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Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#31

Post by muzani »

john_moscow wrote: post #19
mitchellst wrote: post #6

For my part, I think the partners are much more important than the idea. Good companies can pivot to find a good market. Bad partners will sink you, or never get off the ground to begin with. Select for team, not for idea. The best idea is the one that can attract and motivate a great team, or one put forward by people you want to work with. FWIW, I recall Paul Graham writing something that explains how he screens YC…

Except there's a great caveat with this approach. People that are highly productive and self-motivated often don't give a pleasant impression because they are fascinated with the idea and don't care for the looks. And vice versa, those who will look like a great friendly team, will be passionate about, well, looking great and friendly. They will spend time getting together, having endless pleasant talks about the lat…

I disagree. I've met a lot of super productive, obsessed people. Many are very nice. Though like Ben Horowitz put it, you have your peace time people and your wartime people. The ones you're describing might be wartime people, obsessed with making a company survive. A company like Google would want more peace time people. They're still damn good engineers but not so stoic.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#32

Post by muzani »

drewrv wrote: post #9

People don't like to say it because they're afraid of sounding lazy, but you should do whichever is easier. Is building one of them going to be easier than the other? Is marketing/selling one of them going to be easier? Does one of the ideas require raising money? Building a sustainable business is hard enough in and of itself. If you can avoid having to woo investors, or dealing with Chinese factories, or months lon…

Easy also means that people are less willing to pay high prices for the company. But sometimes it's safer because you're not competing with people like Rocket Internet, who can hire a thousand people overnight capable of working 12 hours/day on some idea.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#33

Post by silentfish »

Thriptic wrote: post #21
thisisxavier wrote: post #4

Don't want to hijack the thread, but even more basically, how do you get startup ideas? I've read what PG has to say and others, but nothing is clicking.

Find a domain expert and ask them to walk you through their day or shadow them. Also, ask them what sucks. I could literally throw ten ideas at you right now of fixable things of various complexity in my domain (academic bioengineering). Another strategy is to look for large problems in your industry that have been solved and then try to find analogous problems in other industries where the same or a similar solution…

I always hear about this abstract guidance to get ideas but haven't had a chance to find a domain expert willing to spend time on sharing the thoughts. What are good examples of when ideas generated this way formed a startup in the past?

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#34

Post by drewrv »

danenania wrote: post #20
drewrv wrote: post #9

People don't like to say it because they're afraid of sounding lazy, but you should do whichever is easier. Is building one of them going to be easier than the other? Is marketing/selling one of them going to be easier? Does one of the ideas require raising money? Building a sustainable business is hard enough in and of itself. If you can avoid having to woo investors, or dealing with Chinese factories, or months lon…

There's a natural tradeoff here though: the easier a business is for you to build, the easier it is for others to copy it. If you're a skilled practitioner doing something near the limits of your abilities, it in no way guarantees that you'll find product-market fit, but when you do, the market is more likely to be yours for awhile. There will be fewer people out there who are capable of competing with you and it wil…

Agreed. If something is too easy it gets too competitive and you're working for scraps. But if one is a skilled practitioner, pushing the limits of that skill will be "easier" than learning a completely tangential skill.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#35

Post by graycat »

(1) Annual revenue if successful. So, it's number of users/customers times average revenue for each.

(2) Ease of getting first users/customers before virality, a marketing/sales effort, etc. can work.

(3) Some form of lock-in. E.g., once a company has all their important data in database manager X, they will be reluctant to change to Y. E.g., once all the office is good with office suite software X, they will be reluctant to change to Y. Once all your friends are on Facebook, you want to join Facebook and won't want to leave all your friends. And there are more cases.

(4) Various barriers to entry to keep out competitors. Technological secret sauce can be one such. Also some proprietary data. Sure, have to count some forms of lock-in as possible barriers to entry.

(5) Ease of developing the product or service to get to good profits, e.g., your wife is pregnant, your three year old needs braces on her legs, your nine year old needs braces on her teeth and wants to ride horses, your 11 year old wants to be an Olympic figure skater, your 16 year old wants his own car and to go to a private high school that will let him race ahead in computing, and your 18 year old has done really well in violin, e.g., much as in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvtibhCdepQ

[October 27, 2017 will be exactly 100 years since he did that, fresh off the boat, at Carnegie Hall and got a remark from a violinist in the audience "Isn't a little hot in here?" and a remark "Not for pianists!"]

has been accepted to Julliard, and wants a $500,000 violin (down from th $15 million he really wanted). And, by the way, you need a larger house and want an enclosed, Olympic pool. So, you want profitiability. Oh, yes, everyone in your family over the age of 5 wants the new iPhone for Christmas. Your wife needs a new SUV, bigger than the last one. You want a Corvette, e.g., just to save time driving to work you understand. Oh, yes, the new house needs a four car garage.

