The problem with so many "startup ideas" is that they are a solution to the problem, "I want to create a startup and don't have an idea." Not surprisingly, this tends to produce copycat concepts, products with no real market fit, services that target sexy but oversaturated markets, etc.
There are lots and lots of problems that are either unsolved or are being solved in ways that are less efficient and cost-effective than they could be, particularly outside of the consumer space. In many cases, these problems can be solved with relatively unsophisticated applications. But the folks who sit around thinking about the usual consumer internet suspects (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) never discover these problems because more often than not, they have no domain expertise.
Sadly, it seems to me that many technical wantrepreneurs have no real interest in developing domain expertise because they believe there's more value in mastering the framework du jour than focusing in on a vertical and developing a real understanding of it over time.
I have come up with a lot of ideas to solve business problems, but I am reluctant to implement them for the concern that selling to such businesses would be a far more difficult problem than simply creating something that works better than what they are currently using. Business often make stupid decisions based on relationships with sells people or brand recognition more than merit of the solution. Of course, this problem exists in the consumer space as well, but the market is so much larger (everyone is a consumer, not everyone makes decisions on what solutions to deploy in a business).
First, it should be noted that if you're actually in the industry you're targeting, chances are you have relationships that you can leverage. Your comment seems to imply that you're an outsider with no domain expertise who believes he has ideas to solve problems in various markets. If that's the case, you have the aforementioned domain expertise shortcoming.
Second, far too many technical folks seem to believe that they have to sell what they've built. That's almost never the case. There are people who make a living selling all sorts of products and services in established B2B markets. If you have a product or service of merit, chances are you'll be able to find somebody with sales experience who will be interested in selling for you.
Now here's the key: you must be prepared to invest money into your sales efforts. You're probably not going to find many good, experienced salespeople who will work on commission only. And depending on the market, you'll most likely need to budget for tools that will help your salesperson succeed (trade shows, etc.).
Bottom line: it takes money to make money. If you're not willing to put cold hard cash on the line to sell your solution, you have no reason to expect results.
Sales is a bitch if you are not good in it. I complete agree that almost everyone can learn to become a mediocre sales person, yet this is not what you want foe your B2B start-up. But yes, chances are that you will ultimately find someone to sell your product. Even it is not a trivial task to do so.
The pint where I realy don't agree are relationships the typical start-up founder can leverage. My impression is that this kind of decisions are met in a, for me, not really understandable way at levels a founder that worked for a couple of years in company X in industry Y is unlikely to have. These kinds of caontacts don't come from domain knowledge alone.
Agree on most of the rest, although I would stress the importance of sales in a B2B environment even more. Would help to get really early on some good business guys for that. And I mean business in terms of I-did-sell-fridges-to-escimos sales people, not I-had-a-good-prof-during-my-MBA types.
you have the aforementioned domain expertise shortcoming
This seems a little harsh or judgemental.
Big Co's don't care about your 10pc better product, because it may be 10% of a cost center that is maybe 15% of revenues. That makes it a 1.5% margin business for them, which is literally not material. Given the politics of BigCos, the top guys have limited bandwidth. They typically don't want the brain damage associated with taking on operational risk for non-material benefits on the upside. Its a distraction, and a fundamental conflict of interest for them. The quality of your sales guy, is only so good as he helps develope a product with lowe operationa implementation risk and has the already-in-place-relationships with a BigCo to de-risk their adoption. even in the best case, its a tough sell. The better bet is to show up with a 10x solution. That turns a 15% cost into a 1.5% cost, and creates a 13.5% increase in profitability. Now that you are moving the needle, you will get people's attention. Even at sr. levels...Just some things worth thinking about. As petet thiel rightly notes, there are varying abstractions of 'sales' skills that come into play, not all are of the door-to-door "sales guy" variety.
It wasn't. My statement was prefaced with "If that's the case..."
> Big Co's don't care about your 10pc better product, because it may be 10% of a cost center that is maybe 15% of revenues. That makes it a 1.5% margin business for them, which is literally not material.
You're missing the point: you realistically aren't going to know what product to build, or be able to assess its value before you build it, if you have no domain expertise.
