Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
swombat.com
swombat.com
There are lots and lots of problems that are either unsolved or are being solved in ways that are less efficient and cost-effective than they could be, particularly outside of the consumer space. In many cases, these problems can be solved with relatively unsophisticated applications. But the folks who sit around thinking about the usual consumer internet suspects (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) never discover these problems because more often than not, they have no domain expertise.
Sadly, it seems to me that many technical wantrepreneurs have no real interest in developing domain expertise because they believe there's more value in mastering the framework du jour than focusing in on a vertical and developing a real understanding of it over time.
2. You don't have to quit your day job to develop domain expertise. Be strategic and try to make sure your day jobs are related to a specific industry. Far too many people hop from random startup to random startup. That's not surprising: the pay can be excellent, you get to work with the latest and greatest technologies, and you get a lottery ticket in the form of equity. But many of these jobs won't provide enough exposure to a vertical to actually gain meaningful knowledge of it.
3. If you get involved in an industry, you should take the time to establish relationships, especially with folks who are non-technical. If you nurture those relationships and keep your eyes open, you will often meet highly-knowledgeable, well-connected non-technical individuals who make for perfect non-technical co-founders. These are not the "non-technical co-founder seeking technical co-founder" wantrapreneurs with no domain expertise of their own who you run into all the time in Silicon Valley.
4. If you're not prepared to invest the time in understanding a specific market, that's fine. Be the best engineer you can be, try to maximize your income and consider whether it's worth continually beating your head against a brick wall to find an "idea" so that you can create a "startup."
Note that you don't necessarily need to find a market that's underserved. Plenty of markets are served, but not well. Sometimes, doing something marginally better and/or doing it for less than the entrenched competition is all you need to create opportunity.
The size of that opportunity will vary of course. A lot of wantrapreneurs look at huge markets and think in terms of 8, 9 and 10 figures, but if you're more realistic (i.e. you'd be happy with a six or seven-figure annual top line with healthy margins), I would suggest that opportunity is abundant. The easiest way to find that opportunity? If you meet people in unsexy markets, talk to them. Most wantrapreneurs won't give these folks the time of day.
If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI, and consumers mostly don't.
Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per sale. Even if it's 10x easier to sell to one consumer than one business, if a business customer pays 100x more money, then it is still vastly easier to sell to businesses.
Selling can still be a challenge. But if you have a valuable product, and an A* sales team, it's much much easier.
They like to say they do, but they very frequently don't. I'd say easily 80% of the software and hardware purchases I've seen corporate clients make are based on things other than ROI. Things like "the sales person for product X always takes me to nice lunches" or "everyone else is using Y so we need to use Y too".
Second, far too many technical folks seem to believe that they have to sell what they've built. That's almost never the case. There are people who make a living selling all sorts of products and services in established B2B markets. If you have a product or service of merit, chances are you'll be able to find somebody with sales experience who will be interested in selling for you.
Now here's the key: you must be prepared to invest money into your sales efforts. You're probably not going to find many good, experienced salespeople who will work on commission only. And depending on the market, you'll most likely need to budget for tools that will help your salesperson succeed (trade shows, etc.).
Bottom line: it takes money to make money. If you're not willing to put cold hard cash on the line to sell your solution, you have no reason to expect results.
This seems a little harsh or judgemental.
Big Co's don't care about your 10pc better product, because it may be 10% of a cost center that is maybe 15% of revenues. That makes it a 1.5% margin business for them, which is literally not material. Given the politics of BigCos, the top guys have limited bandwidth. They typically don't want the brain damage associated with taking on operational risk for non-material benefits on the upside. Its a distraction, and a fundamental conflict of interest for them. The quality of your sales guy, is only so good as he helps develope a product with lowe operationa implementation risk and has the already-in-place-relationships with a BigCo to de-risk their adoption. even in the best case, its a tough sell. The better bet is to show up with a 10x solution. That turns a 15% cost into a 1.5% cost, and creates a 13.5% increase in profitability. Now that you are moving the needle, you will get people's attention. Even at sr. levels...Just some things worth thinking about. As petet thiel rightly notes, there are varying abstractions of 'sales' skills that come into play, not all are of the door-to-door "sales guy" variety.
It wasn't. My statement was prefaced with "If that's the case..."
> Big Co's don't care about your 10pc better product, because it may be 10% of a cost center that is maybe 15% of revenues. That makes it a 1.5% margin business for them, which is literally not material.
You're missing the point: you realistically aren't going to know what product to build, or be able to assess its value before you build it, if you have no domain expertise.
