How to Get Startup Ideas
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
As an example: in a hospital, we have the "sign out sheet" which is a list of the current patients and all of their important data. These sheets are usually manually updated and it's a very, very tedious task; you've got to make sure all the dosages are current, and they're already in the system! Anyway, I kept noticing the residents would ask one another if they had updated the sheet and realized this was a pain-point that's become an accepted part of the day-to-day medical routine. That's just one example.
Good problems don't have to elicit noticeable frustration. In fact, I'd say many of the best problems around are ones that have pushed people past frustration and into acceptance.
This. Seriously, the Institute of Medicine has implicitly decided that this is the problem that it wants the world's entrepreneurs to solve.
The IOM observed that there were many errors made in medicine. Errors in medicine harm and kill people.
Many people believe that doctors (residents) who sleep too little are more liable to commit errors. They believe that a lack of sleep is dangerous to patients; therefore, the ACGME instituted duty hour restrictions on residents.
As a consequence of this, residents work for fewer consecutive hours. Necessarily, they "hand off" their patients to one another more frequently than they did in the past. As you can imagine, there is also risk in the handoff process.
The IOM and the ACGME, via their pronouncements and policies, have decided that long shifts are too dangerous to try to solve. Instead, they are willing to throw all of their eggs into the "handoffs must be safer than long shifts" basket. Handoffs are dangerous, hard, annoying, and they happen at least twice per shift per attending, resident, and midlevel provider every day. I don't mean to tell you how to solve handoff problems, but I do want to underscore the problem that kyro has identified.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus11.pdf - Health, United States, 2011
http://wps.pearsoneducation.nl/wps/media/objects/13902/14236... - To Err Is Human
- http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192842 - JAMA: Institute of Medicine Medical Error Figures Are Not Exaggerated (Context for To Err Is Human)
- http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192908#RE... - JAMA: Is US Health Really the Best in the World? (More context for To Err Is Human)
http://www.innovationlabs.com/summit/summit3/readings/Schust... - How good is the quality of health care in the United States?
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/F... - Why Not The Best (Commonwealth Fund)
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309091179 - Health Literacy: A Prescription To End Confusion (IOM)
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6121 - IOM Workshop: Antiomicrobrial Resistance - Issues and Options
Books:
Anatomy of an Epidemic (Mental health)
The Emperor's New Drugs (Mental health)
Crazy Like Us (Mental health)
The Truth About Drug Companies (Pharma)
Overdosed America (Pharma)
Health Behavior Change and Treatment Adherence: Evidence-based Guidelines for Improving Healthcare (Medical adherence)
This list doesn't do a great job of covering certain niche problems like current issues in drug discovery or electronic records, but I think it provides enough context to understand whatever issues aren't covered directly. One of the quirks about medicine is that a lot of the data we have on even the most important issues (e.g. antibiotic resistance) is either 10+ years old or else woefully incomplete, which is extremely unfortunate but on the plus side it makes it actually fairly easy to learn about what would otherwise be way too complicated for anyone not in the industry to understand.
Short of scratching your own itch, a great way to come up with startup ideas is through careful observation of others, and particularly those who could be defined as a "market" of sorts (e.g., those in a hospital setting, business, etc.). Observing behaviors and the language people use when they are trying to accomplish a task is an amazing way of developing new ideas, which can easily lead to new startup ideas.
I've been in qualitative market research for about 10 years now and by far the most effective studies I have run for my clients has been through observational and ethnographic research methods where we just follow along as people try to perform a task. This is the best way to uncover unmet needs and ideas for new products.
If you're stuck for a startup idea, just ask someone in an industry you're personally interested in if you can watch them do their job for a day. Just sit there and observe - ask questions only at the end.
If you really watch carefully, that will produce more ideas than you know how to handle (although I still agree with pg's original point - solving your own problems is the best way to go because you'll be more likely to stick with it through the inevitable ups and downs of startup life).
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in
trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw
In healthcare, checklists improve safety, but so do other procedural changes. If a pilot has a mishap, the FAA/NTSB always investigates. Hospitals rarely investigate patient mishaps (deaths, malpractice etc.) unless there is a lawsuit filed, and state medical boards rarely investigate either.
http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...
And this doesn't just apply to tech startups...
The business I currently run (an exotic car rental company) started out precisely as described -- it was an idea I had to solve a problem I was facing (I wanted to rent a super-fancy car to drive across the country. Nobody in NYC offered that service). The business started as a fun side-project - a toy. I figured it would be a hobby business - something I could do in my spare time while I figured out what business I "really" wanted to start. I built it myself - did the deliveries, threw a website together, learned SEO, etc.
And sure enough, I was surprised by how much other folks also wanted this service. So when I went live - the calls kept coming. That was 8.5 years ago, and the business now employs over 20 people and is about to open in its 3rd city.
So take PG's words to heart - they're some of the best I've read.
wow, it sounds like an awesome business. drop a link so I can take a look at those babies.
//edit: got it http://www.gothamdreamcars.com/our-fleet.htm holy crap, nice collection (although I was hoping for some more diversity and vintages :)).
If you don't mind me asking, I was always curious: who is the common clientele for these kind of services? People who own such cars at home and want something similar while travelling?
I guess you pay a lot of insurance. have you had any problems like 'spoiled kid rents a murcielago, wrecks on the first corner?' or some fun/weird stories? (needless to say the whole business of owning such cars must be fun :) maybe you could do an AMA on reddit)
I recall someone did a similar AMA a few years ago, but indeed, maybe it's time for another one.
