Show HN: 70% of startup ideas suck. Yours doesn't have to. Alpha testers wanted | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 70% of startup ideas suck. Yours doesn't have to. Alpha testers wanted

validator.phalox.be

14 pointsphalox7 comments

70% of startup ideas suck.

Is there anything to support that claim? ... why not 99%

The failure of startup ideas is probably one of the toughest to quantify: Failed ideas probably didn't result into a registered business. Articles on the internet all seem to refer to a paper from 2011 (http://gallery.mailchimp.com/8c534f3b5ad611c0ff8aeccd5/files...) that claims that 72% of intellectual property is not a competitive advantage.

This article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-star...) claims that 42% of startups fail because there's no market demand. Which doesn't include startups that found market demand, but didn't offer what the market needed (e.g. market values the offer but doesn't (or too little) want to pay for it). For failed startups in general, this article mentions a failure rate of 90%, but the reasons are diverse.

As I'm focusing on the validation (and some ideation) phase, the first metric made the most sense. Thanks for being critical!

Looks interesting. How does it work under the covers? Do you have an army of testers of various demographics?

I'm so happy you're asking! As a good entrepreneur/product manager, I start by validating the idea with the most minimum viable product possible.

For a service like this, I can simply use the 'concierge MVP' (https://www.shortform.com/blog/concierge-mvp/). So you're not far of: Rather than an army, it's me myself and I. Another common strategy is to do things that don't scale (and this most definitely won't scale). If it turns out to be a success I can define with the customers which features will be implemented first, and which will remain a 'concierge' service. The technical risk will need to be tackled next when there is market demand.

For early adopters, that pretty much means they're getting a personal coach for near to nothing.

If I'm lucky to have customers, I have some ideas around converting chat bots into virtual coaches, doing a bit of natural language processing (mainly to get the sentiment) and some simpler text matching to make sure the target customer, problem and solution match. Under the hood I'll need a process with different branches for different businesses. The alpha stage is also meant to further expand this process before implementing it in software.

(sidenote: Launching something is exciting, but also scary. I'm super happy you wrote!)

Very cool, thanks for your detailed response. Hopefully one day I’ll be in a position to use your services.

Love the transparency and boldness. My personal opinion is that your service sounds too good to be true so it makes me hesitate trying it out as there is a time and emotional cost to trying it out.

This is great feedback, and I believe the solution is to be even more transparent. I was thinking of adding some FAQ after the pricing to give people some insight and increase the trust level.

So far, no conversions yet. I can only conclude that the current format is indeed not the right one. Trust in the service can indeed be a problematic one.

I'm going to individual approach now: Reach out to people on IndieHackers who wrote about their idea, and browse around here (although, I think people will be in a later stage).

I'll be sure to get back when I have an update! :)

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