Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#11

Post by muttled »

kypro wrote: post #5

> 8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company. Just my opinion, but technology moats are very hard to achieve, and almost impossible if you're a solo founder. How exactly are you going to achieve a technology moat with no capital as a solo founder? Do you honestly believe you are such a good developer that no one is going to be able to recreate what you've done? Probably no…

I think moats can also come if you have a cross-section of skills that another solo developer might lack. If you happen to have intimate knowledge of a super-specific niche industry, for example. Not just the knowledge, but the connections to get your product in front of the people who might use it in that industry.

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#13

Post by avmich »

gizmo wrote: post #12

I dislike this product because its main selling point is that it helps people with violating the terms of service of a site by rotating IP addresses and defeating captchas while crawling. Not cool.

If something is published, it's probably ok that it's watched and acted upon. Granted, people may use it differently than you intend, but that's the consequence of publishing, right?

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#14

Post by gizmo »

avmich wrote: post #13
gizmo wrote: post #12

I dislike this product because its main selling point is that it helps people with violating the terms of service of a site by rotating IP addresses and defeating captchas while crawling. Not cool.

If something is published, it's probably ok that it's watched and acted upon. Granted, people may use it differently than you intend, but that's the consequence of publishing, right?

No, because there is a big difference between information being technically out there on the internet and that information being harvested and sold to advertisers and other scummy organizations.

If I post my email address here that doesn’t mean I’m fine with it being crawled and sold along with a million other email addresses to spammers.

Where people live, their relatives, their social security #, their employer, it’s basically all out there. But because it’s kind of hard to extract this info from public records we enjoy relatively safe pseudonymity.

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#15

Post by altdataseller »

EUROCARE wrote: post #9
warrenm wrote: post #6

>8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company. That’s why there are a million to-do list apps. That’s practically the first thing they teach in any course. So you want to have a technology that's proofed against "every amateur trying to start a company" ... but you're a solo dev who thinks he's better than every other amateur trying to start a company? This is also in direct…

Seems like he's a professional dev. I think there's a lot of kinds of software you could make that would be way too hard for someone learning while doing it.

... there are millions of other professional developers in the world. There are almost 0 new products you could develop right now that many many other developers can't.

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#16

Post by EUROCARE »

altdataseller wrote: post #15
EUROCARE wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like he's a professional dev. I think there's a lot of kinds of software you could make that would be way too hard for someone learning while doing it.

... there are millions of other professional developers in the world. There are almost 0 new products you could develop right now that many many other developers can't.

Sure, but there might be a lot of products that people who are not developers yet won;t be able to develop. Todo lists are easy to develop even for beginners, PaaS cloud platforms not so much, for example.

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#18

Post by fxtentacle »

kypro wrote: post #5

> 8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company. Just my opinion, but technology moats are very hard to achieve, and almost impossible if you're a solo founder. How exactly are you going to achieve a technology moat with no capital as a solo founder? Do you honestly believe you are such a good developer that no one is going to be able to recreate what you've done? Probably no…

Strong disagree. A solo founder working on the same product for years means they'll have in depth knowledge that few (if any) experts can match. That's a very strong technical moat.

Re: My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

#20

Post by lee101 »

kypro wrote: post #5

> 8. The technology should provide a moat against every amateur trying to start a company. Just my opinion, but technology moats are very hard to achieve, and almost impossible if you're a solo founder. How exactly are you going to achieve a technology moat with no capital as a solo founder? Do you honestly believe you are such a good developer that no one is going to be able to recreate what you've done? Probably no…

I'm a solo founder of https://text-generator.io I feel fairly confident about the value proposition and technical moat, I have huge competitors like OpenAI, Copilot and huggingface working hard on the problem too.

I'm confident in selling it for 25k per year to businesses because:

* there's a one line migration in from OpenAI

* Self housting will save the companies entire OpenAI bill

* OpenAI doesn't have some features I do like autocomplete or generating a set number of sentences

* Generating multi lingual text and code is a hard problem to solve yourself, specifically it's a larger than 25k development problem, so will cost more if you want to try solve it yourself right now, so businesses would rather pay some money to have it now which also reduces risk for them.

With a lot of experience in a field and hard work it's very possible to create something others can't feasibly do, or do for the price you do

Post reply on HN