An entrepreneur with domain expertise is far less likely to build a product that doesn't create enough value to be viable than an outsider who doesn't understand the businesses he's targeting. In other words, the entrepreneur who actually understands what he's doing because he understands the industry probably isn't going to build a 10% better product that is 10% of a cost center that is associated with just 15% of revenues.
The pint where I realy don't agree are relationships the typical start-up founder can leverage. My impression is that this kind of decisions are met in a, for me, not really understandable way at levels a founder that worked for a couple of years in company X in industry Y is unlikely to have. These kinds of caontacts don't come from domain knowledge alone.
Agree on most of the rest, although I would stress the importance of sales in a B2B environment even more. Would help to get really early on some good business guys for that. And I mean business in terms of I-did-sell-fridges-to-escimos sales people, not I-had-a-good-prof-during-my-MBA types.
It's about finding/extracting ideas (from domain experts) and then testing them quickly.
(Apologies for the terrible landing page)
(La mian from Hokkien meaning hand-pulled noodles -> Ramyun in Korean being a loan word -> Ramen in Japanese, as borrowed from the Korean).
[1] Analogies are just repackaged ideas.
People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for interesting products almost always miss the point.
Always look to the execution.
(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very easy to sum up)
I really don't understand why being an entrepreneur is so "sexy" (only to other dudes, being sexist for a moment here) these days, it's lame.
P.S. I know, wrong forum to say that.
And yes, this being a hacker forum, where everyone is the creator kind of person, the percentage of possible entrepreneurs here is bound to be high.
Social workers in the UK have a big problem. Different teams, professions (police, medical, housing), deal with the same people, and often collect all the pieces required to understand and prevent a tragic situation. But they can't put them together.
There is an obsession with interpofessional meetings to tackle this, but every serious case review shows that the knowledge was there but not put together, leading to dead children. My perception is that often knowledge is mentioned, but when discussing a different related case, or isn't formally written down and passed to the right person.
My solution is inspired by the part of the CALO project that dealt with capturing and exploiting knowledge from meetings. There are some great ideas. If you do this, read up on it.
The product records all meetings, using existing meeting room Teleconference hardware. The meetings are put through automatic speech and speaker recognition on a best effort basis to produce a searchable index for that meeting. So you get something like a transcript and can skip to the point where Mr A is mentioned.
Supervisors, who in that field are criminally liable for mistakes by subordinates, already review minutes for meetings. Now they can search for any mention of Mr A, and see in what context he was mentioned and listen to that part of the meeting. Obviously there would be control of who could listen to what meetings, but these people already have big intrusive databases, so I don't think they are too worried.
Ideally, you could then build graphs from there of who is mentioned together, and do some Palantir style stuff to spot associations between people.
But the start is, very much, implementing a meeting transcriber by sowing together a few brands of speech recognition engine, a web interface for administrating and searching meetings, and selling it into social services.
I mean, I assume Cisco Telepresence stuff doesn't already record/transcribe meetings... If your idea starts to take off, I would bet that it will for sure in the near future. That seems like exactly the sort of functionality you would expect from that sort of hardware.
Anyway, it yielded a lot of high grade speech recognition research and AI research, which companies are battling to license. If you recall Yahoo's weirdly overvalued purchase of Sumly, that was part of a deal to acquire a license for this kind of tech.
I suspect the most credible opponents to this startup would be MS bundling this kind of functionality into Outlook, or some other big company exploiting this expensive but already licensed tech.
But what you get here, is first to market, and attack on specific verticals (i.e. social services, and later related services). You can't be scared off by 'what if we have a competitor'. If you don't have a competitor, your market probably doesn't exist. That is what I'd worry about here.
Spoonrocket's cars have builtin heaters that keep food warm, only 2 menu items a day, and really quick delivery. If they actually expanded nationwide they'd kill burger/pizza joints, or at least force them to innovate.
'InstaToiletPaper is doing really unique things like drone delivery of toilet paper and a huge selection! If these guys succeed, they'd be out disrupting the $20B toilet paper market, or at least forcing the to innovate.
InstaToiletPaper is a pretty good startup if existed. When you run out of toilet paper you really want it quick. A drone could fly through a small window and it get it to you. You'd pay $10 for a single roll.
Presumably any drone that can fit thru a bathroom window can fly thru a bigger bedroom window.
Already a thing (minus drones).
2. With #1 in mind, I focused on what businesses need to make money: clients. Thus, I set out to learn how business generated new leads, or followed up on clients.
