501–510 of 580 posts
STOP. Just go work for someone else, please! Pretty please! Find someone with vision, and work for/with him/her instead. Or merge as equal partners. You sound like really competent people, but working under people without their own vision and without their own ideas is a wrist slashing inducing experience... The people with the ideas/vision should be in charge, not ever the other way around! If you're execution peopl…
My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. Look for the pain, and to do that talk to people. The challenge will be that most people accommodate the pain in order to get something done, but they don't like it. A recent pain point I came across was that 501.c(3) organizations are good at organizing but often poor at "the Internet". That suggested that if you talked to a half dozen…
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The fact that they've spent the past year toying around without direction supports your conclusion as well. CVs are just one metric by which to judge a team.
no but one of them made millions in private equity, so...
The few product ideas we came up with following the above process we dropped, often because we discovered that that space is ultra crowded or commooditized. GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons once said something like (paraphrased slightly) "never be scared to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else". Something to think about. Beyond that, consider that your product is not the only dimension on which you c…
If you as an entrepreneur feel that the market is too crowded or commoditized, though, that's a very good signal not to enter it. Not because it actually is too crowded, but because you don't know it well enough to come up with a unique differentiator that will resonate with people actually in that market. When you stumble across an idea that's actually viable, it feels like "Oh, why has nobody else done this yet? I…
That's a fair point. The key, I think, is understanding when a market is susceptible to entry by another player. But part of making that judgment is understanding the different dimensions along which you can compete, which is why I find The Discipline of Market Leaders so valuable. That was the first book I read that really made the case that it isn't necessarily just about your product. Likewise Crossing The Chasm makes a pretty good case that you can always (well, almost always) segment a market to a degree that there's a place where you can compete.
I have a couple of ideas with legit legs. I am also pretty competent at implementing stuff.
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>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!
Here's mine: fix income inequality and the staggering inequality in the distribution of wealth worldwide. How is that a startup? I dunno, maybe there's a small part of that big problem that you can start tackling. Maybe it has to do with some facet of the economy you're improving/making more efficient, maybe it has to do with influencing policy. That's for you to figure out. Find a big, big problem, and then look for…
Would have hoped the last year would have shook you all to your senses
I'm sure it must be out there already in some form, but you might want to give a shot at "uber for day laborers". It seems to me like there are opportunities on both the supply and demand side. On the supply side there its lots of room for improving gig hunting and payment assurance for laborers. Staffing agencies are of course in this space, but are pretty inefficient and catch only a small fraction of potential gig…
I concur. I needed a ditch dug a couple of weeks ago, and everyone was recommending that I drive to Home Depot and pick some guys up waiting for work. There has _got_ to be a better way. Note that this felt different to me than hiring a handyman or any other skilled trade, which feels like a semi-solved problem. Sometimes I just need some extra hands, and learning the unspoken rules around how to hire guys on a stree…
Classic SV/SF “I want this service, without having to interact with poor people” next step up from bus as a startup laundry delivery as a startup etc
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no but one of them made millions in private equity, so...
Are investing in other people's businesses and starting your own translatable skill sets?
My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. Look for the pain, and to do that talk to people. The challenge will be that most people accommodate the pain in order to get something done, but they don't like it. A recent pain point I came across was that 501.c(3) organizations are good at organizing but often poor at "the Internet". That suggested that if you talked to a half dozen…
I agree with your premise but the example problem already has many established companies including Engaging Networks, EveryAction, Salsa, and Luminate. As a startup your job will either be to completely replace their stack in one fell swoop (VERY hard as a startup with no track record) or to somehow integrate in with the existing stack and eventually push it out (also hard but doable).
I don't disagree that there are people in this space. The nationbuilder folks (mentioned elsewhere) and apparently there are a couple people who specialize in setting up church web sites etc.
From a go to market strategy I'd probably advise that the team interview the executive committee of several new charities, compile a survey of charity sites and rank them from great to garbage, pull out the common functional features of every site, then decompose charities into every activity they do from filing tax returns to holding black & white balls. Look at how they manage payroll, volunteers, and assets. Listen to the problems the treasurer, directors, executive director, and donors have with charities. Where are their pain points and what does their day to day look like. Then pull all of that together and identify where there is commonality amongst groups and where their is uniqueness, and for each uniqueness attribute do the stake holders think it adds value or do they just not know any other way.
Then I would mock some interfaces to the infrastructure from using a phone, a web site, and maybe a chrome book like device. Look at security, look at complexity, look at time to complete tasks.
And finally after I felt the set of problems that could add significant value were identified, and I had helped a couple of new charities get from zero to online. I'd pull apart where the service business added value and where it didn't and develop a business model that was cost effective for the charity and sustainable for the startup to grow it in a boot strap fashion while the company got its feet under it for running its own organization.