I don't understand. When I think of ideas, the perspective I view the idea from is whether or not it solves a significant problem in daily peoples lives. A lot of these startups, don't solve anything.
I'm interested in your extended response regardless of my stance.
Is it just guys that have too much money and fund startups hoping that 1 in 100 of the funded ones will eventually make them billionaires? That's currently what it seems like.
Is it just guys that have too much money and fund startups hoping that 1 in 100 of the funded ones will eventually make them billionaires?
Again, you're letting sour grapes color your perceptions here. Broadly speaking: "Make lots of bets, lose lots of bets, but have some money invested in [without loss of generality: Google]" is, in broad strokes, the model. Note that there is no reward for being original. Google wasn't. ("Another search engine? Please. And their portal is much worse than Yahoo's.") Facebook wasn't. ("So it's like MySpace but with 1/1,000th the users? Great idea, Harvard dropout.") etc, etc.
In terms of what makes a startup fundable: http://venturehacks.com/articles/unfundable-startup
In general, with exceptions which would be pretty obvious to a hypothetical founder if they applied, a hypothetical founder is fundable if:
+ They are located in proximity to investors who routinely fund companies like theirs
+ They are addressing a market with potential to make $10M ~ $100M (seed stage, angels, and early VC funding) to $X00M a year in revenues, at a minimum.
+ They've got a team who "look like winners", for very subjective versions of that. Graduated from a good school, worked for one of a few firms with known high hiring bars (AmaGooBookSoft, etc), had a high-impact role at a previously successful startup (first hire or first VP engineering at a company which exited or is a shoe-in to do so, etc), etc etc.
+ They are clearly capable of shipping great product. What makes a great product? Um, investors "know it when they see it", but suffice it to say that high-caliber design is very big right now.
+ Traction. In brass tacks: $X0,000 of monthly recurring revenue or millions to tens of millions of free users but growing fast. Less at early seed stage, but you should ideally be able to demonstrate it in micro-scale. (e.g. If you can show $1,000 of ad spend got you 4 customers and their LTV is probabalistically above $1,000 then you're in a much better position than if you can't, even if $4,000 doesn't really ring any bells for investors.)
Now, let's contrast this to a hypothetical guy. Guy has big dreams. Guy probably has not shipped a product. If Guy has shipped a product, Guy got 20 people to look at it once, but no one still uses it. Guy lives in the Midwest. Guy graduated from a respectable (but not name-brand) school. Guy worked has worked the last few years as a freelancer. Guy has not convinced a second guy to join him on his crazy adventure. Guy has an idea which Guy thinks is awesome but which Guy has not succeeded in actually selling to 10 customers or instantiating on the desktops or home screens of several thousand users.
Guy will have a very, very difficult time raising funding.
Stabbed me right in the heart. Pretty much what I'm doing now. Thank you for the article and your response.
Want a couple of examples? How about me and Patrick? I'm in Chicago, and Patrick lives in the Tulsa of Japan.
Right now I'm working on a mobile labour job marketplace with a low barrier of entry. Jobs like snow removal, cutting grass, simple errands. House owners can post a task, set a schedule for that task, and set a monthly budget for said tasks. Workers can view these tasks and areas, sign up for the task, at which point the house owner would review that workers profile to determine whether they are a good match. I like this idea because it would enable people to make quick money (teenagers, jobless people) and it would simplify the process much more.
I think it's a great idea and I'm spending every second of my time researching and developing, I'm really excited about this and I really think it will take off.
So that's my situation, just working on a prototype now.
I'm not crying about not being funded, just wondering why so many mediocre startups are funded. Thanks for your response!
MVP: focus on one aspect of your idea and just do it. From the ideas you gave above, I see winter and summer MVPs (snow removal, grass cutting) If you have a site ready to go now, go for 'www.grassbegone.com' and get a site out matching grass cutters with lazy home owners. Do the research while executing. If you don't have a site ready, spend the next few months developing www.snowbegone.com, learn marketing (from patio11 - hint, you're not charging enough) and launch at the end of autumn and corner the snow removal market.
Neither will get you funded now but I would bet money that what you learn would put you into the section of Guy who is now able to get funded.
Or you may end up like patio11 and make your millions without needed funding. Or you could end up like tptacek rich, acerbic and full of knowledge.
- not doable by a specialised company (cleaning, gardening)
- have a physical component (else they could be done by a VA)
- are more efficient to outsource than do yourself (which seems to rule out pretty much everything)
I came to the conclusion that the only way to go would be to build a specialised services firm, which seems to be what Exec has done (they now seem to just do cleaning). Which is cool, but maybe I'm missing something, since I don't see how they're really a tech startup as they don't really leverage tech in the way that Uber does. But straight services firms make tons of money anyway, so Justin Kan deserves applause for persuading pg to invest in a cleaning company.
Anyway my points to grandparent are:
- I agree, figure out a niche skillset first, then expand
- don't get seduced by the "on-demand mobile workforce" element. It sounds cool, but your target market probably doesn't care about cool. You have to answer the question "who really wants a dogsbody to do generic tasks?"
- Though the social aspect of this kind of business is nice, nailing the supply side is really easy. Unskilled and semi-skilled labour is really cheap, if you haven't noticed. 90% of your focus should be on nailing the demand side.
- read everything you can get your hands on about Exec/TaskRabbit/all their many clones.
- agree with parent's plan. Most local services firms probably suck at online marketing. If you can figure out a way to reliably get online customers for service X, you can then go to all the local firms that offer service X and offer a 10% affiliate deal. I'd focus more on nailing the marketing channel before the product (SEO, AdWords, whatever works - find out if there's underpriced search terms like "best window cleaning firms in Cambridge" and go from there).
And yeah, I've become a big fan of the patio11/tptacek approach. Just need to put it into action myself...
No need to bust out Excel and do any complicated models, but it's surprising how few people even do the mental arithmetic to figure out the volume of business and prices they need to charge to make rent.
For example, most people starting out with SaaS go with freemium with a premium plan of... you guessed it right.. $10/month!!! But, even at a conversion rate of 2% (which is not trivial and assumes you're making something people actually want), you'd need 3,000 users to earn your $600 of current living expenses, ignoring things like business costs and tax.
Do the math.
I'm really only doing this as a side project, to learn new technologies, to display that knowledge, and ultimately create an awesome portfolio piece if the idea doesn't take off.
If it does take off, that would be incredible.
I want to make it completely free. I want people to be able to find jobs with this amazing app, keep all the money, and keep the interaction between the employee and customer. I don't take any cuts. Registration is free. The app is free. In the future, if it does get traction, I may introduce some premium services or incorporate it. Right now, I just want to experiment with a mobile labour job marketplace.