An entrepreneur with domain expertise is far less likely to build a product that doesn't create enough value to be viable than an outsider who doesn't understand the businesses he's targeting. In other words, the entrepreneur who actually understands what he's doing because he understands the industry probably isn't going to build a 10% better product that is 10% of a cost center that is associated with just 15% of revenues.
i agree and am also a big believer in the notion that your product usually needs to be 10x better to displace the competition. however, sometimes there is benefit in not being a "domain" expert. naivety can drive an entrepreneur to do what industry insiders have been conditioned to believe is impossible. while young entrepreneurs are inexperienced, their age also works to their advantage in certain situations.
> i agree and am also a big believer in the notion that your product usually needs to be 10x better to displace the competition.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back this notion up?
Without much effort, I can think of a lot of markets in which this isn't the case. One example: eDiscovery software for law firms. There are young companies gaining traction in this market and they're absolutely not "10x better" than the competition as far as technology, usability and overall sophistication go. Some are actually less robust than the competition but are able to compete on price alone because there isn't always a need for the Cadillac offerings.
in the example you bring up, these new eDiscovery software providers are competing on different dimensions. in fact, i would argue that they're carving out a new market (smaller law firms who don't need the cadillac)/disrupting incumbents through a simpler product that better fits the needs of a different type of law firm customer. in this situation, they are a "10x" better product in terms of a better product-company size fit + pricing that is orders of magnitude better (enabled by the focus on a different customer set with a simpler product).
> in the example you bring up, these new eDiscovery software providers are competing on different dimensions.
Uhm, most businesses compete "on different dimensions." What's your point?
> in fact, i would argue that they're carving out a new market (smaller law firms who don't need the cadillac)/disrupting incumbents through a simpler product that better fits the needs of a different type of law firm customer.
Ironically, you're providing a perfect example of the importance of domain expertise because I can tell from your comment that you're not familiar with this market:
1. Not all of the eDiscovery upstarts, many of which are engaged in offering hosted document review, are targeting smaller law firms. In fact, this really isn't such an attractive target market because small law firms are far less likely to have cases large enough to warrant the use of a hosted document review service.
2. Large firms have relationships with multiple eDiscovery vendors, so an upstart vendor has the opportunity to play ball without having to displace entrenched competition in one fell swoop.
3. eDiscovery is ultimately paid for by the client, so clients make the final decision on which vendor is used.
my point (agreeing with yours) is just that if these startups are getting meaningful traction, they are probably 10x better in some way or through some combination of factors, be it being simpler, cheaper, etc. if they aren't "better" by 10x, then they're probably just nibbling at the edges of the incumbents' market and their traction isn't really worth noting. there's always a way to make sales to some small percentage of people in any market, even if your product is worse. getting some revenue traction is no proof point that you're really doing something disruptive in a major way. but to really change behavior at scale, i do believe you need to be "10x better."
Phrases like "meaningful traction" and "at scale" and statements like "if they aren't 'better' by 10x, then they're probably just nibbling at the edges of the incumbents' market and their traction isn't really worth noting" might sound good at a Silicon Valley mixer, but they don't really mean anything.
There are lots of people who have mid-to-high six and seven-figure a year businesses who are "nibbling at the edges" of markets. To those who aren't impressed I say: don't knock it until you've tried it.
i'm not saying i'm not impressed. in fact, i think anyone who can start a business and be self-sustaining deserves praise. all i'm saying is that there is enough inefficiency in any large market to become a 7-figure business even if your product is no better than the competition. you can get customers through personal relationships who are doing you a favor and sometimes customers don't have the time to do a full evaluation of all your competitors. so, if you happen to reach them at the right time and solve their problem, even if you don't have the best solution, they still might choose your product. all i'm saying is if you want to create a truly disruptive company that can get to $100MM in sales, you do need to offer something 10x better. if you want to start a business in any given market and get to high six figures or seven figures, you just need to create something good enough and hustle. but you won't start displacing your competitors at scale if your product isn't significantly better.
Uhm, most businesses compete "on different dimensions." What's your point?
Your definition of domain expertise seems self-referential. If you define it as "knowing everything which makes a business in this area successful". That's like marketing/consulting speak, so its ok, but Its not adding much explanatory power to the analysis.
