
How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas - paraschopra
http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/how-making-money-changed-my-perspective-on-startup-ideas.htm
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jfi
Great post! Few thoughts: I am having a similar experience. My co-founder and
I have been working on our "this will change the world" venture for the past
few months ... we built CollegeJobConnect, a platform designed to
revolutionize the undergraduate recruiting system and enable undergraduates to
connect with employers. It's a sexy product with a great story. However, due
to the summer time period and the "you need to do something different"-ness of
the idea, the revenue has been light thus far.

Along the way we heard a lot of pain points hiring managers and companies were
having, so we built Recruitly (<http://recruitly.com>), a plug-n-play career
portal and applicant tracking system allowing you to tap the talent that
visits your website. This has been a dream to sell and much easier to
monetize.

I think it depends what you are out to do: if you are out to make money, you
can jump into an existing market and produce a competitive product ("mine is
cheaper!", "mine does X better", etc., etc.) and do fine. If you are out to
change the world, you have to understand the fight you are in for: you likely
will have to change a lot of people's behavior or understanding of how to do
something - no easy task. To your point, it pays to do your homework
beforehand so you know the extent of the battle that faces you.

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petercooper
The lessons learned in this article remind me of the book "Ready, Fire, Aim"
by Michael Masterson. It's a great book.

Masterson notes that when you're starting off, you just need to make money
ASAP. Worry about being original later when you have a budget. So you need to
find a hot area where there is competition (but not _too_ much) and a clear
consumer interest and then produce something that's just slightly better than
the main competitors. There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the main
gist for starting off.

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Cabal
_And most importantly: do competitors exist?_

Exactly. I don't want to be the only falafel salesman on the street, I want to
be the best one.

~~~
hiroaki
You don't need to be the best either. You can be a salesman on the adjacent
street.

~~~
mkramlich
And you don't have to be the falafel salesman. You can be the supplier who
supplies that salesman, AND all his competitors.

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dgudkov
AFAIR economics, starting a company in a market segment with established
competitors may reduce risk, but it may reduce profitability by the same
degree. E.g. starting selling hot dogs in place where there are 5 other hot
dog sellers has high chance for break-even profitability and low chance for
exponential business growth. However this may not be true for some rapidly
growing markets highly sensitive to innovations.

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rama_vadakattu
The secret to making money Online --DHH is superb video to listen to which is
on this lines

[http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-
hans...](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-
startup-school-08)

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acangiano
Solid advice. When we started <http://thinkcode.tv> we immediately asked the
question, will people be willing to pay for screencasts? The existence of
other companies selling screencasts, like PeepCode, PragProg, Lynda, VTC (and
many other emerging ones) reassured us, rather than scare us away. I still get
the impression that the market is more keen to ebooks than screencasts, but it
would have been foolish to start without some form of market research.

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Mz
He was 18 years old and his first idea made no money. Now he is making money
and has some insights he wants to share. I don't necessarily place much stock
in the conclusions he draws but the story has some value. Details of how and
why something failed and what the people learned from it can help others,
depending upon what that specific individual is in need of better
understanding.

~~~
kwamenum86
The conclusions he draws are very much inline with the basic concepts you
learn in marketing 101.

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burriko
I followed your link to your previous site, Kroomsa, and it proceeded to
repeatedly open the site in a new browser window. I was forced to kill Safari,
at which point it had 129 windows open. Not cool.

~~~
paraschopra
I'm sorry, wasn't aware of it. Does it happen on other browsers too? I didn't
notice it on Chrome or Firefox.

~~~
burriko
I only seem able to reproduce it on the latest Safari for OS X. Even Safari
for Windows doesn't do it. Weird.

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warstory
Although he learned his lesson and that's the biggest thing to take away from
this, his original mentality pretty much sums up why 75% (or whatever number
it is nowadays) of startups fail.

The moral of this article is a pretty basic, common-sense parable. Not sure
why the author had to fail to learn such rudimentary things as "no market = no
business" and "no research = bad" but at least he learned his lesson.

~~~
paraschopra
I think I was earlier motivated by originality of idea and a chance to change
the de facto in the world. Like I was, I assume many fresh college peeps are
high on "changing the world" through their great ideas.

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rb2k_
I'm sorry to say this, but that is a lot of text for basically saying: "no
market -> no sales"

~~~
pavlov
This could be a new summary format.

In Search of Lost Time: "lost youth -> melancholy adulthood"

Odyssey: "angry gods -> misplaced hero"

The Bible: "believe it -> live forever"

~~~
mahmud
I can see an arXiv paper coming:

"An Equational Logic for Automatic Text Summarization via Term-Rewriting: Or
Lambda, the Ultimate TL;DR"