This is a perfect example of a sustainable niche business, and one of the reasons I love this particular PG essay more than most. I find that a lot of PG essays (especially his recent "growth") exhibit an obvious VC / Silicon Valley bias, but this one is globally applicable to everything from an exotics rental company to a rapidly-growing IPO-targeted hot startup.
Both your business and the PG essay also triggered "why has nobody written/created this in such a simple way before?" thought processes, which in my mind is another good indicator that the concept behind both is quite sound.
Had I known prior to my current trip to NYC, I'd probably be a customer right now - as it stands a Phantom for the day tomorrow is really appealing but I'm not sure I want to drop the cash :)
I'd love to hear more about your early days. I'm guessing you had to convince a bank to loan you money to buy a Ferrari, but you were a new business with no established credit history. How did that go?
I'm also very interested in learning about determining pricing for a service leasing out assets on a short term basis. I've had an idea that involves renting on a monthly basis (no, not exotic cars!) but I'm not able to figure out a pricing model to see if my target (low) prices are feasible.
pg's essays are so true and correct that I could practically cry.
If enough people read these essays (especially this and the recent "growth" essay), it could materially boost the economy.
No, it's not because pg is wrong or I disagree with anything he's saying, it's because everything resonates with my startup (Tinj.co, interactive movie ratings) but after 1000+ pitches I still can't succinctly articulate how I know this.
I could probably make a checklist for the criteria of great startup ideas (seems like a toy: check, personal problem: check, inspiration from other fields: check, etc) but I have a hard time imagining that to be persuasive. I guess all we can do is push on towards a beta and let traction speak for itself.
Truly disruptive ideas are difficult to communicate because most people do not have the mental framework to truly grasp them. I guess that's just the catch-22 of disruptive ideas.
1. Does it help people address their fears? For example, are they afraid of not being heard? Or missing the next great movie?
2. Does it help people feel loved? For example, giving them an opportunity to warn people away from bad movies, or to offer unique insights?
3. Does it help people create or curate beauty? Movie ratings themselves are not very beautiful, but perhaps the personal curation piece is important to some.
4. Does it help people to eliminate ugliness?
...and I wrote this before checking your site. After seeing it, I have this sinking feeling that you are not really serious about your startup, as the homepage makes absolutely no attempt to describe what it is. Cold sign-ups are very 2004. honestly if I had checked first I wouldn't have bothered replying, but since it's already written, here you go. Hope it helps.
1. A big reason more people don't rate movies is because it's unclear how or if it actually helps others (my vote doesn't matter syndrome) or themselves (black box recommendations).
2. Validation is a big motivator, seeing that others agree with you or trust your judgement is huge.
3. Funny you should mention curating beauty, individuals will be able to share and discover based on people that share the same taste in "beauty" in the context of movies.
4. Reading tons of reviews or trying to decide if 79% on RottenTomatoes or a 3.8 stars from something else means you'll actually enjoy a movie is a painful (or ugly) experience to most people I've talked with.
I assure you, @javajosh, we are taking this very seriously as a startup. The launchrock signup page is not the primary way we're finding beta testers, it's merely sufficient before we start a closed beta.
Getting back to the bigger picture though, we're really building a system to efficiently share opinions and see what other people think.
This isn't a huge pain point.
To make a (hopefully apt) comparison, what pain point did twitter initially solve? Sharing what you had for lunch?
Medical diagnostics, OTOH, could avoid a painpoint involving death - so that's an easier pitch.
Ratings are a form of feedback.
Feedback helps people learn.
Therefore, if we can build a better rating system that lets people share more and better feedback, then we can speed up learning and improve the flow and evolution of ideas.
Also, this system wasn't designed for movies, it was designed for answers on Quora. Movies are just a better beachhead.
Feel free to discount my opinion though, I haven't seen a movie in a theater in probably 5 years and basically think movies are a complete waste of time and money.
It never hurts to think bigger, too. If they do somehow achieve a big advance in selecting movies, it could probably be applied to books and movies too, right?
It's hard to think of a more impactful problem for the entire entertainment industry than better matching of products to consumers.
Listening to stories (or watching them, as the case may be) is a usually enjoyable experience - which is why we choose to listen and even pay for the opportunity to listen to a really good story from a really good storyteller. All of the "pain points" around this process have been thoroughly addressed: it's easy to discover movies, buy tickets, download to your computer, get reviews, write reviews. Even the watching experience itself has been improved with 3D (although this is open to debate) and better sound, even things like IMAX and more experimental experiences e.g. Star Tours at Disneyland. There are some places in the world where they even serve food and drink during the movie (or at least during an intermission).
The biggest pain people feel about movies is dealing with the proliferation of choice. It doesn't seem to me that there is an underserved market of people who would see more movies if only they knew about the good ones.
Imagine, if you will, your own personal Heaven. Presumably storytelling and movies are still happening. What is the heavenly, perfect movie-going experience? Does the movie take over your visual cortex? Are movies recommended by God - or indeed, created by Him to perfectly stimulate your mind in the way He knows you like? Does your reaction telepathically propagate to everyone else in Heaven? (Is telepathic propagation connectionless? I suppose that's another thread).
This is exactly it - well said. And as you said, "movies are your beachhead".
