I followed your link to your previous site, Kroomsa, and it proceeded to repeatedly open the site in a new browser window. I was forced to kill Safari, at which point it had 129 windows open. Not cool.
How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#12And most importantly: do competitors exist?
Exactly. I don't want to be the only falafel salesman on the street, I want to be the best one.
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#13The lessons learned in this article remind me of the book "Ready, Fire, Aim" by Michael Masterson. It's a great book.
Masterson notes that when you're starting off, you just need to make money ASAP. Worry about being original later when you have a budget. So you need to find a hot area where there is competition (but not too much) and a clear consumer interest and then produce something that's just slightly better than the main competitors. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the main gist for starting off.
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#14I'm sorry to say this, but that is a lot of text for basically saying: "no market -> no sales"
This could be a new summary format. In Search of Lost Time: "lost youth -> melancholy adulthood" Odyssey: "angry gods -> misplaced hero" The Bible: "believe it -> live forever"
I can see an arXiv paper coming:
"An Equational Logic for Automatic Text Summarization via Term-Rewriting: Or Lambda, the Ultimate TL;DR"
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#15And most importantly: do competitors exist? Exactly. I don't want to be the only falafel salesman on the street, I want to be the best one.
You don't need to be the best either. You can be a salesman on the adjacent street.
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#16And most importantly: do competitors exist? Exactly. I don't want to be the only falafel salesman on the street, I want to be the best one.
You don't need to be the best either. You can be a salesman on the adjacent street.
And you don't have to be the falafel salesman. You can be the supplier who supplies that salesman, AND all his competitors.
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#17Great post! Few thoughts: I am having a similar experience. My co-founder and I have been working on our "this will change the world" venture for the past few months ... we built CollegeJobConnect, a platform designed to revolutionize the undergraduate recruiting system and enable undergraduates to connect with employers. It's a sexy product with a great story. However, due to the summer time period and the "you need to do something different"-ness of the idea, the revenue has been light thus far.
Along the way we heard a lot of pain points hiring managers and companies were having, so we built Recruitly (http://recruitly.com), a plug-n-play career portal and applicant tracking system allowing you to tap the talent that visits your website. This has been a dream to sell and much easier to monetize.
I think it depends what you are out to do: if you are out to make money, you can jump into an existing market and produce a competitive product ("mine is cheaper!", "mine does X better", etc., etc.) and do fine. If you are out to change the world, you have to understand the fight you are in for: you likely will have to change a lot of people's behavior or understanding of how to do something - no easy task. To your point, it pays to do your homework beforehand so you know the extent of the battle that faces you.
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#18The secret to making money Online --DHH
is superb video to listen to which is on this lines
http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#19I followed your link to your previous site, Kroomsa, and it proceeded to repeatedly open the site in a new browser window. I was forced to kill Safari, at which point it had 129 windows open. Not cool.
I'm sorry, wasn't aware of it. Does it happen on other browsers too? I didn't notice it on Chrome or Firefox.
Re: How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas
#20Although he learned his lesson and that's the biggest thing to take away from this, his original mentality pretty much sums up why 75% (or whatever number it is nowadays) of startups fail. The moral of this article is a pretty basic, common-sense parable. Not sure why the author had to fail to learn such rudimentary things as "no market = no business" and "no research = bad" but at least he learned his lesson.
I think I was earlier motivated by originality of idea and a chance to change the de facto in the world. Like I was, I assume many fresh college peeps are high on "changing the world" through their great ideas.