

Acadamia niche, limited customers - worth a startup? - polyfractal

I've been tossing around a startup idea designed to serve the biomedical acadamia niche.  I'm a molecular neurobiologist with a comp-sci background, so I'm familiar with the various difficulties the biomedical acadamic community faces.  I think my idea is a tractable problem that hasn't been addressed by others in a sufficient manner (yet).<p>My concern, however, is that the market is necessarily limited.  The academic biomedical community is not huge and has modest wallets.  I imagine the product would be licensed to institutes and universities as a site-wide service, rather than individual labs.<p>My question:  Should one jump into a startup knowing that the niche is small and has a ceiling on potential customers?  Customers who are at the mercy of limited budgets?
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kenjackson
Sounds like free is the way to go. You'll get your name out in the community
and probably get more use this way. And if it turns out to have commercial
appeal, you can always do an upgraded version with more bells/whistles and
sell that one.

But everything you've described sounds like more frustration trying to make
money rather than focusing on just trying to get it in people's hands -- which
for most devs is the fun part (after coding).

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teyc
I'd say no. Avoid something where addressable market is too small. Remember
that for academia, human robots (aka grad students) are cheap and viable.
Having said that, keep it in your ideas book, as you might use it for idea
generation. Otherwise, use it as a way of practising customer development.

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abhishektwr
It's not that bad, you need to execute it extremely well. Last year I tried
something in this direction called as MolSeek. Did not work out well, but I
think I will try again. I will be keen to listen what you are up-to, only if
you think year idea is worth sharing.

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polyfractal
Excellent, thanks everyone for the advice! I think I could easily produce a
barebones beta and just push it to grad students (the intended user) for free,
see what happens. If people adopt it, perhaps I can investigate adding
bells/whistles as you mentioned.

How big of an audience/revenue stream should a startup shoot for? I really
have no idea. Just for fun, I ran some quick numbers:

A 10k yearly fee works out to 0.04% of MIT's library budget (26m), and 0.27%
of my alma mater's budget (3.6m). If 10% of 4-year universities adopted the
service (~230 colleges) that totals 2.3m yearly.

Obviously that is a really simplified example. I imagine larger schools would
pay more than smaller schools, 10k is probably a silly number, ten percent
adoption is probably overly-optimistic, etc. But I suppose it puts everything
into rough context.

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bricestacey
For most libraries, 10k is a fairly large fee for something only a small
number of people would use. We do spend good money on very specialized
databases, but they're fabulous resources, not something you can just whip up
by yourself. Also, large fees require additional authorization above and
beyond regular acquisitions. Something more reasonable would reduce friction.

Another idea for marketing: You may want to consider trying to sell to
departments by contacting faculty/grad assistants researching in the affected
field. Then, have the faculty request the library purchase a license. We
pretty much buy anything faculty requests within reason, but ignore
salespeople.

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polyfractal
Very interesting, thanks! I admit I just made up 10k as a number, I have no
idea what libraries typically spend on various acquisitions. I've contacted my
alma mater's library asking similar questions. Would you mind an email from me
about this?

