There is an interesting bias going on here. I'm wondering how many people upvoting this text has actually built a business, or just want to believe that what was written here is true?
Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution.
The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not.
You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.
I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed.
I teach entrepreneurs to pitch and tell them to go to relevant events. Consistently. They may need to go to 200 events and pitch at them because you have no idea what one of those 200 events will give you the break you are looking for. And then at event 124 someone says "hey, I have that problem, let's talk"...
Now, it's not all about pitching at events but I'm trying to get across the story that you need to consistently do something for a while so that when luck strikes at that particular time you are there.
The chances of getting lucky right out the door are very slim.
Also, I make sure they understand this: Love the problem, not the solution!
I see this argument a lot on hn, and the problem I have with it is that even if correct, it's not really useful. Good idea and execution doesn't guarantee success, but ascribing everything to luck (and basically absolving yourself of all responsibility for success/failure) does guarantee failure.
Yeah, at a certain level everything depends on luck - even things like talent and intelligence through the birth lottery. I find this argument overly reductive. Luck isn't something you have control over, and focusing on it is counterproductive.
All anyone can do is make the best decisions based on available information. Sometimes you make the right bet and still lose, that doesn't mean it was a bad bet.
Having worked on my startup for the past 2 years I can agree with this -
> Building a business is messy
But luck is not the best way to succeed. Being systematic and knowing that any domain will have deficiencies that can be worked on will greatly increase the odds of success.
It is true that we will not hit upon a problem worth solving (in terms of scale, cost etc) on our first try. But the author's suggestion is to focus on iterating over the problem more than the solution, atleast initially.
Luck plays a role in all things, but I can't agree with your depiction suggesting that nothing else matters, that the right knowledge may not even increase your odds, and that we can't ever really know anything.
If you're trying to make the next Google or Amazon, sure, you're going to need to get massively lucky, and do so repeatedly. There's no playbook for that.
But if you have the relatively modest goal of making $5-10k/month to supplement or replace your income, and you have some baseline level of skills and resources, I'm quite confident the right knowledge can help you minimize luck to the extreme.
There are different ways to look at things, but personally I'm not a fan of the "luck" apsect. I like "uncertainty" much better.
"Luck" might imply that you might get lucky. Framing your mind into getting lucky is really bad as an entrepreneur (personal opinion).
That is why I like "uncertainty" much better, because whatever you do, there will always be uncertainty whether you will succeed or not. Entrepreneurs operate in complete uncertainty, always.
The failures were just as uncertain as the successes, but if you don't try you will never know. And framing successes as lucky is pretty disrespectful if you look at all the shit that had to be done to get there.
As a special bonus on my "uncertainty" framing: you live in constant uncertainty, yet your customers, employees and investors expect certainty from you. Very hard mentally.
So if luck is the most important ingredient, would it make sense to go for ideas where you can see a lot of very different opportunities? Because that seems to be slightly opposed to the “correct” approach of starting with understanding a problem, then look for a solution. If you do, your solution is going to be extremely tailored to one specific problem, and if that doesn’t work out, it will be hard to do anything else with it. This is what the lock and key metaphor describes: the key only fits one specific lock, and is useless for anything else.
On the other hand, if you start with the solution before the problem, you can make more of a lock picking set... your solution may fit a whole lot of different problems. To continue to stretch the metaphor, you can now manipulate luck simply be opening more doors.
Fantastic post. Lots of weight on the problem discovery area which is the right move and engineers turned entrepreneurs skip this step a lot. I know I did.
A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling.
I have used the techniques personally and it's great to see what users say is a huge problem vs a problem they're willing to pay for.
It is easy to get stuck in a self-fulfilling trap that a user complains is a big problem. I recently spoke with a customer:
- "What's your biggest problem?" (book says this question is a no no)
- He replies, "If I sell 3 cars at the same time, I'm out of available float (cash) while I wait for those deals to close. This is a HUGE problem for me!"
- "How do you solve this today?" I ask.
- "I have other, larger car sales company who will lend me money at XX rates."
Right there, it's a solved problem. The end user figured out their own way. Turns out other smaller dealers like him rely on large trade line companies.
The only way I could complete is either on lower cost of financing or speed. At which point, for me, it's not a problem worth solving. The problem isn't so big for him where he's willing to throw cash at me for it.
