

Ask HN: You have a start-up idea. Now what? - christonog

Just curious what everyone's process for turning an idea that you just thought of into a real opportunity. Essentially the period between idea generation and actually executing on that idea (if there is a period of time).<p>My process is:<p>1. Lots of Google searching for potential keywords to see if anyone's posted about a need, or if there is a start-up there already.<p>1a. If there is a definite need, proceed to Step 2. If not, proceed to Step 1b.
1b. Look for start-ups already in this space. If there are, proceed to step 1c. If not, step 2.
1c. Is there a way to do it better? If yes, step 2. If no, kill idea.<p>2. Research and answer the following questions:<p>What is your idea?
Why would someone want to use your idea?
Who are your competitors?
What if a big player enters your business?
How will you differentiate yourself from them?
How will you make money?
How will you reach your customers?
What is the time it will take you to launch?
How much money will it take to get a revenue-generating version of your product?
How will you convince people with complimentary skill sets to help you?<p>3. If the answers are satisfactory, tell friends and colleagues about potential opportunity.<p>It's a bit more complicated than this, but I hope this gets the point across. Not surprisingly, most of my ideas have been shot down at steps 1 (especially 1c) and 2.<p>Would love to hear everyone's processes and feedback to hopefully improve my own. Thanks!
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mahmud
Way different than how I usually do it.

1) Meet someone at a pub and introduce each other.

2) Learn everything I can about his work/business, rank within the
organization and what they do.

3) Discover something we can work on, either on the spot or after another
planned meeting, this time over coffee.

4) Bet the farm and everything you own on a potential joint venture, give them
a 2 month timeline til project.

5) Research like crazy and learn everything you can about the project, the
client, their business.

6) Have the client write you checks weekly while you solve the _general_ case.

7) Deliver the project, launch a "startup" on the side and get support and
improvement contracts from the client.

8) Work 4-5 hours a day on _this_ startup, reach out to the world and see who
else is interested in the product and how can you help the industry.

9) Write articles for industry and trade publication and be sorta famous for
computerizing one aspect of their business.

10) Gather ideas for sub-projects and launch a software sweatshop of one man,
churning out good stuff for a handful of big boys, work like crazy, and be
wired the whole fucking time.

11) Look around you for an exit, having discovered you pretty much painted
yourself into a corner in terms of interesting problems to solve ;-)

------
asimjalis
Step 1: Figure out a way to quickly and flimsily implement the idea and
release it.

Step 2: See what happens next and react to it.

Step 3: Repeat step 2 until the idea becomes a success. Or give up if its
clear it could not possibly succeed.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Yeah, this is the closest to how I do things, too, fwiw. All the other stuff,
to me, is procrastinating.

Get idea -> If I have time to implement a rough working version of the idea,
then schedule it and do it; else, do not do it, and possibly file away in
brain for later.

I'm horrifically busy at this point, so I don't have to bother with most of my
ideas right now.

It helps that I've finally broken the bad habit of talking about ideas.

~~~
stanleydrew
Can I ask why you consider that a bad habit?

~~~
sho
I can't speak for the GP but I agree it's a bad idea. Maybe not for everyone,
but for a certain type of person, definitely.

The problem is psychological. When you talk about an idea, you feel like
you've somehow accomplished something by doing so. You hear other people's
positive reactions and instead of validating that your idea should be done
your brain interprets them as satisfaction in and of itself. You feel that
little less "hungry" and yet you haven't even done anything.

Also, talking too much clouds the vision and you tend to expand the scope even
as you talk. Your companion will have their own opinion and their feedback and
ideas will merge with what you think until you're left with a union of both
party's concepts, your version 0.1 getting that little bit harder to ever
reach. Or worse, that person might later claim you stole their ideas.

