Economists say there are some peculiarities to this wave of downturn start-ups. Chiefly, the Internet has given people an extraordinary tool not just to market their ideas but also to find business partners and suppliers, and to do all kinds of functions on the cheap: keeping the books, interacting with customers, even turning a small idea into a big idea.

The goal for many entrepreneurs nowadays is not to create a company that will someday make billions but to come up with an idea that will produce revenue quickly, said Jerome S. Engel, director for the center for entrepreneurship at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Mr. Engel said many people will focus on serving immediate needs for individuals and businesses.

“It’s a very painful thing,” he said of the pressure people feel to find new ways to make money. “But it’s a healthy thing.”

Mr. Engel noted that the dot-com bust helped propel a pack of hardy companies. One of those, in fact, was Google. While it was started in the late 1990s, the company succeeded during the bust in part because it was highly focused and did not need much capital, Mr. Engel said.

Ryan Kuder, 35, understands the notion of scaled-down start-up fervor  and the worry and exhilaration that goes along with it. He was laid off in February 2008 from Yahoo, where he was a senior marketing manager. He job-hunted for a bit, then decided to start an Internet company that would let people do social networking at the neighborhood level.

Mr. Kuder and his business partner toiled until November, when he realized his big dreams had run headlong into reality. He needed money to pay the mortgage and buy health insurance for his family.

They transformed the company into a new one called Koombea that designs and builds Web sites for businesses. Koombea has grown to nine people, most of them in Colombia, where the cost of living allows them to do Web design relatively inexpensively.