All you need is why what you do is different and/or better (which is still not exactly clear, unless it's finding peers).
It's sometimes tough for engineers to be focused less on being precise in description, and more inspirational to goals. I have to work at it every day.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html famously boils it down to one question: Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
Not exactly how we'd track it but the number of people that get laid after using our system would be a fascinating statistic.
Here's hoping pg writes that essay next.
The best material I've found about this kind of stuff is: Robert Cialdini's "Influence", and some of the less creepy pickup material, particularly to do with "inner game". Also, this new book by Australian business journo Valerie Khoo looks interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Stories-Build-Business-ebook/dp/...
If they were a "yes", they would take out their wallet and offer you money. "Something like that" means "not what you are offering".
"Maybe I could see using something like that" is what people say when they want to be nice to you. Even "I would use that" is basically a "no".
Try this template: "it's like Rotten Tomatoes, except ..."
It's like Rotten Tomatoes, except you rate on 3 axes instead of just 1.
It's like Rotten Tomatoes, except you rate the movie by answering questions about what parts you liked.
It's like Rotten Tomatoes, except your ratings are automatically posted to Facebook.
What are you building? If you can't say in one sentence, I would suggest the problem is with your pitch rather than with the listeners.
Describing what we're doing and illustrating the pain points aren't the same thing.
How about this: Tinj is a rating system that lets people externalize opinions about movies in context so they can receive comprehensive recommendations.
See? Told you I still suck at this.
Here's a problem we're solving: Given that opinions are complex, how do you figure out what other people think about a movie?
Read reviews? That's biased to critics and writers (less than 1% of the population).
Look at star ratings? What does 4-stars even mean?
Check out social media? How many tweets and blogs would you have to read?
Ask your friends? Which ones actually share your tastes and have seen the movie?
Unfortunately, complicated problems tend to have complicated answers.
"Quickly and easily decide which movie to see."
Simple, to the point, and yes, it's still an unsolved problem.
If you've come across this before, forgive the pestering, I just thought it was fair to point out before you've launched.
You should be putting those blocks in place now. Good SEO takes time, and day-before-launch is not the time.
Seriously, start executing your strategy now.
This is what I suggest you do. It might cost you ~$50 or so. Go to a coffee shop like Starbucks and offer someone to buy them their coffee in exchange for some feedback on the "new website you're building". Try to find normals (not super technical folks, unless that's your target audience). Explain to them what you're building, let them play with the site (hey this is also a nice UX test), take your notes whatever but in the end, ask them to explain to you what your site does. Maybe if you do this with 10 or so people you might see a pattern emerging (bonus: get pretty good feedback on product too).
I am not saying this will work, but this will not be a waste if the people you talk to are anything close to your target audience.
P.S. What Emmett is saying above is to give him a one sentence description that brings him as close as possible to cloning your site. Also, do you really need "externalize opinions"?
I've more or less mastered the 1-minute demo, hard not to since I've done it a thousand times (and a thousand different ways too). Trust me, I used to suck a lot more.
As for the "externalize opinions" line, just trying something new.
I'm not even sure what that means. Target your pitch to an 8th grade reading level. Yours sounds like the abstract for a research paper. And these days, your core value proposition should be able to be expressed in a tweet.
>How about this: Tinj is a rating system that lets people externalize opinions about movies in context so they can receive comprehensive recommendations.
What does "externalize opinions" mean? As someone who has never seen your service, I know what an opinion is, but "externalize" is a complex word with multiple nuanced meanings. As a prospective user I assume you mean "voice".
What does "in context" mean? Again, as a prospect I have zero idea what you mean by that, so I will assume you mean "on my site".
What does "receive comprehensive recommendations" mean? I guess it can be my FB friends (if I give another service access to mytriends list) or strangers or (worse) friends I have to make on your site before it brcomes useful. I'll assume "strangers or FB friends".
Put it together, and the pitch becomes (to me, a prospective user who had zero context about your srvice beyond this sentence and who you are trying to convince to visit your site): "Tinj is a rating system that lets people voice opinions about movies on the Tinj website so they can receive recommendations from strangers or FB friends.". This may be totally wrong, but it's the picture I got. To which as a user I say: "Big deal. I don't need this site when I have FB and RottenTomatoes."
I hope hearing some feedback from a stranger will help you refine your pitch.
I think you're talking about Yahoo and the J-curve, couldn't find anything by Bezos.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, we went through a phase of pitching ourselves as "Disqus for ratings" but the problem was it's hit or miss with people.
Ratings in general is a different story though.
It's difficult problem to solve, you need lots of users and a good algorithm to improve on what IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes provide. In general I find that I'm happy with the ratings on IMDB and generally I will like the high rated films on that site - though I can imagine there are a lot of people that doesn't work for.
It would take a lot to convince me that someone had solved this problem (many have tried and failed), like a bit of hype from everyone or some rave reviews. However, in absence of that and seeing that you had done 1000+ pitches, I looked at your site and it has an invite form on it - so really you haven't even started yet.
- some people enjoy movies and are always looking for new stuff.
- their joy is watching movies, not rating them. like / not like right after the movie is ok. some disconnected process is not, this is work, not joy.
- what are the major, simple factors leading to the next good movie?
1., Same personnel involved. director, screenwriter, main actors.
2., I liked their previous work.
3., The major outliers are found by chance or word of mouth. then 1 and 2 are in play.