I come from the school that believes that with very few exceptions mere ideas
are nearly worthless in themselves. Anyone can imagine anything. Actually
doing things is much, much harder. Talking is not doing. Don't talk to anyone
until you've got at least a prototype, IMO. With modern web frameworks you
should be able to whip up at least a crappy, incomplete prototype outline in a
day or two. Sitting down and doing that will hone and focus your thinking. And
if you can't be bothered spending a day or two implementing just the skeleton
of your idea - then you obviously don't really believe it's a good idea at
all, so go and think harder : D

~~~
apsurd
I come from the same school.

From my experience, ideas are worthless because they don't exist. Sounds
obvious but think of it is this way:

Everything can fit neatly and beautifully into anything else whilst it exists
in your head. "How do we monetize this...? Easy! just do xyz!" The answers are
clear, the solutions are elegant, and everyone and everything is holding
hands, dancing around in a circle, singing their hearts out.

As soon as you actually get to work, and you make the transition from fantasy
to reality, well: shit instantly hits the fan, and you've got a mess of a mess
of a mess, and that's what really counts. Nothing works right, nobody wants
it, you deal with endless bugs, its never ready, all your "plans" don't really
mesh with this thing called reality.

It's kind of like fighting in a video game. You can fantasize all you want
about how badass you are at street fighter. But get yourself into a real
street fight and you won't ever think you know anything about anything ever
again.

------
apsurd
Perhaps replies should include the business(es) that was/were yielded from the
the steps outlined.

I'm all for discussing ideas, but this question is more about getting _better_
results than merely throwing out "this is how I do it".

I'd want to know how the dropbox, reddit, google, basecamp, balsamiq,
uservoice, pbwiki, weebly... idea-flow worked.

Not so much the "yeah this is how i come up with ideas that never really
...uhhh...worked out ....".

No offense of course, but just so we can be clear on the matter!

~~~
chinmi
On the other hand I think it's really cool hearing from those who haven't yet
succeeded as well! Just because it didn't work out doesn't mean that the steps
they took were bad. Plus, learning from success is good, but learning from
failure (especially when it's not your own) is great as well.

We all know how crazy an entrepreneur with a world changing idea can get (I've
been there). Succeed or fail, it's always an interesting story.

------
mailanay
I think one of the earliest questions to ask is whether would you, the
builder, use it yourself and secondly, whether you would pay for it. If both
answers are yes, then that is a start. Build a simple workable prototype
(without too much effort and cost) and start finding customers and listening
to them.

------
iamelgringo
I built a social news site this past spring called cuuute.com. It was a reddit
for cute stuff. I built the site because I thought my wife would enjoy it, and
I thought I would enjoy working on it. I was wrong on both accounts, so I shut
the site down 3 months after it started. I still think it's a viable idea, I'm
just not the person to make it happen.

I took a few months off, and mulled different ideas around. I'm a nurse, so I
thought a lot about opportunities in health care IT. I kept coming around to
"I really don't like health care, and I don't want to work in it".

I bought a list of 50,000 top paying google keywords, and cross referenced it
with a google scrape of how many hits per keyword there are. That gave me a
ratio of (top paying keywords)::(# of hits). I sorted the list by that ratio.

There were thousands of items near the top of that list on financial terms.

So, during the months after my last project, I traveled visited family, and
rolled a lot of this information around in my head. Two weeks ago I decided to
make a social news site devoted to financial news. Why? Because 1) I think
it's a subject that can hold my attention for several years, and 2) I think
there's a need in the market for news aggregators/filters and 3) I think it
can be monetized.

Friends and family have both tried to talk me out of the idea and have
encouraged me. Most of those conversations have not been helpful at all. The
really helpful people have suggested ways of iterating on the social news idea
to improve it.

------
p01nd3xt3r
Define idea as a problem

Find someone that has this probem [ID your target market]

Ask them if they would use your solution

------
Tichy
"see if anyone's posted about a need"

I think most people just accept the status quo of living, so few would be
likely to post about needs. Unless you read between the lines, like people
complaining a lot about certain things (mostly the weather and late trains?).

------
khetarpal
\- Be prepared to sell, sell, and sell \- But first, you need to be sold
yourself. So start answering questions in a structured way. Dave Mcclure gives
a nice framework here: <http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/> \- Even though
the slides are for a VC, that's a good framework no matter who you are
pitching. \- Once you are convinced, start looking at building a well balanced
team. \- Your team / co-founder(s) will be the most critical piece. Don't
compromise on the quality of people you build around yourself.

Good Luck!

