For reference, this is an output of the Stanford startup engineering course (which I also signed up for after it hit the HN front page)
In the homework, this is what they mention the goal of the 'bitstarter' page to be:
"Choose a project which you can get to a crowdfunder
People in the class have widely varying backgrounds, ranging from relative neophytes to fairly advanced students. Your goal is to figure out a final project that you can get to the level of a reasonable crowdfunding site. This can mean anything from verbal description and mockups to fully working code, or anything in between: whatever is necessary to make the sale and prove that you have a market. Note that you have control over who's seeing the crowdfunder (e.g. the people in your email list or social circle), so you are also determining the difficulty of the sale itself by choosing the market and the initial crowdfunding audience. Note also that you can just ask for someone to share your content on social media rather than pay you real money for a preorder. Open source projects are ok as well, not just for-profit businesses. The main guideline is to set your success bar at the point that it'll be an achievable challenge for you. That might be a target of $100 or it might be $100,000."
I took this class in person back in the winter. I was under the impression that this class would help me hone my web dev skills a bit, but it really turned out to be very focused on business dev.
That said, Balaji provided some excellent advice, and the course itself is great for anyone interested in the startup process. Just don't expect to come out of the class as some web dev master.
In the homework, this is what they mention the goal of the 'bitstarter' page to be: "Choose a project which you can get to a crowdfunder
People in the class have widely varying backgrounds, ranging from relative neophytes to fairly advanced students. Your goal is to figure out a final project that you can get to the level of a reasonable crowdfunding site. This can mean anything from verbal description and mockups to fully working code, or anything in between: whatever is necessary to make the sale and prove that you have a market. Note that you have control over who's seeing the crowdfunder (e.g. the people in your email list or social circle), so you are also determining the difficulty of the sale itself by choosing the market and the initial crowdfunding audience. Note also that you can just ask for someone to share your content on social media rather than pay you real money for a preorder. Open source projects are ok as well, not just for-profit businesses. The main guideline is to set your success bar at the point that it'll be an achievable challenge for you. That might be a target of $100 or it might be $100,000."
You can see the other projects here: http://startupmooc.org/