(6) Technology is your friend that helps you make money and not your enemy that threatens to run you out of business.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#36

Post by muzani »

Look at the team first. Ideas usually need experts in their fields, so the teams are usually different. Now imagine you're trapped on an island with cannibals. Who would you take?

Your idea is wrong. The market could be off, the solution is not a good fit, the product night be too expensive, the partners might not be receptive.

What are the consequences of that? It's like trying to shoot a small target at a distance. Your first bullet will miss. That's fine. But how will you hit it?

If you only have one bullet, very limited resources, are you accurate enough to not miss? Do you have a high firing rate? Can you do 3 prototypes/day? What are the odds of hitting other targets in the field even if you don't get yours?

But there's more.. most of your targets will actually be hidden. Now how well do you know your space? If you are building something for millennials, a partner be a millennial. If you build something for city councils, ideally one partner has managed a city council. The more you know your space, the easier it is in everything.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#37

Post by john_moscow »

mitchellst wrote: post #24
john_moscow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there's a great caveat with this approach. People that are highly productive and self-motivated often don't give a pleasant impression because they are fascinated with the idea and don't care for the looks. And vice versa, those who will look like a great friendly team, will be passionate about, well, looking great and friendly. They will spend time getting together, having endless pleasant talks about the lat…

I think this is fine for excusing the social quirks of individual contributors. If you're talking co-founders, though, I'd consider this "caveat" a red flag. If a person can't bring himself to make a positive impression to other human beings because he's too enamored of the "idea and doesn't care for the looks," he probably doesn't have the requisite maturity to co-found a business that will employ people. Of course,…

I agree with your point, that a certain level of social skills is a must, although in my experience, when people start competing over making the best impression, many choices that improve it would be disadvantageous when it comes to execution.

The simplest example I could think of is typically being relaxed and simply agreeing with everything that your opponent says gives better surface impression than being focused on understanding your opponent and actually trying to defend your point (the classical salesperson vs engineer case). Except that approach would deadlock your execution, but nonetheless I see many people successfully using it to gain one's trust and get preferred over someone who pushed back too much.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#38

Post by mmanulis »

Thriptic wrote: post #21
thisisxavier wrote: post #4

Don't want to hijack the thread, but even more basically, how do you get startup ideas? I've read what PG has to say and others, but nothing is clicking.

Find a domain expert and ask them to walk you through their day or shadow them. Also, ask them what sucks. I could literally throw ten ideas at you right now of fixable things of various complexity in my domain (academic bioengineering). Another strategy is to look for large problems in your industry that have been solved and then try to find analogous problems in other industries where the same or a similar solution…

I did something very similar and got my first contract this week from this process.

Though I did start out with an idea that I flushed out by talking to people in the industry.

Would love to hear more about your experience, let me know if you have time to compare notes.

Re: Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

#39

Post by mmanulis »

silentfish wrote: post #33
Thriptic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find a domain expert and ask them to walk you through their day or shadow them. Also, ask them what sucks. I could literally throw ten ideas at you right now of fixable things of various complexity in my domain (academic bioengineering). Another strategy is to look for large problems in your industry that have been solved and then try to find analogous problems in other industries where the same or a similar solution…

I always hear about this abstract guidance to get ideas but haven't had a chance to find a domain expert willing to spend time on sharing the thoughts. What are good examples of when ideas generated this way formed a startup in the past?

For me, this started with some broad knowledge about a few industries. E.g. I have experience building connected devices and visualizing / analyzing data from those devices. I tried to meet as many senior managers as I could (think execs or experts) in my network. I knew I was interested in life sciences, energy management and robotics, so I sought out people in those industries.

I described what I was working on, what research I did on those industries and that I was looking to better understand the existing problems that might fit what I was interested in.

Some conversations did not lead anywhere, other times I got excellent, tactical, advice. That gave me more information and ideas, until I landed on my current project.

The reason this approach worked for me this time (as opposed to the other times I've tried this) is that I had a direction I was presenting and I did a bunch of research to get educated about some of these industries. I don't mean I studied it for some long time, but reading related subreddits, searching for conferences and looking up sponsor companies from that, learning some terms specific to those industries, etc. helped to have a better conversation.

While YMMV, getting warm intros to smart and successful people for a 15-20 minute phone conversation will expose you to what you don't know yet. This will result in you asking better questions, which can lead to more ideas.

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