In your specific customer interview, I would probe deeper. For most real problems people have, they've hacked together a makeshift solution. It may work, but it doesn't mean it works well. It doesn't mean the problem is solved.
I would ask "how is it like working with this larger company?". If you have any specific pain points working with larger companies that you've seen, I'd ask "how do you deal with pain point X?"
I doubt someone would say something is their biggest problem if they have a great solution for it!
> A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling.
I can't recommend this book enough. It lists every single mistake I ever made and every lesson I learned in doing so.
The only problem is that I discovered the book after making those mistakes and learning all those lessons.
Of course, following the advice in the book won't guarantee a successful business. But I'm 99% sure that NOT following it is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Seconding this. Mom test is an essential read. People will say positive things about your product in order to protect your feelings, and this can lead you along the wrong path. When you ask them to purchase though, the conversation becomes really clear.
This book is incredibly helpful - I just wish they'd do a follow up book around how you interview users on your product once it exists.
I guess the same principle applies "tell me about a new feature you want for our product... Did you actually try to find a workaround? No" *X probably isn't a feature we should prioritize top then
I'd love to see more examples of ways to get good existing product feedback.
I am a serial idea writer and I have to agree with the author.
Ideas are inherently valuable, maybe not financially, but they're valuable to have and valuable to society to share.
It makes me angry that people actually believe ideas are inherently worthless. Or that without any code or implementation they're worthless. It's a meme that needs to die. It's like having your cake and eating it too. Here's a free idea for you to think about and contribute to but it's not enough, you want the outcome without any effort too. So you say my idea is worthless.
Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs and any thing that humanity has ever accomplished. And ideas are meant to be shared.
People that think ideas are worthless are shutting down conversations about good ideas because of this obsession with the idea that execution is all that matters. And so many ideas die on the grape vine because of this poor attitude.
I don't think you're wrong. Great ideas are extremely valuable. But I think the disconnect comes from the fact that it's very easy to mistake mediocre ideas for great ones.
Most times when I hear someone's self-described great idea it seems impressive at first, but then fails to hold up to scrutiny. Among other reasons that an idea may not be as valuable as it appears:
* It's not actually original. Even if not widespread, one or more other parties is already working on it.
* "And then a miracle happens..." Some aspect of the idea assumes magic technology or dependencies that don't exist.
* The low-level details are not elucidated and have just been hand-waved away.
* It's solving a problem that not many people actually have.
* It's not economical or practical.
* It requires mass widespread adoption or buy-in from powerful interests before being able to actually have value. There's no gentle gradient to product organic growth.
The contrast, is that it's much harder to be deluded about the value of execution. Great execution is obvious when it happens. Ask people for their great ideas, and you'll often get something half-baked. Ask people for a demonstrated history of execution, and that's pretty hard to fake.
Ideas tend not be valued, not because they're valueless, but because they're hard to value.
I think the ideas being worthless meme is an over-correction of the person that thinks the idea is all of the value and wants to hire an engineer to 'just do the implementation' for little reward.
Ideas have value, and someone who can unite people with a clear vision can do incredible things but the implementation is a big part of the actual difficulty and usually you have to update the idea as you learn more from the implementation.
In general I suspect the implementation is usually harder than coming up with the idea in most cases and fewer people can do it. (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper).
Still, obvious value in trying to come up with things from first principles.
I don't think I've ever heard people say that ideas are entirely worthless. Good ideas have enormous potential value.
The argument is that, in general, unlocking this potential requires great execution. You can't (in general) make a good idea successful without it. You can, on the other hand, take bad or boring or tired ideas and make them successful with great execution.
So, great execution (in general) matters more than great ideas.
"worthless" is too strong, but I meet so many people that overvalue them that my language has become more about devaluing ideas than valuing them.
Look I'm not going to sign an NDA for something with no work done on it yet. If you want to share an idea and enrich the world sure that's fine. But most of the time while executing an idea, changes have to be made, assumptions weren't quite right, edge cases show up, the world was more complex than expected.
Conversations don't shut down because ideas are worthless. When discussing or evaluating ideas, especially bussiness idea that involve social aspect, the main challenge is to select right assumptions and projections. Modeling future social behaviour is extremely hard and error prone. So it's not that ideas are worthless, but discussions about ideas and possible realizations are worthless until you start working on them.
> Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs
I disagree. Practice and experience are precursor of RFCs and ISOs.