Now, does a web page solve this nicely? No. Much smarter would something akin to what Netflix is attempting. A XBMC/Plex/VLC plugin maybe that tracks HABITS. No effort involved. The plugin tracks the movie history and maybe, maybe asks at the end if you like the movie.
You can apply the same to songs, etc.
And yes, Netflix, Amazon, all prior art. But actually working.
Convenience is key for consumers. Seamless. Easy. Valuable. Instagram hooked itself into the photo making process. Flickr did not.
Good luck.
--note: I know nothing more than my rottweiler sitting next to me. The difference between me and most people is that I will tell you I know nothing. So just take the advice and do with it what you want.
I came across the following quote by William S. Burroughs recently:
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Replace "Happiness" with "a start-up idea", and I think you get what pg is getting at:
A Start-up idea is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek a start-up idea for itself seek victory without war.
I also came across a great post on the relationship between serendipity and success, and is it well worth the read: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/when_success_is_born_out_of_...
I especially enjoyed this bit:
Our mind abhors these serendipitous explanations, and searches for convenient patterns instead. Ask for the keys to career success and you'll get logical explanations, recommendations, pathways and approaches. Then ask someone how he or she became successful and suddenly it becomes a story of serendipitous encounters, unexpected changes in plans, and random consequences. It does not make sense to ignore this basic fact about success any longer.
Similar to the advice you read on "creating your own luck", you need to put yourself in situations where "serendipity" can happen more easily. In other words, if you want to become an actor, move to L.A. If you want to work in Finance, hang out in Wall Street, etc. There are of course no guarantees, and of course you can become an actor without living in L.A., and a financial analyst without being on wall street.
If you walk through a bad neighborhood by yourself late at night with a George Costanza like wallet bulging in your back pocket, you increase your chances of being mugged. It won't happen every time, but you are certainly "tempting fate".
So, "walk" in "neighborhoods" where you tempt fate in your favor. Go to meetups. Volunteer at organizations where people are trying to solve important problems. Ask people you find interesting to go for a coffee. Socialize with small business owners. Contribute to open source projects.
There is an interesting Forbes article on "The Four Essential Personality Traits Of Every Entrepreneur", one of which is "Luck-Dominant":
"...luck-dominant founders—which make up more than 25% of founders in the authors’ studies—are men and women whose positivity and intellectual curiosity create circumstances where a positive outcome is more likely. In other words, “they’re lucky by attitude, not by fate.”
(link to article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/10/11/the-fo...)
There's also the excellent quote attributed to William Gibson[2] "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed". That's probably the biggest reason I live in silicon valley - there is a disproportionate amount of 'future' distributed here.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Living-Future-Education-Adventures-Adv... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson
I once worked on a social network for dog owners. Not pet owners, dog owners. And not actually dog owners, but their dogs. A place for people to have a social network of ... dogs.
But all the features made it an interesting enough project. The guy even came up with enough money to pay the web agency I was working at for the development - yes, outsourcing core product to an agency.
It took a year for the project to go from "I need devs" to "Build this". By then I had already given my notice at the agency with the dream of launching a cool startup.
I don't know that the dog social network ever launched.
There will now be a lot more HN readers keeping diaries of all the things that they noticed were inefficient in their day, and they will come up with good, competing startup ideas. However, the founder that is likely to be the most successful was the one that started doing this long before this essay came out. Which is actually the point of a large part of the essay, the one that talks about being "the right type of person".
Though they were public, for anyone to see, we were able to read the notes, understand his philosophy, and raise money in an area he'd never invested before.
The thing is, most people will read this essay and go "Yeah, yeah! That's great. I'm going to do that" and then forget about it by next Sunday. So I don't think you need to worry too much.
Edit: OK, YC adds much more hands on value to businesses, but the investment aspect is exactly the same as it would be if you bought shares over the market.
If a VC buys a 10% stake in company ABC for $1 million the trade looks like:
VC: -$1,000,000, +10% equity (worth $1,000,000)
Net = $0
ABC: +$1,000,000, -10% equity (worth $1,000,000)
Net = $0
Now let's say ABC doubles their valuation. Now the trade looks like:
VC: -$1,000,000, +10% equity (worth $2,000,000)
Net = +$1,000,000
ABC: +$1,000,000, -10% equity (worth $2,000,000)
Net = -$1,000,000
Obviously the $1,000,000 helped ABC double their valuation, which means that the transaction was not zero sum. Same could be said about all investments and to a lesser extent, options and futures. You can't ignore the context of the trades such as using put options to hedge a long position, for example.
Reading and understanding are only one step. Actually assimilating and putting the advice to practical use is another step entirely.
This is why there are so many "obvious" articles that we do not apply. For instance, the blog posts and articles advocating exercise and a good night's sleep.
And yet, here I am, posting on HN at 1:20 AM.
Just a couple of thoughts on the paragraph about finding non-organic ideas.
If you're a developer and in need of an idea, I couldn't recommend highly enough to attend industry conferences (in any industry). Over the day or two you are there, you will hear speakers tell you the problems they face, hear which are the repeat questions asked from the audience, and have a chance to talk with delegates about their biggest problems and why they are attending (what are they trying to find out). I rarely leave a conference without several obvious pain points facing the industry jotted down. If one of them inspires you, sounds interesting, feels familiar etc. then that could be your start-up idea. Most of these could be 'eaten by software' I'm sure, so they would be ripe for a developer to tackle. You could even find your domain-specific co-founder there too - 2 birds, 1 stone!
