Ask HN: idea for a startup, how important should be the path to revenue?

hey gilbax, from what i have read/realized, successful startups don't aim at building the world's best business model... u build the model around your product... i think if your product is good (it solves a pain), your customer's will buy it... so.. focus on getting a kick a*s product out... and don't just try to build something just becoz you want to do it... build something that can actually solve the pain of a million people... and it will bring revenues in before you know it :)

If you don't have an idea yet, why are you refusing job offers to start a yet-to-be-determined company?

Anytime someone asks "What kind of business should I start", the correct answer is none. You should continue learning, working on things and find your passion. That passion will create an undeniable pull that will lead you to starting a business you'll stick with through good times or bad.

There's a short and pat answer, and there's the longer and more thoughtful answer.

But the short version is this: businesses fail when they run out of cash. Period. Keeping that in mind, we can logically conclude that you need either to monetize before the cash runs out (thus becoming organically cash flow positive) OR gather enough outside funding to support operations until such time as you become cash flow positive.

How do you get there? Well, ideally, you have a product that solves a clear need which can be monetized immediately. If not, then you need a product so compelling that you can get to X users in Y months (where X is an impressively large number, and Y is an impressively small one) -- thus attracting partners or investors.

But the bottom line is that you need to generate cash flow or generate funding as quickly as possible.

And yes, generally speaking, it's easier to keep a "fun" product alive in the Valley than it is elsewhere, if only because that's where most of the funding money resides, and because many of the potential funders there have more speculative appetites. Your odds of getting a cool product without clear monetization paths funded outside of SV drop significantly. That's not to say, of course, that getting a cool product funded in SV is easy, because it's not. You still need a good product, and by "good," I mean a product that solves clear needs for its users or else provides its users with functionality or utility that solves problems users didn't even know they had.

Best advice for you is probably to take a job at a startup or larger firm, and build some cool products in your spare time. If and when one of those products becomes extremely cool -- and you'll know it when you see it -- that's when you start looking for users or for funding. No sense in turning down job offers now on the purely hope-driven premise that you'll build or invent something later. Build first, -then- act.

I would probably think about it terms of how many people would/could use it. If a million people use your product, monetizing it wouldn't be too hard to figure out later.

Haven't spent a lot of time thinking about enterprise stuff, so maybe this doesn't apply to that type of business.

Sort of like asking "Am I in love?", "Am I popular?", if you have to ask, the answer is no.