151–160 of 179 posts
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if I build a gam then what is it as shovel? people will not makemoney out of it. I'm also not a middleman because there's just me and the end customer, I vuilt it from scratch. So who am I?!
A game is a shovel. People don't want to play games, they want to have fun, or disconnect from the real world for a period of time, or they want to connect with their friends. Games enable them to do so.
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I mean... you may not be able to distribute food, but as far as I know, it's certainly not illegal to create a social networking app where someone can say "I'm interested in a sandwich" and another person says "I'll make you a sandwich for $5". If Tinder is legal, I don't see how that could not be.
Because Tinder isnt bound by the FDA or any commercial food distribution regulations. Try again.
You can't be a food distributor if you're not distributing food. I've gone to our local small business seminars for food service, and I've been told that as long as you're not handling food at any point, you can't be held responsible.
> One strategy is to think of annoyances you have in your life In this way you will only end up with consumer products. I did this when I was 12 and ended up building a fully automated "egg cutting machine" which solved my annoyance (and created a ton more) but had little market value. The B2B market is huge. I am most interested in solving hard problems that large organizations have with their internal processes. Un…
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook.
If you think the measure of dollars in top market cap companies isn't representative of companies a tier lower, this is likewise true for the highest value YC companies: Dropbox, AirBnB.
As a founder or an investor, it's important not to forget about B2B, but directionally, thinking B2C is correct.
(This is in contrast to, say, thinking of only game companies if you're a gamer; most tech company values are indeed not in games.)
> validate your market how do you do this? Smartphones existed as PDAs for 10-20yrs before iPhone. If I had shown someone my Sony Clie and said "if I make this work with your finger instead of a stylus, simplify the UI, and charge you $80+ a month for service would you be interested?". except for a few geeks like myself the answer would have been "no, that stuff is for geeks" for most people and yet here we are 10 ye…
Netflix example; because of their DVD business, they knew users wanted on-demand. Mail was a bottleneck. So they had a pretty good idea their customers would see the benefit of streaming.
As you mentioned, new ideas are tougher because you can't learn from your existing customers. There's no simple answer, but you just have to formulate a strategy. Target a particular segment that "get's it". Take it one day at a time. Some things are only possible with enormous resources. If you can't find the resources, it's not possible and you should move on.
I've always had lots of ideas, just none I've wanted to follow through on, now I'm in the early stages of an idea I think will be useful ( at least it will be for me ). It's an idea that was simplified out of another idea that's just too large for me to tackle at the moment. In fact it's an idea that's been part of a variety of other ideas. It's also part of a number of other peoples products, and is probably one of…
Use C#.
“everything in the world was created by people no smarter than you”. Is there actually any validity to that? Assuming you is a human of average intelligence...
That statement is wrong, but it has the nice effect to remove self inhibition due to complex of inferiority. Replacing everything with most things would be correct. Creating some things did not require intelligence.
“everything in the world was created by people no smarter than you”. Is there actually any validity to that? Assuming you is a human of average intelligence...
I think this quote is less about the majority, or the absolute truth and more about encouraging that one person who is to not get tripped up on the way there. It may not be true for most, but it's true for a few, and those few need encouragement and support to change the world.
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It’s certainly false though the sentiment might still be valid, basically that the lack of smarts isn’t something that’s holding up more inventions from coming into this world.
Yes, this is the case. Smartness is not the limiting factor. The biggest limiting factor is number of opportunities.
When day after day, you frequently notice people's "pain points", and low-hanging opportunities for reducing system dysfunction, you quickly accumulate a backlog. Which makes it a triage problem. With the associated burdens of "I think I see how I might make this better... and instead I'm going to walk away".
As health professional, you get advice and support on dealing with your limits with respect to people's often unhappy outcomes.
We don't seem to do that much.
There's some around a consultant's limits of professional responsibility. There's hierarchical workplace subordination - "above my pay grade", "not my call". And professional craftsmanship. There's a lot of entrepreneurial mission focus - find one viable/important idea to pursue, and focus narrowly on that. And the seemingly common "it's just a job, to support things like family, that actually matter".
Around here, there's a lot of upbeat use of status quo as baseline. If my product helps people, it's a win. If it doesn't, a null. Anyone else's problems... they're not my market, not my problem.
Market opportunity root cause analysis sometimes turns up a happy "A just hasn't talked to B yet". But sometimes turns up noisome tangles of "I'd be fine with not having seen this" ugliness.
I've seen a great many posts on finding your first viable idea. But I've seen very few posts on remaining ok with leaving the idea faucet running, once it gets going.
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Your point about shovels reminds me of something Alan Kay said about human universals. That is if you want to make a lot of money take one of the top 20 human universals and build a technological amplifier for them. Link: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
Thank you for posting that link.