Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
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Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
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Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#2What's the difference between "Actionable Ways" and plain "Ways"?
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#3What's the difference between "Actionable Ways" and plain "Ways"?
"Copy a feature on Craigslist" vs "make something people want".
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#4What's the difference between "Actionable Ways" and plain "Ways"?
Specificity, mainly. Specific action you can take right now, versus generic platitudes that apply at a very general level.
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#5I've never met a successful entrepreneur who sits around trying to come up with business ideas. At the risk of sounding negative and grumpy, groan. Another one of these blogadoodoos. What follows is my $.02, some might disagree.
From what I've seen it goes "I have experience in this area" -> "Wow there are under-served market needs here" -> "I have some relevant experience to start a company that addresses it and can attract talent" -> startup.
Not "I'm a wannabe entrepreneur" -> "I have no domain specific expert knowledge" -> "let's randomly find something we guess people care about and overspecialize" -> start coding blindly or find a Rails dev on Odesk. Seen that one fail innumerable times.
One other thing. If you have to go searching for ideas, you probably have no business experience. Let's say you manage to find a good idea using something like the techniques of this blog post. You manage to secure some funding. The startup starts to do well. You then become a sitting duck to be ejected by your investors, as you've built the product, but are inexperienced in business, and they specifically will want you out for that reason.
An exception to this is incubators like Y Combinator, who are more concerned with team chemistry than idea. If they weren't buying the concept but want to give you a shot, they might stick your team on an idea other than yours. But they probably already have an appropriate idea in mind, they don't have to go hunting.
Another possible exception is Stanford MBAs, specifically.
So much advice on blogs. Be careful.
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#6What's the difference between "Actionable Ways" and plain "Ways"?
ac·tion·a·ble ˈakSHənəbəl/ adjective
1. giving sufficient reason to take legal action.
2. able to be done or acted on; having practical value.
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#7I've never met a successful entrepreneur who sits around trying to come up with business ideas. At the risk of sounding negative and grumpy, groan. Another one of these blogadoodoos. What follows is my $.02, some might disagree. From what I've seen it goes "I have experience in this area" -> "Wow there are under-served market needs here" -> "I have some relevant experience to start a company that addresses it and can…
This, yes, a thousand times. Building a startup is gruelling and I wouldn't be doing it at all if I hadn't had such an urge to fix a problem I actually faced/was angry about and saw that no one else was fixing it.
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#8I've never met a successful entrepreneur who sits around trying to come up with business ideas. At the risk of sounding negative and grumpy, groan. Another one of these blogadoodoos. What follows is my $.02, some might disagree. From what I've seen it goes "I have experience in this area" -> "Wow there are under-served market needs here" -> "I have some relevant experience to start a company that addresses it and can…
This, yes, a thousand times. Building a startup is gruelling and I wouldn't be doing it at all if I hadn't had such an urge to fix a problem I actually faced/was angry about and saw that no one else was fixing it.
The thing is, everyone reads the news and thinks they can come up with some alright idea and make a few million in a couple years. Most of them don't know how hard it is because they've never done it.
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#9The only upside to "looking for startup ideas" is that it is better than sitting and doing nothing or watching 13 episodes of house of card on netflix for example. The key is to not commit to an idea that was generated in this essentially random manner. Treat such ideas as "projects" where your main objective is to learn. Perhaps do a few in parallel. Experience naturally follows and then real ideas can spring forth. The mistake is to "come up" with an idea and then blast full steam ahead when there is no basis for real conviction.
Re: Actionable Ways To Get Startup Ideas
#10What's the difference between "Actionable Ways" and plain "Ways"?
ac·tion·a·ble ˈakSHənəbəl/ adjective 1. giving sufficient reason to take legal action. 2. able to be done or acted on; having practical value. Up until about 10 years ago, it was nearly exclusively used in the first sense. The second sense was popularized by pop-business gurus promoting with proactive dynamic enterprise synergistic actionable best-practices...
Yep. I still laugh at the 2nd usage. When I went to school this headline would have meant "Ways to get sued getting startup ideas".