

17 Mistakes Start-ups Make - michjeanty
http://www.cpd.ogi.edu/MST/capstone/17Mistakes.htm

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nickb
Previous thread from 2½ months ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=221750>

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unalone
Question: does anybody think there's worth to a start-up that's being made
primarily to offer a service rather than to make money? As in, something where
the main focus is offering a top-notch service, whether it's to a small
community or no? Because the start-up I'm working on is one that I have some
plans for making money with, but I've done no research as to whether or not
such markets are typically profitable and I don't care to. I care more about
creating a service that doesn't exist. Is that a bad thing? Or, to be more
focused, is there something I still ought to beware?

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ericb
I made a website for real estate brokers to manage their apartment listings.
One of my partners was a sales guy. We made very little sales headway as the
problem wasn't pressing enough to brokers--getting available apartments by fax
and keeping them in 3-ring binders was a "good enough" solution for them, and
in terms of paying a monthly fee, they just didn't have the money to spend on
something they saw as a luxury. Services can be great businesses, but creating
them for their own sake is a recipe for failure. My real estate agent co-
founder was _sure_ this service should exist. He was just wrong about the
extent of brokers' willingness to pay for a better mousetrap.

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unalone
I'm not in the same situation. I don't gamble on services that are slight
improvements - such things are never certain. Instead, I think I offer
something genuinely new. So hopefully there's a chance to be had.

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ericb
There is nothing particularly _slight_ about moving from a paper office to
digital. We even offered data entry of their inbound faxes, and a consumer
facing website back end. This was _new_ to them.

I'll put it more plainly--if you don't know if your market has money, and a
real problem, there's a good chance you're wasting your time. They liked our
service--just not not enough to justify the expenditure of money they didn't
have.

Best of luck, and I hope it all works out.

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unalone
In that case, the model - charging people for a potential risk - had a fault.
Perhaps following a different model would have worked.

And thanks.

