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I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

#11

Post by aditya »

yeah, go work for another startup. you'll learn a lot more than your bigco job and you'll figure out if you're ready to do your own thing, also you'll meet people that you can start startups with.

on the other hand, start building something, anything on the side with your bigco job, release-iterate-repeat from there.

Re: I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

#12

Post by mixmax »

I would start by putting an e-mail address in your profile so that others can contact you. Who knows, maybe there's someone reading this thread with a great idea but noone to partner up with.

just press this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zavulon

Re: I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

#13

Post by tptacek »

Start a two-person consulting practice, making sure to bill corp-to-corp and, if you can, avoid staff-aug projects that will simply stick you in one place for months at a time. Two people. Solo consultants get screwed by clients, have less time to manage and grow the business, and aren't learning how to operate as a company.

You'll learn how to market yourself, how to manage a sales pipeline, how to keep a set of books, how to track utilization and how to set up triggers for hiring new people.

If you're successful, you'll build a revenue stream that you can divert from to build a full-time product development team, at which point you'll have bootstrapped yourself and be at cash-flow-positive.

The ideas will come.

Working for a startup is fun. It will definitely teach you how to develop under hair-on-fire circumstances, and probably expose you to current technology (Rails instead of J2EE, Erlang instead of C++, etc).

But I was --- am --- shocked by how much 10+ years of dev work for startups did not prepare me to start a company from scratch. I got very lucky picking my partners; had I been even a little less lucky, I'd have failed in the first six months.

Re: I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

#16

Post by olefoo »

First figure out why you want to do a startup. Then figure out if a startup will actually meet the needs and expectations you have of it.

If it will; and you don't have an obvious business that you should be getting into, then do some research and look for problems that you are uniquely situated to solve better than anyone else.

Don't just pick an idea and run with it, be critical of your ideas, and of yourself. A startup is hard work with relatively small chance of reward; and if you don't have a sense of why you are doing it that is strong enough to carry you through you won't last the distance.

See this wiki page for inspiration as to what your idea should look like though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal

Re: I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

#19

Post by CyberFonic »

warwick wrote: post #2

What do you love doing?

From the tone of your question, it seems that you are attracted to the idea of a startup but haven't identified your passion yet. Toiling away in BigCo means that you should be able to build up considerable cash reserves for when you go full-time in your new venture. The prudent course of action goes something like :

1. Find your passion

2. Develop the business around your passion in your spare time

3. When you predict that you can be ramen profitable, and only then, quit your BigCo job

4. Work harder than ever before

As someone on HN commented, "mega-successful entrepreneurs are the statistical outliers". But that shouldn't stop you from having a go.

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