The great example is HTML, HTTP protocol or even OAuth2. All the related RFC are there to standardize and unify existing and document evolution. They all started with ideas, but the actual adopted standards are results of working groups, that had a lot of experience. And the deficiencies of HTTP1.1 shows it very well, as authors of the original ideas could not potentially know where it would lead eventually.
Not true. Ideas are always great when they stay in your head. If you have a big ego and low self esteem they might even be the best thing since sliced bread. Without execution however, they are useless and not proofed to be even average. Everyone has ideas, because they don’t require hard work or thought
The problem with ideas is that they start of as perfect in our heads. But the more they touch reality, the more they crumble. They become messy, they start to incorporate tradeoffs.
It takes a lot of perseverance to further shape your idea to match reality.
So I agree that they shouldn't die too fast. An idea is always the starting point, but never the end.
I very much agree with this post in that analysis of the problem has to be the first step. There needs to be both a contextual and a granular appreciation of the problem.
You get far too many founders looking for the most intense problem when that is just one facet of a problem. Christmas songs are a problem, painful, intense, etc. But it's only once a year, which would mean not very active users.
As well as the Mom Test, off-the-top of my head, check out
There are some medical pain evaluation papers that I found highly informative, but I would need to go through my notes as I can't recollect them.
And if anybody is interested, I have a free tool you can download, that will aid you to assess your idea by breaking it apart into its elemental composition and looking deeper into the problem, the audience, and the market.
It's at MVP v2, so long way to go yet, and it is only for MS Access, so PC only: https://startizer.com/
It’s a nice framework for many ideas I suppose, but there too many examples of “non-obvious” “stupid ideas” with no market or problem to solve that eventually succeed. And plenty of successes that were not innovative but had great execution.
Like most things in life timing is everything and we only know the right timing and “ideas” in hindsight.
I would also add learning to evaluate your idea(s) objectively.
When you think you've thought of a great idea, by definition, you're biased toward it.
If you then start building it, the sunk cost makes you even more resistant to abandoning it.
In my experience, just "building the product" can take a lot longer than you expect. I've spent several months building out what were mostly CRUD apps.
Why? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working part time, I had to figure out how to do many things for the first time, I had to keep myself motivated, and I had to do development but also design and PM work.
If I was working on something new, I probably would:
1. think of a problem to work on
2. talk to a lot of users following the Mom Test (keeping in mind your product has many personas of users) to validate the problem
3. think of a lot of ideas to solve the problem
4. somehow identify what idea to prototype first and what the feature set should be
5. prototype it in Figma, show it to users, improve the prototype until customers are asking "when can I buy this?"
I haven't done this yet. If anyone has any suggestions for getting from set of ideas -> a prototype users want, I would love to hear them!
It's a good article I guess, but a bit over-optimistic about execution.
> You can build anything.
Not really, though. The article suggests that there are no constraints to what can be built, but there on constraints to what people want / need, how you'll make money, etc.
There are significant constraints around what can be built. They change over time, and in fact, finding ideas that were rejected for being too hard in the past can be a good indicator of something that could be built now.
And many great business ideas that solve huge problems with clear distribution channels can fail, because the solution that works isn't possible or feasible to build yet.
Points 2 and 3 are almost identical for every single business on Indie Hackers.
Subscription model. Internet delivery, with email and social media marketing.
After that, you're back to the square 1 of "now I need an idea". The post had some good points, but for the IH audience I'm not sure it would change much about how they analyse business ideas.
An Indie Hacker isn’t going to buy a pub, or start a VC fueled startup for that matter. OTOH under the umbrella of internet delivered ideas there is a lot of choice as what to work on! And the internet bit could be trivial with most of the legwork going on in real life, or it could be a pure internet play all online with a rich app.
In a roundabout kind of way, if you find the solution first, its called learning and if your mindset is aligned to this article, its defined as research.
Though in a monkey see, monkey do world, there is no shortage of mimicked expertise and flattery, so plan accordingly.
egghead founder downloaded a bunch of youtube vids and zipped them up and sold them to a mailing list? Weren't there copyright issues? I'm not sure if that sort of advice is sound, but the rest of the article resonated nicely.
Starting small isn't universally applicable advice. It depends on competition and availability of substitutes. It's also an approach that will yield no more than small gains at a time.
This is good advice, but I think the fundamental issue for many people is that they are looking for a formula to supplement their own brain.