Can you explain why chipotle and chobani are massively successful? Fast food and dairy grocery are classic commodity products in the US. That's broadly defined. Narrowly defined, the markets in which they compete, their products are also not amazing vs. direct competitors. But they are both massively successful.
Why? Domain expertise? Harldly. They are merely competent competitors, making OK but not class leading products.
But how do they succeed ast selling at 2x competitor prices? Is it a 10pc better product? Or a 10x one?
What is the definiition of domain expertise that reverse engineers the secret to this success?
One likely answer is that they dimensionalize their product in certain ways, when bringing them to market, that changes/highlights their relative performance. By bringing a different class of commodity product to bear on an existing market, they mimic/synthesise a class leading product.
So, chipotle takes a bog-standard SF burrito and makes it go head to head with pastrami-deli sanwiches for lunch in nYc, where nobody would otherwise touch tex-mexican food. Likewise, chobani takes 2nd rate strained yoghurt and goes head to head with watery americanized stuff. Its quite similar to how starbucks took italian espresso-based coffees mainstream 20 years ago. In other workds, yeah, they are competing in different dimensions by using a different class of product to compete in a commodity industry.
But note the prices are not 10% deltas, they are 1x-2x (ie 10x 10%). So in that sense, they are coming to market with products that have if not an order of magnitude higher performance, a significant premium that commands a whole new tier of pricing.
This is the equivalent of North Face and Patagonia selling street clothes to urban your and college kids. Again, these are brands that may or may not be class leaders when viewed apples to apples, but they profit from marketing to people who compare them to choices which haver weaker performance in certain dimensions. Its another variation of making a 10x product out of a 10pc product, by altering the product/market fit...not the product. These are abstract market plays, not "marketing" driven plays, in the first instance...they historically gain their nich/cult status through WOMO not traditoinal advertising. In other words, these are considered "hacks" by early adopters (using a product for some other purpose), which then become popularlized by followers and ultimatley are adopted by the mainstream.
> Your definition of domain expertise seems self-referential. If you define it as "knowing everything which makes a business in this area successful".
Your if is a big, incorrect one.
Expertise is defined as "expert skill or knowledge in a particular field." It does not mean "knowing everything which makes a business in [a particular industry] successful." There is no way of knowing whether a new business will be successful, but I think most reasonable people would agree with the statement, "An experienced individual who knows a thing or two about the industry he's in almost certainly has a better chance of being successful than a person who knows very little."
> Can you explain why chipotle and chobani are massively successful?
Chipotle was founded by Steve Ells, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who worked as a chef before he opened the first Chipotle.
Chobani was founded by Hamdi Ulukaya. He worked on a dairy farm his parents owned as a child and ran a cheese company prior to starting Chobani.
I can't respond to your meandering analyses of these companies, which seems to be based more on assumption and personal perception than fact. But if you believe that the experiences and domain expertise of these two successful founders did not help them spot opportunity and did not contribute greatly to their success, we'll have to agree to disagree.
In my experience, you have the difficulty backward. It's just fear of the unknown that keeps too many technical people from attempting it.
If your product has a demonstrable return on investment, then it is far easier to sell to businesses. Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI, and consumers mostly don't.
Remember that to make a fair comparison, you need to do it per dollar, not per sale. Even if it's 10x easier to sell to one consumer than one business, if a business customer pays 100x more money, then it is still vastly easier to sell to businesses.
Sure, but the same objection applies to consumer-targeted products. If your product is for "everyone", you may need to spend large amounts of money to get attention.
You are mostly right, but then there are other issues to consider: why would a business buy from you who is just starting out? They would like to have some guarantee you will be around after a few years..
Reputation definitely counts for something. But there's a slew of businesses that would likely buy from you in the early stages. They may be much smaller businesses, and possible not even in your long-term/medium-term target market, but it's a stepping stone.
Selling can still be a challenge. But if you have a valuable product, and an A* sales team, it's much much easier.
>Because businesses actually make decisions based on ROI
They like to say they do, but they very frequently don't. I'd say easily 80% of the software and hardware purchases I've seen corporate clients make are based on things other than ROI. Things like "the sales person for product X always takes me to nice lunches" or "everyone else is using Y so we need to use Y too".
