than the entrepreneurs that have them. It takes a great deal of faith and dedication to start a company. That faith should be in the entrepreneur’s ability to implement better solutions to real problems. Ideas come and go and there are plenty of them, but people who can consistently revise and execute are rare. The best entrepreneurs are idea independent and can adapt creatively within an ever changing set of constraints.

We believe getting everything you want is dangerous. Creativity dies in environments where things are handed to you. Ingenuity needs a challenge. That’s why we time box development of new ideas. If you can’t get to market in a fixed amount of time, you’ll have to cut something—usually features. This isn’t a bad thing. Being forced to focus on high margin, core product functionality means you’ll be able to keep your team small and agile.

We believe growth shouldn’t be measured in headcount. Most companies boast how they want to hire hundreds. We don’t. Small teams are like simple products. They focus on the high margin portion of the curve. We don’t measure success based on how many cogs we can add to the machine. Instead, we are interested in how much value the machine can produce with just the right amount of gas.

We believe making money means providing value. In today’s age of free, it might shock you that we are in the business of making money. We aren’t looking to make it through some treacherous ‘charge ‘em later’ scheme or by tricking our users to click here or there. We make money the old fashioned way—providing products customers are glad to pay for. The Idea of building companies that have value seems pretty obvious. But much of Silicon Valley wants us to buy into their pyramid scheme—buy ads so you can sell ads to the level below you. Or better yet, make Google more money and cross your fingers that they will buy you.

We believe the mid-west is a great place to start a business. We live and work in Bloomington, Indiana. It’s an awesome place to be. It fosters a new startup culture that has the ingredients for success: a great university, vibrant downtown, fantastic food and arts, low cost of living, large talent pool, and a solid tech community. Come visit and see for yourself.

Our secret isn’t that our beliefs are that revolutionary. It’s that we follow our own advice—we execute well. If you’re an entrepreneur or investor interested in being involved, let us know.