Acadamia niche, limited customers - worth a startup? | Hacker News Reader

Acadamia niche, limited customers - worth a startup?

5 pointspolyfractal7 comments

I've been tossing around a startup idea designed to serve the biomedical acadamia niche. I'm a molecular neurobiologist with a comp-sci background, so I'm familiar with the various difficulties the biomedical acadamic community faces. I think my idea is a tractable problem that hasn't been addressed by others in a sufficient manner (yet).

My concern, however, is that the market is necessarily limited. The academic biomedical community is not huge and has modest wallets. I imagine the product would be licensed to institutes and universities as a site-wide service, rather than individual labs.

My question: Should one jump into a startup knowing that the niche is small and has a ceiling on potential customers? Customers who are at the mercy of limited budgets?

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Sounds like free is the way to go. You'll get your name out in the community and probably get more use this way. And if it turns out to have commercial appeal, you can always do an upgraded version with more bells/whistles and sell that one.

But everything you've described sounds like more frustration trying to make money rather than focusing on just trying to get it in people's hands -- which for most devs is the fun part (after coding).

I'd say no. Avoid something where addressable market is too small. Remember that for academia, human robots (aka grad students) are cheap and viable. Having said that, keep it in your ideas book, as you might use it for idea generation. Otherwise, use it as a way of practising customer development.

It's not that bad, you need to execute it extremely well. Last year I tried something in this direction called as MolSeek. Did not work out well, but I think I will try again. I will be keen to listen what you are up-to, only if you think year idea is worth sharing.

Excellent, thanks everyone for the advice! I think I could easily produce a barebones beta and just push it to grad students (the intended user) for free, see what happens. If people adopt it, perhaps I can investigate adding bells/whistles as you mentioned.

How big of an audience/revenue stream should a startup shoot for? I really have no idea. Just for fun, I ran some quick numbers:

A 10k yearly fee works out to 0.04% of MIT's library budget (26m), and 0.27% of my alma mater's budget (3.6m). If 10% of 4-year universities adopted the service (~230 colleges) that totals 2.3m yearly.

Obviously that is a really simplified example. I imagine larger schools would pay more than smaller schools, 10k is probably a silly number, ten percent adoption is probably overly-optimistic, etc. But I suppose it puts everything into rough context.

For most libraries, 10k is a fairly large fee for something only a small number of people would use. We do spend good money on very specialized databases, but they're fabulous resources, not something you can just whip up by yourself. Also, large fees require additional authorization above and beyond regular acquisitions. Something more reasonable would reduce friction.

Another idea for marketing: You may want to consider trying to sell to departments by contacting faculty/grad assistants researching in the affected field. Then, have the faculty request the library purchase a license. We pretty much buy anything faculty requests within reason, but ignore salespeople.

Very interesting, thanks! I admit I just made up 10k as a number, I have no idea what libraries typically spend on various acquisitions. I've contacted my alma mater's library asking similar questions. Would you mind an email from me about this?

I think you are going in right direction. Library budget is pain in ass, there is a huge untapped opportunity to disrupt the whole eco-system. Good luck with your Beta.

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