Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#11

Post by akanshmurthy » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

tonomics wrote: post #5

No. Ideas are not as important as sensing what consumers need in the market. It doesn't matter there are other 10^n distracting ideas, the real need of consumers will still be there. For example, Theranos may be a distraction, but that doesn't change the underlying problems and demand for better healthcare.

Intriguing. So, regardless of the noise, you think the signal will resonate due to its demand by the consumer. But, won't the first commenter's idea play here where consumers get sick of trying new products after getting burned?

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#12

Post by meric » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:10 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #7

jmcgough wrote: post #4

You also have to wonder how much startups are benefitting from the increasing number of startups, specifically B2B companies that sell to early-stage startups.

During a shovel rush, sell shovel making machines. ;-)

Technically software engineers are the shovels...recruiter anyone?

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#13

Post by meric » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:12 AM UTC

orthoganol wrote: post #8

I think the factory-style production of prototypes is causing real effects in terms of the importance of design, just in order to not get brushed off. There are just so many decent looking projects being posted to Product Hunt every day, and even traditionally crappy-looking mainstream sites like Paypal, GoDaddy, or ESPN actually look decent these days. I just can't imagine a successful new startup that doesn't have…

Or use a sales team. Our company had a brilliant sales team who managed to sell a good product with a horrible looking and unusable website by directly setting up face to face meetings with clients for a sale.

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#14

Post by tboyd47 » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 11:56 AM UTC

meric wrote: post #12

analog31 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During a shovel rush, sell shovel making machines. ;-)

Technically software engineers are the shovels...recruiter anyone?

Or boot-camps.

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#15

Post by abhimskywalker » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

my_username_is_ wrote: post #9

Interesting question. I would say that yes, startups (as a whole) are likely diluting their own markets. When a startup notices a real pain point and tries to solve it, but cannot make a sustainable business out of it, it shakes the customers' trust in trying an unproven company. This can have negative consequences. Think of it this way: currently, people have faith in the 'startup brand'. A potential customer's inte…

So consequently there would be a lot of startup failures as well... One more interesting scenario that can result could be if there will be an investor fatigue as well similar to the customer fatigue of investing their time & money in these startups...? As this could potentially make finding initial capital harder for startup teams which could potentially be solving similar problems with better execution strategy but in the same market...

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#16

Post by hga » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #6

> 1. Don't start a startup for the sake of starting a startup. Seen that first hand happen. Someone at old work was enamored with "startup world". Read too much HN perhaps... Then came up with an idea for a startup. Right off the bat, could tell it was a forced idea. It was like they sat down and given a task of "come with an idea of a startup in 5 minutes" and they came up with one. It just seemed, well ... artifici…

Counterexample: FTP Software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software). A group of friends decided they wanted to start a company, they realized that with some effort they could turn an IP mostly stack for PCs into a full featured TCP/IP stack and did quite well for a while. Then again, the messes discussed in "Fate" section could be see as suggestive.

Additional details on its fate: the company's sales function got so screwed up people started contacting the president to get a copy (and don't laugh too much, this put Xerox in dire straits and improving this was a if not the most important goal of Mark Hurd when he became HP's CEO). And I was less reliably told that at one point they completely lost their source code repository.

But the idea certainly wasn't forced, full TCP/IP on MS-DOS was a killer app at the time.

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#17

Post by hga » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

my_username_is_ wrote: post #9

Interesting question. I would say that yes, startups (as a whole) are likely diluting their own markets. When a startup notices a real pain point and tries to solve it, but cannot make a sustainable business out of it, it shakes the customers' trust in trying an unproven company. This can have negative consequences. Think of it this way: currently, people have faith in the 'startup brand'. A potential customer's inte…

Indeed, there is absolutely no modern startup that's still in that stage that I would wager any sort of long term reliance on. Especially with this common shamelessness: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Re: Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market?

#18

Post by clay_to_n » Sun, Oct 25, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #6

> 1. Don't start a startup for the sake of starting a startup. Seen that first hand happen. Someone at old work was enamored with "startup world". Read too much HN perhaps... Then came up with an idea for a startup. Right off the bat, could tell it was a forced idea. It was like they sat down and given a task of "come with an idea of a startup in 5 minutes" and they came up with one. It just seemed, well ... artifici…

I took a technical entrepreneurship course, and the professor forced us to come up with startup ideas very early on, and then iterate and convince everyone to throw our original ideas out. After a couple months every group had startup ideas that were clearly much more sound than the originals.

"First startup" ideas are very easy to identify, and are the majority of what you see in college entrepreneurship. The close, but often not scalable problems in competitive markets: food delivery. Textbook re-selling. Better course scheduling. Some way to make profit off of nightlife and parties. And then the large, technically unfeasible ideas: Solve X with drones, 3d cameras, machine learning.

The startups that keep going are usually not in either of these camps, but often start firmly in one and move towards the center as far as complexity.

But your last point is also spot on - a campus food delivery startup from my university got into a good accelerator and raised some money. Seems to be doing well.