Before I read Seth Godin post about opportunities during an economic downturn, I was running the some pretty similar thoughts through my head.While the natural (and maybe correct) tendency during bad economic times like we are in now to is to tighten the purse strings, it’s important to remember that your customers are probably doing the same thing as well. They might be looking for alternatives to things they normally pay a lot for when times were better. And when things do get better, will they find that they really missed what they were previously paying for?For small startups, this is a great time - if you can provide lower cost alternatives to existing offerings, right now you have an active audience. The companies that can figure out how to exploit that will be the ones that lead us out of this recession.