In reality there are many classes of successful businesses. It’s hard to explain the success of a restaurant franchise and of flappy bird in the same formula except to over generalize it as, “decent idea with decent execution and decent timing in front of a decent audience.”
I do think posts like this are very helpful at eliminating dead end habits. I know I’m guilty of searching for a lock.
From the article :
"It's been said that ideas don't matter, execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage."
I think it underestimates execution. A great execution makes the dumbest ideas succeed. Reminds me of 'potatoparcel.com'. The business is solely focused on mailing potatoes, which sounds ridiculous, but it found its place.
The big nugget to me from my own experience is pricing. Early or inexperienced business founders charge too little. They charge just enough to make some money but not offend the wallet of the customer. This is all wrong - if your solution provides a real ROI then companies will pay a lot for it. Of your solution costs $1000 to solve a $1000000 problem then you are an idiot and priced too low by an order of magnitude.
Good article but execution matters. Execution is like sperm. There are plenty of eggs (i.e., ideas), never a shortage. But unless an egg is properly fertilized it's going no where.
Futhermore, Team A can faulter at the execution of Idea X, but later Team B can pick up Idea X and do it right. For example, the ipod. The idea of an mp3 player wasn't new.
> iOS users who need to get tasks done but prefer modern, clean UIs", that's not an actual group of people. You're just describing the features of a product you're already biased toward building.
[+] [-] tappio|6 years ago|reply
Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution.
The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not.
You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.
[+] [-] _Understated_|6 years ago|reply
This... 100% this!
I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed.
I teach entrepreneurs to pitch and tell them to go to relevant events. Consistently. They may need to go to 200 events and pitch at them because you have no idea what one of those 200 events will give you the break you are looking for. And then at event 124 someone says "hey, I have that problem, let's talk"...
Now, it's not all about pitching at events but I'm trying to get across the story that you need to consistently do something for a while so that when luck strikes at that particular time you are there.
The chances of getting lucky right out the door are very slim.
Also, I make sure they understand this: Love the problem, not the solution!
[+] [-] Jack000|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, at a certain level everything depends on luck - even things like talent and intelligence through the birth lottery. I find this argument overly reductive. Luck isn't something you have control over, and focusing on it is counterproductive.
All anyone can do is make the best decisions based on available information. Sometimes you make the right bet and still lose, that doesn't mean it was a bad bet.
[+] [-] dreamer7|6 years ago|reply
But luck is not the best way to succeed. Being systematic and knowing that any domain will have deficiencies that can be worked on will greatly increase the odds of success.
It is true that we will not hit upon a problem worth solving (in terms of scale, cost etc) on our first try. But the author's suggestion is to focus on iterating over the problem more than the solution, atleast initially.
[+] [-] throwaway98797|6 years ago|reply
The only guarantee is if you don’t try you don’t succeed.
[+] [-] csallen|6 years ago|reply
If you're trying to make the next Google or Amazon, sure, you're going to need to get massively lucky, and do so repeatedly. There's no playbook for that.
But if you have the relatively modest goal of making $5-10k/month to supplement or replace your income, and you have some baseline level of skills and resources, I'm quite confident the right knowledge can help you minimize luck to the extreme.
[+] [-] koonsolo|6 years ago|reply
There are different ways to look at things, but personally I'm not a fan of the "luck" apsect. I like "uncertainty" much better.
"Luck" might imply that you might get lucky. Framing your mind into getting lucky is really bad as an entrepreneur (personal opinion).
That is why I like "uncertainty" much better, because whatever you do, there will always be uncertainty whether you will succeed or not. Entrepreneurs operate in complete uncertainty, always.
The failures were just as uncertain as the successes, but if you don't try you will never know. And framing successes as lucky is pretty disrespectful if you look at all the shit that had to be done to get there.
As a special bonus on my "uncertainty" framing: you live in constant uncertainty, yet your customers, employees and investors expect certainty from you. Very hard mentally.
[+] [-] tobr|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, if you start with the solution before the problem, you can make more of a lock picking set... your solution may fit a whole lot of different problems. To continue to stretch the metaphor, you can now manipulate luck simply be opening more doors.
[+] [-] ThomPete|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuantumGood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irjustin|6 years ago|reply
A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling.
I have used the techniques personally and it's great to see what users say is a huge problem vs a problem they're willing to pay for.