That's why you need to sell first and build second. You have a good relationship with your first customer, who has a real problem and real money to solve it.
Yes, of course if you have domain expertise and there is a need you can recognize a niche to fill with a company. I think getting domain expertise is easier said than done and could probably require quitting one's day job to go work in industry X for 5 years. Possibly just to find out that filling a niche is hard.
1. I didn't suggest that domain expertise is easy to develop. Nobody gains expertise overnight. That's the point.
2. You don't have to quit your day job to develop domain expertise. Be strategic and try to make sure your day jobs are related to a specific industry. Far too many people hop from random startup to random startup. That's not surprising: the pay can be excellent, you get to work with the latest and greatest technologies, and you get a lottery ticket in the form of equity. But many of these jobs won't provide enough exposure to a vertical to actually gain meaningful knowledge of it.
3. If you get involved in an industry, you should take the time to establish relationships, especially with folks who are non-technical. If you nurture those relationships and keep your eyes open, you will often meet highly-knowledgeable, well-connected non-technical individuals who make for perfect non-technical co-founders. These are not the "non-technical co-founder seeking technical co-founder" wantrapreneurs with no domain expertise of their own who you run into all the time in Silicon Valley.
4. If you're not prepared to invest the time in understanding a specific market, that's fine. Be the best engineer you can be, try to maximize your income and consider whether it's worth continually beating your head against a brick wall to find an "idea" so that you can create a "startup."
Let me put it this way: in all of the industries I've been exposed to, I've never encountered one that had a) no pain points or b) companies entirely happy with their current vendors.
Note that you don't necessarily need to find a market that's underserved. Plenty of markets are served, but not well. Sometimes, doing something marginally better and/or doing it for less than the entrenched competition is all you need to create opportunity.
The size of that opportunity will vary of course. A lot of wantrapreneurs look at huge markets and think in terms of 8, 9 and 10 figures, but if you're more realistic (i.e. you'd be happy with a six or seven-figure annual top line with healthy margins), I would suggest that opportunity is abundant. The easiest way to find that opportunity? If you meet people in unsexy markets, talk to them. Most wantrapreneurs won't give these folks the time of day.
Not that difficult. Instead of starting a start-up when you come out of school, go work in a few IT departments. You will find something that is needed somewhere.
Write articles and go and interview people as a journalist/researcher. You can do that in your spare time and you will get good access to decision makers and find out all about industry perspectives and pain points.
We recently had a hackathon with a multilateral rice science nonprofit - they had very focused challenges http://rice-hackathon.irri.org/challenges using their domain expertise - the results of the hackathon was eye-opening!
I agree that domain expertise is often lacking in startup founders, especially the "business" founder. For several years I wanted to form a recruiting startup without having built up a solid understanding of how recruiting works. After I had several years of recruiting under my belt, I was able to build a reasonably successful small business (originally a startup that couldn't scale) that exploited a nice little niche in the recruiting world. That small business wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't known a lot about recruiting.
I'm very tempted to write a blog post pointing to this comment, so that it might be reposted in 3 years - but I think it'll be neater if someone else does!
You could also re purpose that old content by updating with further thoughts and a new URL. Similar to what they do on "48 Hours" or with "60 Minutes" on CNBC "we last ran this story in..." [1] Just throw a coat of paint over it and let everyone feast.
Google Trends is based on searches, so it implies it actually started up three years ago, and a bunch of n00bs had to find out what it means. It grew into simple and powerful everyday expression that everybody knows a meaning of.
That just shows how many people were searching for it, not how many people are using it. And most those people were probably searching for the song, not the expression.
Derek Siver's observation back in 2005 that ideas are a modifier on execution is a slightly better recounting of this point: http://sivers.org/multiply
People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for interesting products almost always miss the point.
Always look to the execution.
(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very easy to sum up)
It's the thrill of creation. You see, many people are creators. They feel a need to pour their imagination into something that lasts, possibly something that outlasts themselves. There are quite a few routes for fulfilling this desire: arts, engineering, parenting, and, you guessed it, entrepreneurship.