Another place to look (and possibly cheaper and involving no travel) would be sites like twitter, quora, linkedin etc. where large numbers of users can ask each other questions or complain about some pain they have. You could look for trends and see if that sparks any interest.
Strangely (or perhaps not) getting married made me better at noticing. I could sit in a room and watch TV because there was 'nothing else to do' when my wife sat in the exact same room she saw all sorts of things that needed doing. And when she pointed them out they became obvious to me too. Perhaps I'm an inveterate slacker but those things were deeply camouflaged against the patina of knik-knacks that couldn't hide from her. Oh there is the radio that needs the knob glued to work again, that corner needs a light fixture. The top speakers are covered in dust, the board games have started tumbling out of the AV cabinet and are threatening the dog cushion.
I had invested way too much time as a youth trying not to see things I didn't have time to do or want to do, that I perfected my non-vision vision. She helped switch that off which made my marriage better (fewer arguments) and suddenly seeing things that could be better but weren't yet. One of those 'benched' (sort of ideas was a computer system for teaching computer science. The Raspberry Pi helps wonderfully in that regard. So sometimes even when I don't make progress things get better :-).
Before Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen built and tried to sell a hardware product (!) called the Traf-O-Data. The device processed raw data from roadway traffic counters and printed out human-readable reports for traffic engineers. Luckily for the two budding entrepreneurs, they were unable to close the first sale, leading them subsequently to pivot into making Basic interpreters for microcomputers.[1]
--
[1] http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=45
On "A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young", I'd like to add another way to be unusual: "A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be travel" I mean travel a lot, not short holiday breaks of course. Stuff like go to live 3 months in Mexico, 6 months in Bali and so on. I did all this for what, 10 years, and I have more ideas than I can chew. I'm not that good in executing thought.
And one last thing. Pick your most "status quo" friend. You know, those guys who are absolutely convinced nothing will ever change and nothing ever changed and everything is normal as it is, today. They live in the present. Run your ideas on them. If they go "naa...who needs that?" you may have a good idea.
It happened to me a few years back when I had already started an online reservation business in Prague and decided to try the same in Riga, Latvia. This "status quo" friend had already told me Prague would not work "nobody will trust a website to reserve an apartment". When we went to Riga he told me "naaaa...who would come to Riga, this is like the Soviet Union and it's far". It worked, immediately.
I mean zero investments, html websites and stuff like that. Really low tech.
Thinking about it now, with low cost flights coming in from all over Europe and no passport requirements, he admits I was right. But I am sure that if I present him with another idea he would still go: "nnaaa...who would..". Good, time to build it!
You need a friend like that.
They inadvertently solved the need of microblogging. No need to maintain blogs; no need to write long posts. Just a simple, short way to keep people informed with what you are doing. But that's not what made them big either.
What made them big is celebrities took to it and used it as their main form of communication with their fans. That's why I made an account a few years back and I'd venture to say over half of the active users did the exact same. Twitter has since evolved past that, at least for me, but it was definitely the initial reason for the boom. Would they have been successful without that? Probably not.
So is Twitter a good idea? I don't know. I really don't know.
Sometimes ideas play out in interesting, new ways. I very much doubt that the originators of Twitter thought of even half the ways their service is being used today.
Just because no one (including the Twitter guys) could see the direction it would grow in doesn't mean that it wasn't a great place to start. In retrospect, clearly it was.
If celebrities didn't take to Twitter I very much doubt they would have hundreds of millions of users now. You could argue the idea is what drove celebrities to use the service, but did it? If another service came out before or around the same time that celebrities used instead, would we say "Twitter is obviously a great idea that just didn't catch on?"
Delivery of celebrity gossip, information, photos to fans is big business. It was also gate-kept by an industry who decided who was cool and who was not.
Celebrities quickly worked out they could by-pass this channel and go direct to their fans. The broadcast and print media no longer were the gatekeepers, and the celebrities could build their own direct channel to their fans.
Now celebrities make money just by having a direct link to their fans and have an incredibly effective marketing channel. And now they often accept money for posting something on twitter.
I think it's one of those examples where the media-replacement is coming in along an axis that nobody expected.
The future of media is less in the masthead but more in the individually branded producer. To achieve this requires a lightweight direct channel. Which twitter has achieved without really setting out to.
This spurs on a thought that I've had about the position of entrepreneurship and human society. The cohort of startups are all hard at work solving problems that consumers or businesses run into. It's like the human collective organism that is constantly evolving to become better, stronger, and faster.
Startups are the seeds of the experiments that could become a business that makes a huge impact to the organism. Imagine how much more efficient the world is with Google, for example!
If all businesses and founders were to take pg's advice here, the practical (and important) problems in society would be solved at a much more dramatic rate.
THIS. The field of CS has so many people in it, it's difficult to find an idea that somebody hasn't already implemented in 4+ languages.
If you branch out into other fields, you become infinitely more valuable to said fields, plus the problems in other, not-as-programming-saavy fields become readily apparent.
I know it's been repeated elsewhere, but as a chemical engineer I feel obligated to spread the word.
It is not obvious so much that actually there are several social networks for pet owners with apparently hunderds of thousands (registered) users. There is one even in Hungary where I live (only 10million people live in Hungary), but here are some english sites also:
http://webtrends.about.com/od/socialnetworks/tp/pet-social-n...
