How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas | Hacker News Reader

How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas

paraschopra.com

85 pointsparaschopra21 comments

Great post! Few thoughts: I am having a similar experience. My co-founder and I have been working on our "this will change the world" venture for the past few months ... we built CollegeJobConnect, a platform designed to revolutionize the undergraduate recruiting system and enable undergraduates to connect with employers. It's a sexy product with a great story. However, due to the summer time period and the "you need to do something different"-ness of the idea, the revenue has been light thus far.

Along the way we heard a lot of pain points hiring managers and companies were having, so we built Recruitly (http://recruitly.com), a plug-n-play career portal and applicant tracking system allowing you to tap the talent that visits your website. This has been a dream to sell and much easier to monetize.

I think it depends what you are out to do: if you are out to make money, you can jump into an existing market and produce a competitive product ("mine is cheaper!", "mine does X better", etc., etc.) and do fine. If you are out to change the world, you have to understand the fight you are in for: you likely will have to change a lot of people's behavior or understanding of how to do something - no easy task. To your point, it pays to do your homework beforehand so you know the extent of the battle that faces you.

The lessons learned in this article remind me of the book "Ready, Fire, Aim" by Michael Masterson. It's a great book.

Masterson notes that when you're starting off, you just need to make money ASAP. Worry about being original later when you have a budget. So you need to find a hot area where there is competition (but not too much) and a clear consumer interest and then produce something that's just slightly better than the main competitors. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the main gist for starting off.

And most importantly: do competitors exist?

Exactly. I don't want to be the only falafel salesman on the street, I want to be the best one.

You don't need to be the best either. You can be a salesman on the adjacent street.

And you don't have to be the falafel salesman. You can be the supplier who supplies that salesman, AND all his competitors.

AFAIR economics, starting a company in a market segment with established competitors may reduce risk, but it may reduce profitability by the same degree. E.g. starting selling hot dogs in place where there are 5 other hot dog sellers has high chance for break-even profitability and low chance for exponential business growth. However this may not be true for some rapidly growing markets highly sensitive to innovations.

The secret to making money Online --DHH is superb video to listen to which is on this lines

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...

Solid advice. When we started http://thinkcode.tv we immediately asked the question, will people be willing to pay for screencasts? The existence of other companies selling screencasts, like PeepCode, PragProg, Lynda, VTC (and many other emerging ones) reassured us, rather than scare us away. I still get the impression that the market is more keen to ebooks than screencasts, but it would have been foolish to start without some form of market research.

He was 18 years old and his first idea made no money. Now he is making money and has some insights he wants to share. I don't necessarily place much stock in the conclusions he draws but the story has some value. Details of how and why something failed and what the people learned from it can help others, depending upon what that specific individual is in need of better understanding.

The conclusions he draws are very much inline with the basic concepts you learn in marketing 101.

I followed your link to your previous site, Kroomsa, and it proceeded to repeatedly open the site in a new browser window. I was forced to kill Safari, at which point it had 129 windows open. Not cool.

I'm sorry, wasn't aware of it. Does it happen on other browsers too? I didn't notice it on Chrome or Firefox.

I only seem able to reproduce it on the latest Safari for OS X. Even Safari for Windows doesn't do it. Weird.

Although he learned his lesson and that's the biggest thing to take away from this, his original mentality pretty much sums up why 75% (or whatever number it is nowadays) of startups fail.

The moral of this article is a pretty basic, common-sense parable. Not sure why the author had to fail to learn such rudimentary things as "no market = no business" and "no research = bad" but at least he learned his lesson.

I think I was earlier motivated by originality of idea and a chance to change the de facto in the world. Like I was, I assume many fresh college peeps are high on "changing the world" through their great ideas.

I'm sorry to say this, but that is a lot of text for basically saying: "no market -> no sales"

There are plenty of articles that can be summed up in four words. That doesn't mean they aren't worth reading to get the bigger picture, details, examples, etc.

I agree, although I think the "bigger picture" is only interesting if the story is too specific and the "examples" part would only be useful if the subject matter was hard to understand. My personal feeling was that the whole text didn't really add anything.

This could be a new summary format.

In Search of Lost Time: "lost youth -> melancholy adulthood"

Odyssey: "angry gods -> misplaced hero"

The Bible: "believe it -> live forever"

I can see an arXiv paper coming:

"An Equational Logic for Automatic Text Summarization via Term-Rewriting: Or Lambda, the Ultimate TL;DR"

One needs to be a good storyteller to be able to relate and communicate a point to an audience. I think this article succeeds in doing this.

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