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Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

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Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

#5

Post by Jormundir »

lisper wrote: post #3

This is a three-year-old blog post about a three-year-old HN comment about a different three-year-old blog post. Just sayin'.

Hah, I usually don't like when people repost old articles, but I didn't see this comment originally, and it is super awesome.

Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

#8

Post by knowtheory »

Derek Siver's observation back in 2005 that ideas are a modifier on execution is a slightly better recounting of this point: http://sivers.org/multiply

People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for interesting products almost always miss the point.

Always look to the execution.

(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very easy to sum up)

Re: Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

#9

Post by Xcelerate »

Assuming your goal is to have a successful startup company, I've often wondered what the optimal trade-off between time-per-startup idea and number of startup attempts is.

For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas.

Or... I could invest my time in a bunch of little startup ideas. Make one simple webapp a week, and out of 52 of them, one should stick, right?

But the problem is that in general, the more time and effort you invest into any particular idea, the higher quality the product of your idea will become, and the better a chance it has for success.

So, I'm not sure what the best route is. If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea. But, this may be an example of selection bias. It could be the case that the biggest successes require a huge time-investment in one project, but the probability of success for any random project is very low. In a sense, they won a lottery of a sort. Perhaps your chance of success -- but not mega-success -- becomes more realistic if you focus on many smaller ideas.

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