Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

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This makes a ton of sense and finding an organic idea is often what I tell people to do when they're thinking about a startup. Few reasons:

- Doing a startup is like an iron man competition. When there's something you want to see built, there's that extra incentive to keep going. If you don't finish, you don't get the thing that you wanted. Steve Jobs said it best in his interview at D5 with BillG. Any sane person would give up, but if you really want to see what you're building exist in the world, you'll keep going.

- Usually the organic idea stems from some kind of domain expertise ie- If you used to work in the fashion sector, you recognize severely broken things that are amazingly obvious from spending so much time there. If you didn't work in the Fashion industry you would have no clue these things exist.

- You'll be able to find co-founders more easily. If you've spent time in a certain sector with a problem you're trying to solve, odds are a) you know people in that space really well b) they therefore know that vertical well c) they will recognize the problem as well.

Don't make something people want, but make something you want. Odds are there will be a good amount of other people like you out there. My first startup was a non organic idea. We were trying to make SaaS for PR professionals because it seemed like a good opportunity. Honest truth? I was never a PR professional and didn't really give two shits if PR professionals had good software. I could live if that itch wasn't scratched. Ironically, this failure spawned what is an Organic startup that i'm currently working on with Cloudomatic by helping SaaS developers get distribution. Life works in funny ways.

This from you: "Any sane person would give up, but if you really want to see what you're building exist in the world, you'll keep going"

and this from pg: "There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable"

are, in my experience, both true in science as well, and are useful heuristics for what to work on.

"We were trying to make SaaS for PR professionals because it seemed like a good opportunity."

What was your strategy for figuring out what PR professionals wanted?

So here's the backstory:

Publictivity originally started out as an organic startup- theWeblogWire, which was meant to connect startups and bloggers together. You wanted to launch something, we would make sure bloggers got it. We had a really successful launch (mashable, front page of digg, lifehacker, downloadsquad,etc. for press and we had bloggers from: all of gawker, weblogs inc, techcrunch,mashable,etc.). There were even paying customers too! We had been invited out to the valley to meet a bunch of important people that wanted to help us/advise us/etc.

Shortly thereafter, one of the cofounders Frank, went to someone he knew from way back in the day. His friend was the cofounder of pr firm. They thought what we were doing was great and gave us a bit of office space. One day the owner pops in and says: we need this software for PR! and we'll give you money to build it. This was the point Publictivity was born. We (stupidly beyond belief) shuttered theweblogwire for Publictivity, because it made sense to concentrate on only one thing + software seemed like a better startup path. We spent about two months in their offices so we were close to feedback and took meetings every few weeks to get feedback on how the "PR process" worked. We ourselves were clueless on Public Relations from a firm standpoint. We knew how it worked according to being a startup, but that's a fairly different process.

In hindsight, knowing what I now know just from startup experience, I would have never started down the path of Publictivity and continued onwards with theweblogwire. Why? theWeblogWire was meant to cure a need I really had.

So at what point did you know the publicity software was going to be a failure? What was the proximate cause of your doom?

It sounds like not being very good at this was their problem, which they realised.

OK, but I still want to hear what their strategy was. If I can't think of obvious ways to improve it then maybe organic really is the way to go.

I'm quite interested by Steve Blank's stuff on Customer Development.

My personal theory is that you can sometimes build profitable products, without being the customer, but you can't build great ones.

Microsoft and Apple seem to be two excellent examples. Apple's customer is Steve Jobs.

Are great products also greatly profitable?

To be honest I am mostly interested in making a profit.

Edit: If you're trying to give Microsoft as an example of a company that fails to make great products because it fails to use them, think again: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/62/microsoft.html It seems more likely that they just suck.

I am trying to do that,

They may use them internally, but I think a lot of their work is focussed on external users.

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