As a side project, I've begun collecting ideas and posting them at https://oppslist.com
Most, if not all, are NOT billion dollar ideas though.
To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#52why is this on the front page? It is devoid of content.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#53What 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 fro…
I bookmarked your post
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#54What 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.
I'm not really in the tech scene but often wondered just this; Are there really a lot of entrepreneurs with a genuine goal of creating a 1B company? From the venture capitalists perspective of course that makes sense but most engineers I know really just want to design products and have control over the direction of the company. Seems much easier if your content with a 25m (or even less depending on how many partners…
Solving big problems and creating big companies is really exciting for some entrepreneurs. For that you need VC's and so now your implicit goal is $1B.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fro…
I bookmarked your post
Thanks, I have a revised version coming to Medium soon, turns out I missed ~20 pretty impressive companies!
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#56What 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.
You have to match development with domain experts. Development has to take time away from domain experts until you can pay them and not everyone is willing to be a free part of a development lifecycle. Finding anything more than vague ideas requires connections and the other person not knowing the value of being able to describe their problem (otherwise, why wouldn't they just learn programming and build something th…
Good point - finding domain expertise for product/market fit is super important.
However, that's not something that is solved purely by capital. It also takes a lot of time (in practice, you need potential customers to describe their problem multiple times over multiple meetings, since what they think they want, what you think they want, and what really solves the problem take time to converge). For our company (applying ML/NLP in the customer feedback domain), finding domain experts willing to contribute their guidance took a while, but has been one of the most important things we've done.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#57[deleted]
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#58As a side project, I've begun collecting ideas and posting them at https://oppslist.com Most, if not all, are NOT billion dollar ideas though.
Those descriptions and prices don't sound like they resemble anything close to what you should be charging people. You'd have to put an extra zero or two on most of them.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to match development with domain experts. Development has to take time away from domain experts until you can pay them and not everyone is willing to be a free part of a development lifecycle. Finding anything more than vague ideas requires connections and the other person not knowing the value of being able to describe their problem (otherwise, why wouldn't they just learn programming and build something th…
Good point - finding domain expertise for product/market fit is super important. However, that's not something that is solved purely by capital. It also takes a lot of time (in practice, you need potential customers to describe their problem multiple times over multiple meetings, since what they think they want , what you think they want , and what really solves the problem take time to converge). For our company (ap…
You can shovel developers and PMs and QA at the problem, but if it's a greenfield project, (IMO) you're more likely to have people stepping on toes and vying for territory which can be fatal to a startup. Even if they don't fall to that, time/quality/money is the usual trade-off trifecta, but as long as it solves the problem, extra quality may not necessarily matter. That's where you get into laying out MVPs and getting your customers to agree to buy that MVP and what bells-and-whistles they can live without for a first product.
Customers absolutely need iterations to think things through. In fact, that's my default approach now because trying to get everything right for the first meeting is extremely unlikely. Capital does buy you time and iterations.
Re: To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
#60What 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 fro…
> These stories are often kind of boring.
Definitely not. Boring is subjective but people who can't understand this kind of success have no business being in business.