Yes probably this is not a huge market, but some people make some money off of this.
So, yes, it is totally not obvious what startup ideas are good or bad.
http://abovethecrowd.com/2012/11/13/our-most-recent-marketpl...
"DogVacay is an online marketplace that links dog owners with passionate dog care providers who open up their own home as an alternative to the traditional cage-oriented kennel."
DogVacay is not a social network for pet owners, nor do they seem to want to be one, thankfully. DogVacay is really good at one thing - finding me dog owners who can take care of my dog better than a random professional kennel (and usually for less money). They are a marketplace disrupting the unsexy kennel business by taking advantage of the subtle facts that almost no dog owner likes kennels, most of them would trust another dog owner more than one, and that many dog owners (and even people without pets) and their dogs would actually enjoy hosting someone else's pet for a few days. I don't even do it for the money.
This essay made me feel a little unsettled. It described things I find myself doing (solve small problems and let them grow) for the sake of solving problems, which hasn't been popular with all the people working on being revolutionaries in my life.
After I read Startup = Growth, I felt I read the YCombinator Manifesto, and so much clarity packed into an essay where most others replace one set of confusing concepts with their own.
Together, I think this essay speaks to something bigger that I've believed in. You are the only, and most important start you'll ever work on. learning to learn, recognize, focus on and solve the right kinds of problems is what will make all of the difference.
After reading this essay, I get why YC focuses so much on a person's tenacity.
I could apply with any of my ideas that mostly live in the future, are useful, functional, valuable, and most of all, simple and obvious. I didn't know if I could belong in an accelerator, but, just for the personal mentoring alone for becoming a better creator of what's missing in the future, I'd do it to just be around the conversations.
I found this to be the strongest way of saying don't obsess about your competition. Focusing on users will probably help address other issues as well (i.e. working on the wrong problem, building the wrong thing, not making as much of an impact as you could be, etc).
...On the other hand, I suppose for some ideas you would never know unless you tried to execute it...
While cloning a service in a different geographical area may be profitable and successful on the short term, it's never going to be a Facebook or a Google on a global scale. It's like opening up an Italian restaurant in a small little town that doesn't have an Olive Garden yet.
If that's the kind of business you want to be in that's fine, but it's not the high-growth kind of startup that many of us are trying to build.
It's "just" a cash cow.
This friction also works in reverse, though. As a startup you have a hard time to get the deals with the movie industry, while Netflix already has the connections.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-samwer-brot...
In 1999, they founded Alando, a German clone of the online auction house Ebay. Only 100 days later, they sold the company to Ebay for about $50 million (€38 million), making them legends early in their careers. Later on, they became involved with Jamba, StudiVZ, Citydeal, Groupon, Facebook, Parship, eDarling, MyVideo, Wimdu, HelloFresh, GlossyBox, Zalando and many other Internet up-and-comers.
trademe.co.nz is an ebay clone that got traction in NZ long before ebay ever got going, and now ebay is nowhere there because of the network effect.
Taking a young-ish but proven business model from the USA and rolling it out in your own country can be a very viable way to get success.
However, it takes all the usual combination of drive, talent and capital to do so. And you've got to get straight onto it, because it's such an obvious idea, others will also be doing the same thing.
Ideas should stem from problems. The "problem" with only solving problems for yourself, however, is that you may not be hitting a real market. The tech niche isn't exactly the norm (it's the .1%).
Lean methodologies behind testing problems and market needs are definitely making it better, but it's still extremely time -consuming, can get costly, and can lead to nothing (which is still better than building a product that doesn't go anywhere).
Landing pages, blog posts, setting controls & changes, analyzing the results and transferring those to actual needs and potential customers.
It's a mess.
If only there was something to solve this "problem" of figuring out which problem-solvers are market viable and which aren't quickly and affordably (without the massive learning curve).
My team and I just may have to give tackling this one a try :)
I eagerly await for a problem to come into my life to which the solution is only a few weekends of Ruby away.
Specifically: " Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented."
Also the section about "wells" and attacking a problem at least some people care deeply about, instead of a shallow 'hole' is one that has just allowed me to clarify and refine some of my thoughts and ideas about where I'm at right now.
This was a massive help.
Thanks for the great article pg.
The talk, should anyone actually want to listen to me talk for 20 minutes: http://youtu.be/bPwgkf1aZ9I
(the guy controlling the projector had a hard time with the remote, the background slides keep going out of order :(
Furthermore I think SketchUp[0] is already a solution for this kind of problem, is extremely easy to use; trought I have to admit that it could improve with some tools specifically for photogammetry and 3D printing.
That's not to say that being an employee of a company working on these wouldn't be a lot of fun, if that's your thing. But founding a company around sexy technology is more about self-indulgence than trying to create a wealth generating enterprise.
I worked on what I, at the time, called software to do "3D printing" in the late 1990s. CAM - Computer Assisted Machining - software. (It was CNC drilling, not additive sintering).
Sure, it was very expensive (like a mainframe), not cheap (like a PC). However, it definitely wasn't sexy. Nobody, not even sci-fi nerds, was jumping to work on that type of problem.
It's actually quite schlepy, at least the part we did. Lots of maths and problems with floating point rounding errors, and weird edge cases of strange shapes.
Bet there are plenty of schlepy bits in the new, cheap world of 3D printing. We're certainly early enough, it has nowhere near even begun to play out.
