Why Ideas are a Bad Place to Start a Startup | Hacker News Reader

Why Ideas are a Bad Place to Start a Startup

vijayanand.name

39 pointsjoeyespo19 comments

People do not seek problems. People seek experiences. Experiences uncover problems. Problems do not instantly lead to ideas. Ideas are created when the mind takes quantum leaps in thought to create. The feeling of having a business idea is so profound, the ahha moment is so strong, and the quantum leap in thought feels so unique that we tend to speak about ideas not problems. In reality, they are 2 sides of the same piece of paper (think mobius strip).

Ideas are not a bad place to start a startup.

Bad ideas are a bad place to start a startup.

Ideas are the only place to start a startup. Without the idea on how to solve your problem you have nothing.

Nothing to fail with, nothing to execute on, nothing to keep you going.

The article doesn't actually say that ideas are bad, that's just the title. Not an uncommon phenomenon for blog posts I think.

Without the problem to solve, there's nothing to build the idea on top of.

That's not true. You can build stuff based only on ideas for as long as you want to.

In other words. None is worth more than the other. They are both equally valuable.

It sounds like you didn't read much of the article.

I did read it that was what I took away from it.

Read the post more carefully. It doesn't say you shouldn't have ideas. It say you should start with an audience and then come up with ideas for that audience. It merely shifts emphasis from the ideas to the audience.

It shifts nothing the way I read it. You can't separate idea from audience.

I totally agree, and the article is well-written... but haven't we heard this already? It feels like Amy Hoy's core ideas: 1- start with an audience, not an idea. 2 - observe customers in their natural habitat (the sales safari); do not ask them direct questions. 3- find pain points 4- Market to a group you are part of.

Maybe the author is taking Amy's class, 30x500? I'm not even taking it and I know all this :). It's been blogged for a while now.

Start with an audience, not an idea: Agree!

In fact, start with a Content-Audience Fit if you really want to get somewhere:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/the-very-first-th...

The article sounds a little like business studies 101, but I think it's a good read and a lot of people should think first before investing in a business.

This article seems to have plummeted very quickly from the front page? Does anyone have a clue why that might be?

Maybe some "illegal" upvotes have been detected?

You think that starting with an idea leads to fragility and that there is an off chance that you succeed. You are probably right. You state an alternative process which you say is leads to higher success rate. Great, but where is the proof? The part where you say this has increased success rate from X% to Y% with other variables kept constant is missing.

You say that this blog article would be improved if he had quantified the success rate of his observations, and you say claim this would constitute "proof" of the goodness of his post. Where's your proof that quantified metrics would make the post any better, or that indeed such quantified metrics would even constitute such "proof"?

Just giving you a hard time :)

A quantified proof might not be needed, but at least the slightest indication to if he has seen this process work in the real world would have made the post much more useful.

Exactly. Since he's not suggesting any other actual methods, IMO this is more of a sensationalist way of saying that startups should base their ideas within an area where the founder is comfortable and knowledgeable.

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