And yes, this being a hacker forum, where everyone is the creator kind of person, the percentage of possible entrepreneurs here is bound to be high.
I never said it is. Quite the opposite. I was just placing the choice of entrepreneurship against your advice of "chill, have fun". For many(most?) entrepreneurs, creating an organization, and using it to create stuff in a larger scale, is fun.
I have a startup idea that I'm not going to execute. I currently live with a senior social worker, and my mother was a social worker. Over the years have been deeply troubled by what I've heard. I think this tool could help them, even if it's a bit creepy.
Social workers in the UK have a big problem. Different teams, professions (police, medical, housing), deal with the same people, and often collect all the pieces required to understand and prevent a tragic situation. But they can't put them together.
There is an obsession with interpofessional meetings to tackle this, but every serious case review shows that the knowledge was there but not put together, leading to dead children. My perception is that often knowledge is mentioned, but when discussing a different related case, or isn't formally written down and passed to the right person.
My solution is inspired by the part of the CALO project that dealt with capturing and exploiting knowledge from meetings. There are some great ideas. If you do this, read up on it.
The product records all meetings, using existing meeting room Teleconference hardware. The meetings are put through automatic speech and speaker recognition on a best effort basis to produce a searchable index for that meeting. So you get something like a transcript and can skip to the point where Mr A is mentioned.
Supervisors, who in that field are criminally liable for mistakes by subordinates, already review minutes for meetings. Now they can search for any mention of Mr A, and see in what context he was mentioned and listen to that part of the meeting. Obviously there would be control of who could listen to what meetings, but these people already have big intrusive databases, so I don't think they are too worried.
Ideally, you could then build graphs from there of who is mentioned together, and do some Palantir style stuff to spot associations between people.
But the start is, very much, implementing a meeting transcriber by sowing together a few brands of speech recognition engine, a web interface for administrating and searching meetings, and selling it into social services.
If you are relying on teleconference hardware made by other companies, I suspect that you will have those companies cloning your software for their hardware.
I mean, I assume Cisco Telepresence stuff doesn't already record/transcribe meetings... If your idea starts to take off, I would bet that it will for sure in the near future. That seems like exactly the sort of functionality you would expect from that sort of hardware.
Well CALO yielded SIRI, as in on the iphone. That project had a number of parts, one was an AI personal assistant, another was meetings, and another was some kind of integrated battle control center.
Anyway, it yielded a lot of high grade speech recognition research and AI research, which companies are battling to license. If you recall Yahoo's weirdly overvalued purchase of Sumly, that was part of a deal to acquire a license for this kind of tech.
I suspect the most credible opponents to this startup would be MS bundling this kind of functionality into Outlook, or some other big company exploiting this expensive but already licensed tech.
But what you get here, is first to market, and attack on specific verticals (i.e. social services, and later related services). You can't be scared off by 'what if we have a competitor'. If you don't have a competitor, your market probably doesn't exist. That is what I'd worry about here.
Without relevant domain or speech recognition expertise, it seems that names might be one of the more common areas to get errors while transcribing using such a system, particularly if the system isn't trained for a name and/or it is said by many different voices?
Current thinking on this matter is to avoid the tired old web 2.0 hipster stuff. The current batch of YC is all about solving real problem for real people. Spoonrocket got the most applause ($6 meals delivered within 10 minutes).
i'm all for real ideas but the 7000th web food delivery service shouldn't get people that excited, especially not the most select group of entrepreneurs in the world.
Spoonrocket is pretty unique. You'd have to go to the 3rd world like India to get similar levels of service.
Spoonrocket's cars have builtin heaters that keep food warm, only 2 menu items a day, and really quick delivery. If they actually expanded nationwide they'd kill burger/pizza joints, or at least force them to innovate.
Neat implementation details and 'disruption' aren't what make a startup unique / important. For example:
'InstaToiletPaper is doing really unique things like drone delivery of toilet paper and a huge selection! If these guys succeed, they'd be out disrupting the $20B toilet paper market, or at least forcing the to innovate.
By that standard few startups are 'important'. Twitter (sms on web), Facebook (another myspace), Microsoft (another OS).