The main problem I see is that development is going to be hugely expensive. It's an inherently complex problem domain. You need people who know hardware and 3D modelling. And you need people who can design UIs. There's a reason AutoCAD costs so much!
Someone will do it eventually. But it will be interesting to see how they are able to make it affordable and still make money. I know about Tinkercad but don't know what their plans are.
"Thanks to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan, Mike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about startup history."
(my emphasis)
To what extent do these individual contribute and/or suggest corrections of an essay like this?
[1] Read Ben's email here: http://spectralight.com/myblog/2012/11/09/the-secret-is-expo...
Another good trick is to write down those ideas on your blog at a fixed interval. This has two side effects: it forces you to either execute on an idea or let it go and it gets you feedback from your visitors. Here's my most recent idea dump: http://syskall.com/some-crazy-and-not-so-crazy-startup-and-p...
Are there good examples of "former consultants who decided to start a company building the tools they used to make for every new client?" RJMetrics is the only one that comes to mind.
(This is not a loaded question; I was one and am in that place now. My potential cofounders and I are engineers but not developers; that's a barrier but not insurmountable)
(Well idea: as I've gotten older I no longer care to keep up on all music related media and there are too many bands I like releasing music I don't want to miss. I've made a service that allows you to keep track of releases from your favourite artists chronologically so you don't miss out on any.)
This hit home run.
re the unsexy filter, success can create sexiness. nike sells shoes. amazon sells books. salesforce sells enterprise software. yet these are all considered cool, sexy companies for the most part. if you build something people love, you can make it sexy. worry less about if something is sexy today, and worry more about building something people will love tomorrow. sexiness will follow.
Sounds like start with a niche. Which is great advice.
I like how in this essay pg managed to balance the idea of building something you really want (but may have a market size of 1) vs a problem that everyone has but is only a small itch-to-scratch problem
I ran and failed a number of startups for a number of reasons, and I think this essay resonated the most with me as the idea fountain never stops. Choosing the ideas were in fact the difficult parts, and I know a few months down the track, I'd be reading it again.
Are you all applying for YCombinator? There's so much effusive praise for Paul. ;)
He mentions 3 basic factors: the founders want it, they can build it, and it goes un-noticed.
"Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way."
I agree with this premise, and he backs up the 1st point really well.
The 2nd point isn't really worth arguing. Ya, you've got to have product.
What was disconcerting to me was that he went after the pet websites. It made me laugh a bit.
As someone who used to work for Dogster.com and Catster.com which were both successful niche websites that were profitable and sold to "Say Media," I'd have to say no to this:
'The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." ...Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.'
Zero users is simply false. Dogster.com still has the kind of usage that isn't the home run Paul is looking for in his investments, but it is sustainable.
The 3rd point about not-noticing has two excpetions: Hegel and PayPal. Let's stick to the second. Elon Musk noticed it from the very start as a competitor running what was then also a payment system known as X.com. I think when he added his startup DNA into the mix, although it led to an employee revolt and his ouster, it made PayPal stronger. This is where Hegel comes in: the dialectic of history is a pattern that can be seen everywhere, even in startups, but that's another blog post.
E.g. I read below someone's startup idea is for a new type of movie rating system ("because 5 stars just isn't good enough anymore") - but couldn't this be easily wiped out if an encumbent like IMDB just rolled the idea directly into their rating system.
The difference however is that instead of a new and massive muscle movement, it will be refining and pruning the tree to make things more efficient, cost effective and empowering.
AirBnb lets you monetize your spare housing capacity for rent.
Congested cities are full of cars with spare capacity that isn't being monetized. I'm not the only one that's noticed this. Someone will eventually try to use smartphones + ridesharing to use this spare capacity.
Is anyone doing it at present?
Ain't that the truth. This footnote stung a bit. Take advantage of the flexibility of youth!
Issue with using ideas as your problem is that you have to find actual problem first, then solution next. 'm' ideas as your problem and another 'n' ideas for each problem, it is m x n complexity.
Use lean principles to find a solution to a problem that you understood well.
2. Domain expertise in X
3. Thinks "I could build X!"
4. Actually builds X
The intersection 1+2 occurs often, and 1+2+3 more recently. 2+3+4 are fun for hacking. A PhD thesis is 1+2+3+4, but with a very limited 1. The startup I'm at (my first) is the first time I've worked on something that strongly intersects 1+2+3+4.
I got a wake-up call from my 5yr old that felt like this. He pointed up and said "look". I asked him "what is it?" ... "tree!". I bit my tongue humbled.
I wish to be able to see the "trees of ideas-in-waiting" like he does and not take the status quo for granted.
[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
> When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad [emphasis mine], but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
That is the best thing I've ever read from PG. But I would say, "Ideas lead to action, and only action builds a startup. Ideas upon ideas lead to ideas, not a startup."
An OkCupid for best genetic matching?
-You have to be a founder to found, who you are defines what you can do.
-just another founder at work
YC assembles a Team of the Greatest Founders after extensive validation by the most qualified people in the planet to judge whether you have the qualities required to build a startup. (They may miss a good team, but the probability of them selecting a bad team is less than 10%)
YC mentors these teams ideas by making the best people in Silicon Valley available to these teams so that they can pivot and re-work on the most probable idea which may succeed
Expected Outcome to Founders: Conservatively 50% of YC funded Startups would be back to the point of their starting (Zero returns for the effort invested both for the founder as well as the investors) Some Founders may even have negative returns in Health, Relationship and sometime financially.
