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

The sole objective of any business is to make profit. How a business gets to profitability depends on a lot of variables, but the end goal is always to make profit.

Ergo, since you can't make a profit without revenue, your path to revenue is of utmost importance and should be one of the very first things you consider.

My advice:

Start with something that generates revenue. This will give you experience with making money. It will give you experience completing a project. In other words, it will give you a track record.

A track record will help you attract people (co-founders, investors) to your next idea (or to your initial one). Revenue will allow you to pursue other ideas or expand your first business.

However, don't take any of this as advice to start your own company in lieu of taking a job.

Definitely focus on revenue. That way you work towards building a profitable business from day one. If you focus on 'money later' you are in effect first building a user base and then trying to monetise it. Just because you succeed at the first stage does not mean the second will be a breeze.

Also, keep in mind that a startup is really an experiment. Every day you should be learning something new and tweaking your business accordingly. By focussing on revenue you start learning how to make money from the beginning. If your initial focus is on a wide userbase, then you learn nothing about the money-making side which is likely to be very different from just getting users.

If you have ideas for both path, List them all and assesss their potential for growth and demand. Pick the one which scores better in both metrics and start building it. You will come across many issues to solve, one of them probably be cash.

As somebody who just got our of school a couple years ago, and is trying get a startup of my own rolling, I have a few bits of insight. First and foremost, I'm not sure what your CS education was like but if it was anything like mine it was mostly useless. The vast majority of skills/knowledge I apply to development and design now were self-taught or I have picked up working as a developer for somebody else. It's easy to ready tons of great articles about practices, methods, etc but until you get your hands dirty and code some stuff that gets real world usage you may be at a disadvantage. For example, things like enterprise-level security practices, planning for scale, having redundancy and fall-backs in place are easy to envision and 'think' you planned for but until you are actually faced with a situation where those things happen you aren't fully prepared. My advice: score the best-sounding full time job you can get and see some live internal tools, business practices, backup processes, etc. Nothing says you can't code your dream product in your free time while still getting exposure to a real, working product/business (and making money to throw at your startup as well!)