It is easy to get stuck in a self-fulfilling trap that a user complains is a big problem. I recently spoke with a customer:
- "What's your biggest problem?" (book says this question is a no no)
- He replies, "If I sell 3 cars at the same time, I'm out of available float (cash) while I wait for those deals to close. This is a HUGE problem for me!"
- "How do you solve this today?" I ask.
- "I have other, larger car sales company who will lend me money at XX rates."
Right there, it's a solved problem. The end user figured out their own way. Turns out other smaller dealers like him rely on large trade line companies.
The only way I could complete is either on lower cost of financing or speed. At which point, for me, it's not a problem worth solving. The problem isn't so big for him where he's willing to throw cash at me for it.
Talk to users.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...
[+] [-] xamde|6 years ago|reply
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-t...
[+] [-] veeralpatel979|6 years ago|reply
In your specific customer interview, I would probe deeper. For most real problems people have, they've hacked together a makeshift solution. It may work, but it doesn't mean it works well. It doesn't mean the problem is solved.
I would ask "how is it like working with this larger company?". If you have any specific pain points working with larger companies that you've seen, I'd ask "how do you deal with pain point X?"
I doubt someone would say something is their biggest problem if they have a great solution for it!
[+] [-] nmfisher|6 years ago|reply
I can't recommend this book enough. It lists every single mistake I ever made and every lesson I learned in doing so.
The only problem is that I discovered the book after making those mistakes and learning all those lessons.
Of course, following the advice in the book won't guarantee a successful business. But I'm 99% sure that NOT following it is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
[+] [-] cdiamand|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james_impliu|6 years ago|reply
I guess the same principle applies "tell me about a new feature you want for our product... Did you actually try to find a workaround? No" *X probably isn't a feature we should prioritize top then
I'd love to see more examples of ways to get good existing product feedback.
[+] [-] samsquire|6 years ago|reply
Ideas are inherently valuable, maybe not financially, but they're valuable to have and valuable to society to share.
It makes me angry that people actually believe ideas are inherently worthless. Or that without any code or implementation they're worthless. It's a meme that needs to die. It's like having your cake and eating it too. Here's a free idea for you to think about and contribute to but it's not enough, you want the outcome without any effort too. So you say my idea is worthless.
Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs and any thing that humanity has ever accomplished. And ideas are meant to be shared.
People that think ideas are worthless are shutting down conversations about good ideas because of this obsession with the idea that execution is all that matters. And so many ideas die on the grape vine because of this poor attitude.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|6 years ago|reply
Most times when I hear someone's self-described great idea it seems impressive at first, but then fails to hold up to scrutiny. Among other reasons that an idea may not be as valuable as it appears:
* It's not actually original. Even if not widespread, one or more other parties is already working on it.
* "And then a miracle happens..." Some aspect of the idea assumes magic technology or dependencies that don't exist.
* The low-level details are not elucidated and have just been hand-waved away.
* It's solving a problem that not many people actually have.
* It's not economical or practical.
* It requires mass widespread adoption or buy-in from powerful interests before being able to actually have value. There's no gentle gradient to product organic growth.
The contrast, is that it's much harder to be deluded about the value of execution. Great execution is obvious when it happens. Ask people for their great ideas, and you'll often get something half-baked. Ask people for a demonstrated history of execution, and that's pretty hard to fake.
Ideas tend not be valued, not because they're valueless, but because they're hard to value.
[+] [-] gonehome|6 years ago|reply
Ideas have value, and someone who can unite people with a clear vision can do incredible things but the implementation is a big part of the actual difficulty and usually you have to update the idea as you learn more from the implementation.
In general I suspect the implementation is usually harder than coming up with the idea in most cases and fewer people can do it. (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper).
Still, obvious value in trying to come up with things from first principles.
[+] [-] zeroxfe|6 years ago|reply
The argument is that, in general, unlocking this potential requires great execution. You can't (in general) make a good idea successful without it. You can, on the other hand, take bad or boring or tired ideas and make them successful with great execution.
So, great execution (in general) matters more than great ideas.
[+] [-] michaelbrave|6 years ago|reply
Look I'm not going to sign an NDA for something with no work done on it yet. If you want to share an idea and enrich the world sure that's fine. But most of the time while executing an idea, changes have to be made, assumptions weren't quite right, edge cases show up, the world was more complex than expected.