InstaToiletPaper is a pretty good startup if existed. When you run out of toilet paper you really want it quick. A drone could fly through a small window and it get it to you. You'd pay $10 for a single roll.
I reason all YC batches have been about solving real problems for real people. Though they seem to be focusing more on solving business problems. I did make that change from consumer to business and am pretty happy about it. Might even apply to the Winter batch.
I stopped looking for ideas, and focused on solving problems. There is a difference. Ideas come with a lot of fluff. Meaning that under the right conditions they might work. Solving problems focuses on talking to people who have problems, and figuring out a way to solve it. I now spend at least an hour every week talking to people who have problems I want to solve: people who can pay. (:
1. I realized that a product is not built in a vacuum. Meaning that I had to go out and figure out what products where needed. This led me to reach a simple understanding: I would focus on building products that made people money. Selling such products seems to be simpler (I am still testing this at the moment).
2. With #1 in mind, I focused on what businesses need to make money: clients. Thus, I set out to learn how business generated new leads, or followed up on clients.
3. Now that I had focused on solving a type of problem (lead generation and client follow up), I set out to research markets. Every business out there needs leads. But some can be easily automated. Using patio11's appointment reminder app as inspiration, I started to ask people how such app would help their business. Turns out there is a big demand for such a simple application. Who knew that sending text messages and making automated phone calls would be such a life saver?
4. Who did I talk to? Well, who needs to keep constant contact with their client list? Dentists, insurance agents, private schools, auto mechanics, etc.
5. Once I knew the who, finding the where was as simple as looking in my cellphone. I called my dentist, and insurance agent to talk about the application (before writing any code). They gave their feedback and I set out to write it.
Assuming your goal is to have a successful startup company, I've often wondered what the optimal trade-off between time-per-startup idea and number of startup attempts is.
For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas.
Or... I could invest my time in a bunch of little startup ideas. Make one simple webapp a week, and out of 52 of them, one should stick, right?
But the problem is that in general, the more time and effort you invest into any particular idea, the higher quality the product of your idea will become, and the better a chance it has for success.
So, I'm not sure what the best route is. If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea. But, this may be an example of selection bias. It could be the case that the biggest successes require a huge time-investment in one project, but the probability of success for any random project is very low. In a sense, they won a lottery of a sort. Perhaps your chance of success -- but not mega-success -- becomes more realistic if you focus on many smaller ideas.
"If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea."
Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their time"?
I would expect that the first iteration of those websites have been coded in a few days or weeks.
> Where does that info come from and what do you mean with "all of their time"?
It came from my memory of various articles I've read; but that's certainly a fallible source, so correct me if I'm wrong.
And with "all of their time", I didn't literally mean "all of it". I meant, with time appropriated towards working on a star-up, it was spent on only one idea rather than multiple ones.
Actually it was a founder-focused idea that jack had thought of first in 2000 but decided to shelf it. Also it was a failing podcast platform called Odeo.
I think you're right. Building the next twitter would require a huge gamble that's unlikely to pay off. But from what I can tell neither of Twitter, Facebook, Google started out with the intention to be the next big thing. All of them started as something much smaller and focused, even though they eventually grew into behemoths.
No, your chances of success are extremely low whatever how you do it, so better do something you like.
And the most relevant bias here is not selection bias, it's the one that makes every driver believe they are above average drivers. The same happens with mergers too: the boss believes he will better than the other one, and forget about all the difficulties and costs of a merge.
I think that if you really need the money you probably should work in a big corp.
Hopefully you've found one of the 52 ideas awesome enough to spend a little longer on. How enthusiastic / passionate you are about it is a big factor in how successful will be.
A web app a week sounds like a pretty brisk pace to me -- but then again my knowledge of web development is rather outdated. What technologies would you use to build a web app in 7 days in 2013?
Perhaps not if you consider they don't need to be polished or great, or (depending on what you're making) perhaps even finished. You just need to work on it enough to get an idea of 1) how enthusiastic you really are about it and perhaps 2) what the market or audience looks like (but mainly 1, because that's what will motivate you or not to spend more time on it).