3. Now that I had focused on solving a type of problem (lead generation and client follow up), I set out to research markets. Every business out there needs leads. But some can be easily automated. Using patio11's appointment reminder app as inspiration, I started to ask people how such app would help their business. Turns out there is a big demand for such a simple application. Who knew that sending text messages and making automated phone calls would be such a life saver?
4. Who did I talk to? Well, who needs to keep constant contact with their client list? Dentists, insurance agents, private schools, auto mechanics, etc.
5. Once I knew the who, finding the where was as simple as looking in my cellphone. I called my dentist, and insurance agent to talk about the application (before writing any code). They gave their feedback and I set out to write it.
For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas.
Or... I could invest my time in a bunch of little startup ideas. Make one simple webapp a week, and out of 52 of them, one should stick, right?
But the problem is that in general, the more time and effort you invest into any particular idea, the higher quality the product of your idea will become, and the better a chance it has for success.
So, I'm not sure what the best route is. If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea. But, this may be an example of selection bias. It could be the case that the biggest successes require a huge time-investment in one project, but the probability of success for any random project is very low. In a sense, they won a lottery of a sort. Perhaps your chance of success -- but not mega-success -- becomes more realistic if you focus on many smaller ideas.
The might not even be the most time consuming activity, especially if you consider what one can make in a single day (see for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155)
Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their time"?
I would expect that the first iteration of those websites have been coded in a few days or weeks.
It came from my memory of various articles I've read; but that's certainly a fallible source, so correct me if I'm wrong.
And with "all of their time", I didn't literally mean "all of it". I meant, with time appropriated towards working on a star-up, it was spent on only one idea rather than multiple ones.
It's a nice idea - 52 startups.
And the most relevant bias here is not selection bias, it's the one that makes every driver believe they are above average drivers. The same happens with mergers too: the boss believes he will better than the other one, and forget about all the difficulties and costs of a merge.
I think that if you really need the money you probably should work in a big corp.
I have done a lot of things where upon presenting them to people, they would say "What's the point?", "That can't be done", or commonly "There's no point in an alternative to X. Even if it does work, people won't change from X". I have even had "that's the stupidest thing I have ever seen"
The chances of those things becoming enormous successes are tiny, and I'm aware of that. But the chances for those who _did_ become enormous successes were also tiny.
It's a hard road, but only people who walk the road have a chance. Please, rather than criticize the attempt, or the implementation, or the presentation, or their use of apostrophes. Try offering directions that could help them in the direction they want to be going. There's no point in saying "Turn back now." Even if you think they are going in the wrong direction, they have made their choice and the journey will be informative.
1. Major show-stoppers need to be discussed and brought to light early on. The point is not to say "don't get started" but rather to say "do you have any idea what you are up against?" Having an idea is the first step to planning, and planning is mostly valuable for mapping out obstacles and potential solutions.
2. Once one is past the commitment and planning phase, I think it is fine to criticize implementation. The goal here is to bring up problems that might not need to be solved right away but need to be on the radar.
3. These need to be coupled with constructive support. Heavy criticism along with solid support is golden. Heavy criticism without solid support is like a lead weight.
(Lincoln held a patent, but it was for a method for helping boats navigate sandbars).
Let's see: Take idea some X and the set A of all efforts for idea X. Then take the effort in set A that was earliest in time (probability of exact ties 0). Call that effort T. Then when T was done, idea X was a "new idea" and not "done before" in contradiction to the quote.
For there being "no new ideas", the research libraries are stuffed with journals of peer-reviewed original research, and the usual standards for publication are "new, correct, and significant". So, those libraries are stuffed with "new ideas" that the quote says don't exist.
Are there new ideas in business? Sure: The transistor, the integrated circuit, the Multics processor architecture (heavily borrowed since), security via capabilities, access control lists, and authentication, the microprocessor, RSA encryption, speculative execution, out of order execution, penicillin, cardiac stents, and on and on.
'Nuff.
how many people would be thinking at relativity when einstein did, or calculi for newton(actually two with ), or marx thougts in "the capital", a music piece by mozart or a painting by van gogh..
they created great things because their toughts were above average, and they where not losing too much time with ordinary things.. like "what will i eat?" "were are the kids" .. "i wanna a big iate" .. etc.. etc..
this kind of tought, that nothing is really original, only diminish the human nature.. and if we mix and copy.. the problem are ourselves.. we can do better, and improve with effort.. than some day.. that something really original, that no human being could ever thought can come into reality
if people wanna think different things, they must first start to look to different horizons, where nobody or almost nobody are looking at..
the innovations starts in the way you think.. you need to observe yourself thinking, and be your own harsh critical
Weak.