
How I vetted and dumped a startup idea in ~20 hours and for under $1000 - jonah
https://medium.com/@dweekly/clouseau-a-postmortem-ed6192f32ae3
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jannotti
What's interesting is that he did two things. 1) Spent about $1000 on light
meters, domains, logo, upwork. and 2) Talked to a couple people, for free,
that made him realize the idea can't work. (This conversation did not use any
of the knowledge gained from the $1000 spend.)

There is certainly a lesson here.

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dharmon
In the first few paragraphs, my thought was "hotels have lots of rooms with
very different light characteristics, and when you reserve a room, you are not
reserving any specific room." I can vet and dump this idea in 5 minutes and
$0.

Lo and behold, he found out the same thing after 20 hours and $1000:

> "I called my cousin, who had worked for Hilton for a decade before moving
> on. She walked me through how important it was for hotels to do room
> assignments morning-of; having to hold certain rooms was a tremendous
> impediment to flexibility and efficiency since it’s quite difficult for them
> to predict which guests are going to show up when and even which guests are
> going to check out which days sometimes."

Maybe a better title is, "How I played around with light meters for 20 hours
and $1000, and then vetted and dumped a startup idea in 5 minutes."

Even if they reserved specific rooms, I'm not sure the logistics of taking all
these measurements would be profitable. Its a good idea to not just talk to
potential customers quickly, but also do some back-of-the-envelope
calculations. Although if more founders / investors did that, we wouldn't have
all these wonderful SV startups subsidizing our dinners, deliveries, etc.
until they go bust.

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ecmermaid
I'm shocked about how easy it was to convince hotel staff to let you view the
room to test light. How very Veronica Mars :)

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stevenwiles
This person just oozes self-obsession. It's pretty discouraging that people
like this are super rich and taking expensive vacations with their entire
families.

Is the only way for me to become rich like this person is just to become
really conceited and stubborn?

