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Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

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Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#71

Post by brucephillips »

comstock wrote: post #64
brucephillips wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're underestimating how expensive that goal is. Providing every adult with basic income so that they can pursue their dreams would bankrupt the country.

I’m not really talking about providing a basic income. What I’m saying is the barrier to having “personal autonomy” in a society where providing the essentials of life has to a high degree already been automated, is too high.

How would we provide the essentials of life other than through basic income or a similar welfare program?

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#72

Post by brucephillips »

Zalastax wrote: post #47
brucephillips wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "worth pursuing"? Do you mean that you can't find an idea worth investigating further? Or do you mean that you can't find an idea that survives a month of concentrated market research? The latter is reasonable. The former isn't. You should be able to come up with lots of ideas worth following up on. Let's play a game. Someone give me a product category, and I'll list ideas that are at least worth mor…

Furniture is a category or products I have so many problems with (with a viewpoint from Sweden)... I'll let you write some ideas and then chime in with the problems I have seen.

I can't innovate on furniture directly, but maybe on the design, manufacturing, and distribution processes around it. I have no idea how this industry is structured, but here are some ideas.

- Made to order furniture. Let users design their own, or at least mix and match high level componets at a finer detail than ikea.

- High end IKEA. Combine the flexibility of Ikea with high end designs and materials.

- High level office furnishing service. Companies provide a high level description of their furnishing problem, rather than choosing specific items. I'm sure these consultants already exist, but maybe it can be done in a more automated, scalable way.

- bid/ask interface for used furniture markets. This would enable sellers to passively sell items.

- used marketplace that uses ML to extract features from pics. I think this may already exist. Not sure.

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#73

Post by kornish »

brucephillips wrote: post #38
katzgrau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fairly successful bootstrapper, I'd say that it's more likely that taking money generally leads to a "runway" in that you need to be profitable or raise another round by the end of that runway. Many don't succeed in either of those efforts because they tend to take on heavy expenses too early, where a bootstrapper is much more thrifty and mindful of cash flow. In the early days of my company, I applied to YCombi…

Great point. This is why I advocate for taking money early on, but only increasing burn when a profitable business model is found. This is the best of both worlds.

100% agreed, and that's essentially the advice present in Mark Suster's blog post "Do You Really Even Need VC?" [0]

[0]: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/do-you-really-even-need-vc-7...

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#74

Post by jopsen »

comstock wrote: post #56

The last sentence really stuck home to me (edited for clarity): While these Red Ocean ideas may not result in creating multibillion dollar companies they do offer opportunity that can lead to riches and personal autonomy. It’s sad that we live in a world where the goal of personal autonomy is so lofty. We have an over abundance of resources in the West. And yet having the freedom to work on useful things under our ow…

While is the US is moving slightly backwards... In most of the developed world we have never had as much free time, vacation and money as we do now.

You don't need to have your own business to have some degree of personal autonomy. In many ways you'll have fewer responsibilities if you're just an employee, and a larger degree of self-determination.

I'm not necessarily convinced doing your own business is a guide to happiness. That said, author has a point, if you do want to try, maybe avoid VC money. It's easier to become profitable if you're not dragged down by investors who needs to profit first.

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#75

Post by amorphid »

adventured wrote: post #70
pwaai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think startups die because they are pressured to spend a dollar or more for every dollar that comes in. Bootstrapped businesses are forced to retain cash for a rainy day. It is anti-fragile vs the fragile nature of a negative/break even cash flow business that depends on a steady stream of investors who introduce other investors who introduce other investors. It's built on ego and not on fundamentals and humans are…

> These days you can just get a loan from a bank if you have a high enough MRR to cover the interest rate Heavily depends on the business. Banks absolutely hate to lend to businesses with few or no assets. It's not enough to just be able to cover the payments because of your MRR. The bank wants something to seize if you implode. For the bank it's a simple calculation: how do we get our money back, if your business tu…

> Banks absolutely hate to lend to businesses with few or no assets

Pretty much! My tech startup couldn't raise funding, morphed into a consulting business, and couldn't borrow money. We had to grow entirely out of cash flow, which was both liberating and terrifying. The only credit available to us was personal credit cards. We might have been able to get approved for a small line of credit, but it wouldn't have been large enough to make a difference, depending on it would have been risky.

