How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study

I’ve always been annoyed with the fail fast model. The only group that benefits from fail fast are VCs looking for a big score. They push entrepreneurs to invalidate instead of teaching/helping them how to build a business. It’s all ass backwards.

But for the VC, if they see a hundred good ideas invalidated by bootstrapping founders, they save time and money.

The founders are the suckers if they listen to this bull crap. You still need to validate. But do it by actually trying to make the vision work, not by giving up at the first sign of trouble.

$60/hr is actually pretty good, even in the bay area. Currently paying $40/0.5hr for 1:1 violin and $20/hr for group piano for my kid

Pairing people romantically is so hard to do that dating platforms can count on a long string of revenue from clients.

It's going to take many meetups before I find the woman of my dreams, but chances are pretty good that the first maid I get paired with will meet my needs (worst case, maybe I'll need to try one or two more), after a few successful visits, then I can offer to pay direct and cut out the middleman.

Had a similar experience running a consulting practice for a global software company. Our practice revenue was growing with profitably around 20% EBIT. Software sales where not growing as fast. As a result consulting was an increasing % of regional contribution income but at a lower margin. So my practice was lowering regional EBIT margin. We got told to slow down. I put an amazing guy in charge and resigned.

Millions of incremental profit... unwanted. Of course it's logical given shareholders, but remains strange all the same.

Well I was right there with you, thinking it was a completely shit idea, but a little math shows how it at least popped up on the radar (and I don't think its quite so bad myself after some thought):

100,000 music instructors, $60 per hour, at 365 days per year is roughly: $2.19 billion gross revenue per year-hour in the segment. Assuming, the average hours per day are like 3.5 (I can't imagine folks doing this are giving lessons for a full 8 hours per day, 5 days a week), that gives a total market of like: ~$7.65bn. Assuming they could earn a 20% stake in 100% of the market, that's like $1.53bn.

Looking at the numbers, I think there is likely more potential than they realized[1]. I would suspect that by and large, digital advertising is capturing almost none of the market as kinda proven by their analysis. Looking at how low the frequency of searches were compared to the sheer number of employed individuals tells me something is off as a whole with the analysis.

That is to say, digital advertising isn't showing the volume of or demand for musical teaching service because it's highly likely everyone believes it's incapable of doing so or adding value... That (driving the market online) is the problem to be solved in the space, because it sounds _hard_, and solving hard problems tends to be the way to make a lot of money. The other opportunity I would look at is, sort of from the other side: how to fix (what I assume to be likely) most music instructor's "underemployment" problems (i.e. inconsistent, few, or not enough hours). I imagine this angle would probably net more gross sign-ups as well since users (instructors) would be advertising the platform for you.

With all that said, you'd have to assume there is latent under-served demand (25-35%) in the market too to bother with anything I've said... that 25% is essentially what would be left over for others after you've captured the niche.

One last thought, for the VC since it looks like they're reading HN. Have you thought about doing retroactive market analysis where unicorns now exist to see what the market looked like then (e.g. short-term vacation rentals in ~2006)?

Might give you some strong signals for where there is potential...

[1] They are indeed a VC so it may not be in their best interest (time value of money, opportunity costs, etc)...

Edit: Adjust some bad arithmetic.