[+] [-] aschatten|6 years ago|reply
> Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs I disagree. Practice and experience are precursor of RFCs and ISOs.
The great example is HTML, HTTP protocol or even OAuth2. All the related RFC are there to standardize and unify existing and document evolution. They all started with ideas, but the actual adopted standards are results of working groups, that had a lot of experience. And the deficiencies of HTTP1.1 shows it very well, as authors of the original ideas could not potentially know where it would lead eventually.
[+] [-] oklol123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|6 years ago|reply
It takes a lot of perseverance to further shape your idea to match reality.
So I agree that they shouldn't die too fast. An idea is always the starting point, but never the end.
[+] [-] c22|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ace__|6 years ago|reply
You get far too many founders looking for the most intense problem when that is just one facet of a problem. Christmas songs are a problem, painful, intense, etc. But it's only once a year, which would mean not very active users.
As well as the Mom Test, off-the-top of my head, check out
1. Talking To Humans https://www.talkingtohumans.com/
2. Testing With Humans https://testingwithhumans.com/, both by Giff Constable.
There are some medical pain evaluation papers that I found highly informative, but I would need to go through my notes as I can't recollect them.
And if anybody is interested, I have a free tool you can download, that will aid you to assess your idea by breaking it apart into its elemental composition and looking deeper into the problem, the audience, and the market.
It's at MVP v2, so long way to go yet, and it is only for MS Access, so PC only: https://startizer.com/
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notlukesky|6 years ago|reply
Like most things in life timing is everything and we only know the right timing and “ideas” in hindsight.
[+] [-] MetalGuru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veeralpatel979|6 years ago|reply
When you think you've thought of a great idea, by definition, you're biased toward it.
If you then start building it, the sunk cost makes you even more resistant to abandoning it.
In my experience, just "building the product" can take a lot longer than you expect. I've spent several months building out what were mostly CRUD apps.
Why? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working part time, I had to figure out how to do many things for the first time, I had to keep myself motivated, and I had to do development but also design and PM work.
If I was working on something new, I probably would:
1. think of a problem to work on
2. talk to a lot of users following the Mom Test (keeping in mind your product has many personas of users) to validate the problem
3. think of a lot of ideas to solve the problem
4. somehow identify what idea to prototype first and what the feature set should be
5. prototype it in Figma, show it to users, improve the prototype until customers are asking "when can I buy this?"
I haven't done this yet. If anyone has any suggestions for getting from set of ideas -> a prototype users want, I would love to hear them!
[+] [-] cryptoz|6 years ago|reply
> You can build anything.
Not really, though. The article suggests that there are no constraints to what can be built, but there on constraints to what people want / need, how you'll make money, etc.
There are significant constraints around what can be built. They change over time, and in fact, finding ideas that were rejected for being too hard in the past can be a good indicator of something that could be built now.
And many great business ideas that solve huge problems with clear distribution channels can fail, because the solution that works isn't possible or feasible to build yet.
[+] [-] Thorentis|6 years ago|reply
Subscription model. Internet delivery, with email and social media marketing.
After that, you're back to the square 1 of "now I need an idea". The post had some good points, but for the IH audience I'm not sure it would change much about how they analyse business ideas.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cloudking|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aSplash0fDerp|6 years ago|reply
Though in a monkey see, monkey do world, there is no shortage of mimicked expertise and flattery, so plan accordingly.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] frequentnapper|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] say_it_as_it_is|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flippy_flops|6 years ago|reply
In reality there are many classes of successful businesses. It’s hard to explain the success of a restaurant franchise and of flappy bird in the same formula except to over generalize it as, “decent idea with decent execution and decent timing in front of a decent audience.”
I do think posts like this are very helpful at eliminating dead end habits. I know I’m guilty of searching for a lock.
[+] [-] sonicxxg|6 years ago|reply
I think it underestimates execution. A great execution makes the dumbest ideas succeed. Reminds me of 'potatoparcel.com'. The business is solely focused on mailing potatoes, which sounds ridiculous, but it found its place.
[+] [-] saadalem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatherders|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|6 years ago|reply
Futhermore, Team A can faulter at the execution of Idea X, but later Team B can pick up Idea X and do it right. For example, the ipod. The idea of an mp3 player wasn't new.
[+] [-] aliswe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Giorgi|6 years ago|reply
It's a lottery.