17 Mistakes Start-ups Make | Hacker News Reader

17 Mistakes Start-ups Make

cpd.ogi.edu

22 pointsmichjeanty9 comments

Previous thread from 2½ months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=221750

Question: does anybody think there's worth to a start-up that's being made primarily to offer a service rather than to make money? As in, something where the main focus is offering a top-notch service, whether it's to a small community or no? Because the start-up I'm working on is one that I have some plans for making money with, but I've done no research as to whether or not such markets are typically profitable and I don't care to. I care more about creating a service that doesn't exist. Is that a bad thing? Or, to be more focused, is there something I still ought to beware?

It depends on if you want to live on this idea or not. If you want to make enough profit to support yourself, you need to make sure there's enough of a market for that!

Hmm. In that case, I suppose I'd say that while my goal is making money, and lots of it, my motive is not profit, but invention.

I made a website for real estate brokers to manage their apartment listings. One of my partners was a sales guy. We made very little sales headway as the problem wasn't pressing enough to brokers--getting available apartments by fax and keeping them in 3-ring binders was a "good enough" solution for them, and in terms of paying a monthly fee, they just didn't have the money to spend on something they saw as a luxury. Services can be great businesses, but creating them for their own sake is a recipe for failure. My real estate agent co-founder was sure this service should exist. He was just wrong about the extent of brokers' willingness to pay for a better mousetrap.

I'm not in the same situation. I don't gamble on services that are slight improvements - such things are never certain. Instead, I think I offer something genuinely new. So hopefully there's a chance to be had.

There is nothing particularly slight about moving from a paper office to digital. We even offered data entry of their inbound faxes, and a consumer facing website back end. This was new to them.

I'll put it more plainly--if you don't know if your market has money, and a real problem, there's a good chance you're wasting your time. They liked our service--just not not enough to justify the expenditure of money they didn't have.

Best of luck, and I hope it all works out.

In that case, the model - charging people for a potential risk - had a fault. Perhaps following a different model would have worked.

And thanks.

Don't quote me on this, because I do not have much experience, only what I have learned through reading.

However, creating a service should be fine as long as you can prove there is a market for it. I am currently working on a service/product that I know for a fact there is a market on (its a large enough market to know that there is an opening for this service). You also need to either have alternate forms of revenue, or know that your market can afford the product.

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