The might not even be the most time consuming activity, especially if you consider what one can make in a single day (see for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155)
Continuing in the face of a stream of "Your idea sucks" presents quite a challenge. You can tell yourself that the best ideas and most successful ventures had similar detractors, but it doesn't always help. You are aware of your own project more than the casual observer. The weaknesses and hurdles to pass are more apparent to you, and you can't help wondering if the comments are insightful and your project really does suck and you are just too invested in it to see the truth.
I have done a lot of things where upon presenting them to people, they would say "What's the point?", "That can't be done", or commonly "There's no point in an alternative to X. Even if it does work, people won't change from X". I have even had "that's the stupidest thing I have ever seen"
The chances of those things becoming enormous successes are tiny, and I'm aware of that. But the chances for those who _did_ become enormous successes were also tiny.
It's a hard road, but only people who walk the road have a chance. Please, rather than criticize the attempt, or the implementation, or the presentation, or their use of apostrophes. Try offering directions that could help them in the direction they want to be going. There's no point in saying "Turn back now." Even if you think they are going in the wrong direction, they have made their choice and the journey will be informative.
I would suggest a slightly different framework. Never say "turn back now." However, I try to divide my criticism into three groups:
1. Major show-stoppers need to be discussed and brought to light early on. The point is not to say "don't get started" but rather to say "do you have any idea what you are up against?" Having an idea is the first step to planning, and planning is mostly valuable for mapping out obstacles and potential solutions.
2. Once one is past the commitment and planning phase, I think it is fine to criticize implementation. The goal here is to bring up problems that might not need to be solved right away but need to be on the radar.
3. These need to be coupled with constructive support. Heavy criticism along with solid support is golden. Heavy criticism without solid support is like a lead weight.
No two ideas are ever the same; in the details... Sure Abraham Lincoln filed for a patent on the essence of 'friendster' and other followed suit; but the details make the difference.
> As I pointed out before, there are no new ideas. Everything of value has been done before in one form or another.
Let's see: Take idea some X and the set A of all
efforts for idea X. Then take the effort in
set A that was earliest in time (probability
of exact ties 0). Call that effort T. Then
when T was done, idea X was a "new idea"
and not "done before" in contradiction to
the quote.
For there being "no new ideas", the
research libraries are stuffed with
journals of peer-reviewed original
research, and the usual standards for
publication are "new, correct, and
significant". So, those libraries
are stuffed with "new ideas" that
the quote says don't exist.
Are there new ideas in business? Sure:
The transistor, the integrated circuit,
the Multics processor architecture
(heavily borrowed since),
security via capabilities,
access control lists, and
authentication,
the microprocessor, RSA encryption,
speculative execution, out of
order execution, penicillin,
cardiac stents, and on and on.
It's interesting that both Twitter and Facebook evolved quite a bit from where they started. The newsfeed and chat have both altered how I use Facebook and made it much more like twitter for me. When twitter first came out though I don't really see how anyone could have claimed it was a Facebook clone.
somebody, somewhere must come with something for the first time.. this copy/mix stuff is more reasonable in more common line of thinking (average people)
how many people would be thinking at relativity when einstein did, or calculi for newton(actually two with ), or marx thougts in "the capital", a music piece by mozart or a painting by van gogh..
they created great things because their toughts were above average, and they where not losing too much time with ordinary things.. like "what will i eat?" "were are the kids" .. "i wanna a big iate" .. etc.. etc..
this kind of tought, that nothing is really original, only diminish the human nature.. and if we mix and copy.. the problem are ourselves.. we can do better, and improve with effort.. than some day.. that something really original, that no human being could ever thought can come into reality
if people wanna think different things, they must first start to look to different horizons, where nobody or almost nobody are looking at..
the innovations starts in the way you think.. you need to observe yourself thinking, and be your own harsh critical
There are lots and lots of problems that are either unsolved or are being solved in ways that are less efficient and cost-effective than they could be, particularly outside of the consumer space. In many cases, these problems can be solved with relatively unsophisticated applications. But the folks who sit around thinking about the usual consumer internet suspects (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) never discover these problems because more often than not, they have no domain expertise.
Sadly, it seems to me that many technical wantrepreneurs have no real interest in developing domain expertise because they believe there's more value in mastering the framework du jour than focusing in on a vertical and developing a real understanding of it over time.