Want to start a $1 startup? Start finding problems instead of ideas.
Works at any scale
To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#32What you really want to find are the 25 million dollar problems that you can turn into a monopoly. Sure you won't ever be famous, but you will have a great lifestyle that is 99% of what a billionaire has on the upside with none of the downside.
> turn into a monopoly Sure, but how do you do that? There's lots of textbook stuff (patents/copyright/trademark, consumer habit etc), but in practice, you must continuously improve it, promote it etc, to keep that "monopoly". There's no monopoly; only temporary monopoly. [But I'm interested to hear your thoughts]
[deleted]
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#33> come up with a solution which is easy to implement This might be better phrased as, "a solution that's easy to scale". I don't think the implementation part of most valuable things is remotely easy; at least from my experience.
Thanks for the advice. I've edited the blogpost.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#34What you really want to find are the 25 million dollar problems that you can turn into a monopoly. Sure you won't ever be famous, but you will have a great lifestyle that is 99% of what a billionaire has on the upside with none of the downside.
> turn into a monopoly Sure, but how do you do that? There's lots of textbook stuff (patents/copyright/trademark, consumer habit etc), but in practice, you must continuously improve it, promote it etc, to keep that "monopoly". There's no monopoly; only temporary monopoly. [But I'm interested to hear your thoughts]
You will most likely need to work on maintaining your monopoly, but having a monopoly position in a small market allows you to extract above average profits without attracting competition. This is the path to quiet success.
From a lifestyle perspective it is much better to be a small fish in a small pond than a big fish in big pond filled with sharks.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#35This is exactly the right strategy but finding big enough problems can be an issue.
I asked this question in Hacker News two years ago.
What problem in your industry is a potential startup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007
It was a very interesting experience and I wrote an essay about some of my findings.
https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#36What you really want to find are the 25 million dollar problems that you can turn into a monopoly. Sure you won't ever be famous, but you will have a great lifestyle that is 99% of what a billionaire has on the upside with none of the downside.
> turn into a monopoly Sure, but how do you do that? There's lots of textbook stuff (patents/copyright/trademark, consumer habit etc), but in practice, you must continuously improve it, promote it etc, to keep that "monopoly". There's no monopoly; only temporary monopoly. [But I'm interested to hear your thoughts]
The more complex the solution, the easier it is to lock it in permanently. People don't want to learn a new complex thing. Note that this means the minimal complexity (or close to it). If you implement something that could be simple, and you make it complex, someone else will come along and make it simple and kick your ass at market.
Imagine you've got a warehouse automation system (this is not an example of a $25 million dollar business, just an example of a problem that has no simple solutions) that is ten times as efficient for employees as the current pad-and-paper solution. If you arrive first and lock in that industry with the market leaders in owning warehouses, you don't have to worry about a competitor coming along five years later with a system that is eleven times more efficient than pad-and-paper and that costs 20% less than your system. It cost the company a half a million dollars to train all of their staff to use your system. It'd be crazy to migrate.
So...not a monopoly, but a comfortable lock on a significant portion of the market.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#37What you really want to find are the 25 million dollar problems that you can turn into a monopoly. Sure you won't ever be famous, but you will have a great lifestyle that is 99% of what a billionaire has on the upside with none of the downside.
Yep. I wrote a piece for TechCrunch about this recently. There are a bunch of "Invisible Unicorns" in the startup world that have built businesses brick by brick, often without capital to start. They often have a compound interest like effect, the $1M business grows year after year and all of a sudden you have MailChimp, with a $400M ARR, which is completely controlled by its founders. Or Shutterstock, which went from bootstraps to a $2B market cap (and $1B for the founder alone).
These stories are often kind of boring. Who wants to build (or read about) a CRM for life sciences companies? Fortunately for Veeva shareholders, there was a founder who wanted to go after this $6B opportunity.
Or Guidewire Software, which powers insurer's ability to underwrite and turned a modest $29M in VC into a near $3B business.
In my post, I found 15 companies that I categorized under the heading "Blessed are the Boring." These are companies that build software to automation injection molding quotations, construction management, corporate event messaging, and have done quite well as a result.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/01/invisible-unicorns-35-big-...
It would be good if more startups studied their examples, rather than reading yet another profile on Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#38Want to start a $1 startup? Start finding problems instead of ideas. Works at any scale
Back to the drawing board then, pg says to do things that don't
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#39Or you could create a problem to solve! Uber is trying to underprice the taxi industry into bankrupt, then there will no more taxis and only Uber! Capitalism!