Extected Outcome to YC and the World in Large: Even less than 10% hit a home run, they have extra ordinary returns and the world becomes a better place hopefully because of realization of new ideas.
What does this tell me, this tell me that there is no relation between Ideas and the extra ordinary results which every founder is look towards, then why waste time looking for a needle in a haystack.
As a startup founder who identified a big pain (Fragmentation of Operating Systems for Applications to be developed on - It does not make financial scence to develop the same functionality three or more times) about 2 years back and started working on a solution to solve my own pain, i have come to the conclusion even after solving the problem, financial success will not come easily by just working on a Idea. But Working on this Idea made me understand how to get success.
Just follow in the footsteps of the YC. What does YC do, it enables and guides others start on the path of founding a startup and takes a % if you succeed. Since the returns are extra ordinary, even if a few succeed they win.
A example: Any developer can just start doing Minimum Viable Prototype (1 to 3 months effort for a capable person) for any interesting idea for 1% non dilutable equity return (!Don't spend any effort after MVP and don't ask for money to do the prototype!) which others are interested in pursing for a mythical return. This is equvalent to emulating YC and may have a better return on effort. Of course if all the people whom you sponsor are duds, your expected return will be zero which is also what YC is solving, If their luck is so bad that they don't have home runs, they would have wasted their money, where as you would have enjoyed trying to solve interesting problems even if they have failed and in the situation your MVP becomes a Instagram. Your 1% is 10 Million dollars.
All the above are assumptions which i am planning to verify (But not a a developer but as a Micro Angel) and hope to see what will happen.
If you earn based on Effort you are an employee, if you earn based on the value created by your Effort you are a consultant or most of the current startups, but if you earn based on other peoples effort willingly parted, then you are true scaleable startup which has a higher probability of success.
If your idea can make others succeed in what ever they do, but there is a link to return based on their success of their idea, the probability of making extra ordinary returns becomes possible.
AirBnb succeed because it is an idea which makes others monetize their living space. YC succeeds because YC shows the path to wealth generation for founders even if 50% of founders fail.
Last point is about Idea about Pets which pg assumed is a bad idea. My take on it is (I have no domain expertise on this), Pet Foods is a multi-billion dollar business, i know there are many pet food stores selling pet food, i also know that the pet food suppliers are multi-million dollar corporations. If i create a simple Mobile Pet Food Cataloging/Ordering/PreOrdering system (a 3 months effort) and give it away free to these pet food stores for giving to their customers and collate all these data and can sell the viewing of this data to the pet food supplier, I have a just in time inventory replenishment system. So many inefficiencies can be remove by asking the customer to preorder pet food. You remove overstocking, managing discounts. You effectively become the middle man between the Pet food supplier and the Pet Food store/Customer. I am not saying that this is a good idea, but just rejecting an idea because pets.com was a flop is not the correct way to go about it. You should deeply think about any idea before discarding it.
A disciple of pg giving an alternative viewpoint.
The bottom line is every developer sees the "waste" in developing the same functionality multiple times on different platforms every time there is a shift in the software sector. They're drawn in by the siren call of a potentially huge productivity gain by introducing new abstractions, but it almost always ends up in a death march and failure. You end up with bloat, inferior performance, inferior look and feel, and least-common-denominator of functionality. The history of computing is littered with these things and while there are a few spots of mixed success (like Java for example, which took more than a decade for people to realized sucked on the client but worked well for servers) the charred remains of surely thousands of other attempts sit on forgotten directories of hard drives everywhere.
Other ones: a better Craigslist, a drag-and-drop/novice-oriented/visual programming tool, a replacement for PHP, basically any import/export/sync tool between two major well-established enterprise services that do not have one already, and how could I forget a better to-do list. That's not to say there isn't a potential for making these things happen, but if you're going to throw 3-5 years of your life into something you probably want to avoid things that many heros have tried and failed doing.
is that last sentence a joke? if yes, i think it is too subtle, a lot of dry sponges would soak it up.
if it's NOT a joke... ummmm... wtf?
[1] ok, not really, but you get the idea.
maybe i'm taking it out of context, but anyway, seems i'm the only one, so nevermind ;)
Anyone else have other methods?
@pg, why dont you upgrade your design ? You have so much money . You can hire best designer . If you say,i can contribute my design to you .
At it's core, it seems to be saying "Ask women what they need, then build it for them". Start with that attitude, and women will have no interest in your product - because you begin by assuming they're incapable of building the things they need themselves.
I suspect it's a relatively low number - hence developers making comparatively quite decent salaries and software companies having an excellent potential for massive returns.
I don't really see this point as sexist or anti-sorority (although it's true sororities are heavily stereotyped in the US, in my experience) - I think this question would be equally applicable as "find stylish young people in a bar and ask them what they'd want or need to advance socially with a wide audience online."
The idea is that sororities self-select for people who are interested in being social, and that women in sororities are often trendsetters and hence excellent marketing targets.
The advice also goes strictly against what pg himself is advising in the same article: The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There must be things you need. [14]
But let's look at the one example that pg gives in the article: Rajat Suri didn't offer to write any software restaurants might need - he learned what they needed, and then struck out on his own.
If anybody had suggested he should just work as free IT for restaurants, that would sound kind of ridiculous, no?
But please, try out his advice, see how it works for you.