A few thoughts on trying to cash when you're bootstrapping:

- if you've got personal assets & a willingness to put them up as collateral, you can do that

- you can borrow against accounts receivable, so if you're always sitting on $100,000 worth of A/R, a bank might lend you some percentage of that amount

- having someone on your team develop a relationship with a regional bank can help, because although they can't offer you any sort on liberal financing, they can tell you what you need to do to get it eventually (unlike a mega-bank, which usually doesn't have much of an imagination when it comes to offering you financial products to choose from

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#76

Post by anovikov »

lettergram wrote: post #10

It's interesting that of the many friends I have who started companies (10 - 12), only two of them didn't receive funding. Both businesses built from scratch and now have a revenue somewhere in the neighborhood of $1m a year after two years. That's honestly pretty good IMO. The other eight or so friends who started companies accepted some form of money. Of those, only two are still in existance. The survival rate of…

Maybe it was by design? The guys who got funding did so to get and eat away funding? And just have some fun for other people's money?

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#77

Post by murukesh_s »

lettergram wrote: post #10

It's interesting that of the many friends I have who started companies (10 - 12), only two of them didn't receive funding. Both businesses built from scratch and now have a revenue somewhere in the neighborhood of $1m a year after two years. That's honestly pretty good IMO. The other eight or so friends who started companies accepted some form of money. Of those, only two are still in existance. The survival rate of…

And those 8 startups have spoiled the culture. Honestly your 2 bootstrapped startup/friends are lucky to survive but imagine if they had to compete against funded startups? The funded guys will outsmart them with money muscle and might eventually crash themselves ruining it for everyone..

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#78

Post by sumedh »

borplk wrote: post #15
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #4

Are there research firms that do ground work research, focus groups, talk to people on the street, build real professional networks to extract "problem stories" for ideas, and do competition research to the same level that e.g. short sellers might? Are these just normal market research firms, and are there boutique firms that have low-volume, high value clients?

Can anyone give a decent concrete real example of "extracting problem stories"? I see this line of thinking repeated a lot but haven't seen any realistic examples that could lead to a viable small businesses. There are obvious ones that you don't need anyone telling you nowadays. Like "I need a good customer support software.". You don't need someone telling you that to know that you can make customer support softwar…

> Or it is "missing features" from other stuff like "Zendesk is ok but it doesn't do ...".

The guy who started freshdesk said he read lot of comments on HN about how zendesk sucks so he started freshdesk to solve those problems.

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#79

Post by tim333 »

lettergram wrote: post #10

It's interesting that of the many friends I have who started companies (10 - 12), only two of them didn't receive funding. Both businesses built from scratch and now have a revenue somewhere in the neighborhood of $1m a year after two years. That's honestly pretty good IMO. The other eight or so friends who started companies accepted some form of money. Of those, only two are still in existance. The survival rate of…

Observing some of the people I know looking for startup funding they are pretty focused on getting funding and less so on having a profitable business. The plan seems to be funding, try to be the uber or blockchain for something then seek more funding. Bootstrapping forces you to look for ideas which are actually cash profitable which may help account for the difference.

Re: Finding Profitable Startup Ideas

#80

Post by throwaway_yaron »

enraged_camel wrote: post #27
bronlund wrote: post #12

Finding a good idea is the easy part.

I used to think so as well, but over the years, I've realized that execution is the easy part, at least for me. Finding good ideas, as in ideas that can lead to profitable businesses, is difficult because it requires deep domain expertise.

I guess different people really ARE good at different things ;)

I am not gonna say great ideas are easy - but if u r a tech lead, you should have domain insights, and several high potential product/idea.

But just deciding on what to focus is difficult. Cold calling is difficult. Pitching to complete strangers. Starting to buy leads, faking it - all these do not come naturally to many people.

Also - i have to point out that i met some people which could have been a good match. But when the opening line is "50%-50% share before we start" - that is also a difficult bump to get over.

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