Thought this was a great article and found the Pixar storytelling framework particularly interesting. Thank you very much for taking the time to put this to paper. I'll definitely check out RethinkDB!
How to pick startup ideas
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#52on saturated markets: many of the companies you've never heard of made their money building an easier to use X in a saturated market. If the dominant company in the industry has not made significant changes to their product in 10 years, then that's an obvious opportunity for a startup, even if the market is completely saturated. at least in B2B i've found that many companies solve a problem for their customer demogra…
Depends on how specific you let the problem be.
Horses (and the first cars) didn't solve the problem to travel 100km in under 1h. Which can be seen as a new problem itself.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are tons more people than you know of in the right-place-right-time, but couldn't/wouldn't act on it. So, right-place-right-time-right-preparation? Boils down the same way, just with an added dimension.
CTY alumnus would be a bonus dimension, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Talented_Youth
The more qualifications you pile on in the competence vs. luck equation, the more it looks like just luck. And the more it looks like any other field where many enter and few win.
The market selects for increasingly subtler and harder-to-attain qualifications, and while you could conceivably stay on top of what the market is looking for through careful reading of history in the short and long term, time spent doing this is time not spent preparing for actually starting an enterprise. The people who do succeed seem to only read history after the fact.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#54I like the distilled version you get from @FakeGrimlock ... find right because, make people want.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#55"Market efficiency implies that if a problem is valuable and solvable, it’s overwhelmingly likely that it already would have been solved."
I think it depends on many things, including the size of the market. I'm willing to bet there are many profitable niches which are served currently with only sub-optimal products. But to find these one needs domain knowledge od the niche, and I think these are served best by teams of adventurous established experts rather than teams without domaim knowledge.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#56Really engaging post. Placed in the context of RethinkDB though it is a bit contradictory no? RethinkDB does not have first mover advantage and they are against the likes of Riak, Mongo, Couchbase, Cassandra, etc. All of those I believe are in a much stronger position according to the criteria in the post.
RethinkDB won't be in this position for long (and in fact, most lessons in the article came directly from the mistakes made in the process of building RethinkDB). We found a big point of a differentiation ( http://rethinkdb.com/blog/realtime-web/ ), which, depending on one's definition, can be considered discovering a new market, and we'll be the first open-source scalable database in that market. The upcoming 2.0 re…
Isn't that something like SQL Server Query Notifications, where you can submit a query and the DB lets you know when the results have changed? Albeit your API looks much smoother.
Speaking of which, I really hope at one point you reconsider the driver model. Having official drivers for only a few not-so-awesomely-typed languages is a big turnoff.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#57[deleted]
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#58Interesting article - a lot of good stuff in it but I found it a bit to general to be really useful. As an example, the author states: "So you need to get to market with a viable product before anyone else does." That's the type of statement that I question - there are plenty of examples of companies creating products in saturated markets where they were not the first mover. In fact, sometime being a first mover can…
I found the article great in forcing me to reconsider my goals in that space. I'd always had this belief that it was possible, eventually, to find the right idea and break through and become the next Microsoft / Google / Apple. The more I actually understand about the broader economic environment, and the more I read about the people in question who started these companies, the more it just looks like right-place-rig…
Theres no denying the importance of luck in the outlier outcomes. Thats why a fundamental heuristic of any startup idea you work on should be: "would i be proud i worked on this problem even if i don't get an outlier outcome?" If you can't say 'yes' to that, you probably won't have the fire to overcome the unpredictable obstacles that will fight you every inch of the way.
Ultimately, that means shifting from a 'risk calculating' mindset to an 'exposure mindset.' Instead of 'what are my chances of success', 'am I cool with potentially spending years of my life on this problem regardless of outcome'? The exposure perspective is the basis for 'antifragility' and honestly makes life quite a bit easier and more satisfying to live.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#59What he refers to as "technology" companies are not ones innovating in any technological area. He's really talking about online application business-to-consumer startups ("appcrap"), for which there's a well-defined assembly line process. A real technology company is defined by their ability to do something hard that others have trouble doing.
The first mover has an advantage, but it's not overwhelming. IBM didn't come out with the first personal computer - Apple and Commodore did. Microsoft didn't have the first operating system for x86 machines - Digital Research did. AOL once dominated social networking. Facebook moved into a quite mature space - Myspace, Geocities, and several others were big companies when Facebook started.
Luck does indeed play a big part. If Gary Kildall, the author of CP/M, had been in the office the day IBM was looking for an OS for their new PC, the history of personal computing could have been very different.
Re: How to pick startup ideas
#60What he refers to as "technology" companies are not ones innovating in any technological area. He's really talking about online application business-to-consumer startups ("appcrap"), for which there's a well-defined assembly line process. A real technology company is defined by their ability to do something hard that others have trouble doing. The first mover has an advantage, but it's not overwhelming. IBM didn't co…
"A real technology company is defined by their ability to do something hard that others have trouble doing."
You're right. But of those companies that just "use" high tech for their services start to put efforts in R&D to stay on top later in their game.