------
pavs
Action.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Its only worth its value when ideas are converted in
to action. Without action, your ideas are just that, "ideas" and everyone has
one.

~~~
christonog
By actually writing it down and tweaking the idea into an oppotunity, doesn't
that constitute as action? Is it smart to skip this whole process altogether?

~~~
pavs
I am not suggesting you skip those steps. I think most people falls into the
"analysis paralysis" stage and end up not implementing those ideas in to
action. While "tweaking with ideas" can be considered an action - it is still
an "idea".

I consider action to be the beginning of an actual product or implementation
of that idea. Tweaking with idea is still an idea.

------
paul9290
Have a passion for an idea, get feedback from friends and family; majority dig
it, go build it!

That's what I did, yet it was not sucessful in terms of getting an audience,
but it did get a lot of attention and some funding. THough I learned from that
experience, but the process for building an idea remains, except next time go
around - all ideas will have solid and interesting biz models out of the gate.

------
DTrejo
Looking for competitors can be discouraging. When is it a good idea to seek
out the tougher aspects of the idea? If you get discouraged too early then
that's no good. Ideally one would be able to stay excited and keep working
either way.

Anyone have any experience with this?

~~~
JonAtkinson
I'm currently working on a startup, and while our market isn't crowded by any
means, I think having a few strong competitors puts us in a better position -
they've made the mistakes so we don't have to.

Each competitor I see certainly nudges the bar higher, but it's only a nudge.
Ultimately, we're all building web applications. They're just code, markup and
javascript. The great thing about the web is that the entry requirements are
very low and your competitors, no matter how strong, can never raise those
requirements.

FWIW, my startup is testled.com. Our competitors are people like userfly.com,
clicktale.com etc.

~~~
alexcq
Check out your homepage on IE8! Those little green buttons are a problem.

~~~
JonAtkinson
Thanks for the notice - we're rolling out a new version of our homepage really
soon, we'll have all this fixed. Cheers!

------
chrischen
1\. What can I build to improve some aspect of my life 2\. Is there something
out there that already does this and satisfies my needs well? If not, exit.
3\. Build it 4\. How can this be made into something that can generate money?
If it can't, exit (not likely). 5\. Modify it.

------
edw519
1\. Code a demo.

2\. Show prospective consumers of the app. The more the better.

3\. Use their feedback along with your judgment to scrap or enhance the
project for the next cycle of feedback. Your judgment is just as important as
their feedback, maybe even more so. Sometimes you just gotta go with your gut
or else nothing would ever change. OTOH, if they brutalize your dream, maybe
they're right and you just gotta kill it and move on.

#1 is the most important. By taking immediate action by building something,
you'll probably learn a lot and even modify the idea. So get started!

------
lionhearted
> 1\. Lots of Google searching for potential keywords to see if anyone's
> posted about a need

That's good. Make something people want.

#2, ideally, is get some money. Like, make your first $20 ASAP in the market.
There's been lots of "cool ideas" that don't make money. A lot of smart people
in tech gun for a Facebook-style massive victory. But for every
Facebook/Linkedin/Myspace/Youtube, there's orders of magnitude more sites than
never catch on.

Or worse! They do catch on, but then you can't get any money! I imagine
nothing hurts as much as being wildly popular and bankrupt. There are many of
these stories.

So try to get some money fast. Money does all sorts of wonderful things in
terms of letting you expand or getting some security, but most importantly, it
proves that people really, truly want you're selling. And if you are going to
be looking for funding, there's not many things that are going to be as good
for getting quality terms as being profitable. You can wait out the right deal
and you're not desperate. And one of investors' biggest fears - no market - is
alleviated. Get that first $20 ASAP. It'll teach you what you're doing wrong
and show you what to do next.

Edit: Also, don't do excessive planning on your first business, competitive
analysis, and all that such. Your assumptions are wrong, you don't have the
instincts for what people pay for yet, and competition doesn't matter when
you're small. Seriously, leave the SWOT analysis for big corporations fighting
over 3% market share and distribution in supermarkets. I've learned this
lesson the hard way. Damn near all of that planning is useless if not
validated with getting some money. Your assumptions are almost certainly
wildly incorrect when not validated with the getting of money from customers.

------
Mz
"Just curious what everyone's process for turning an idea that you just
thought of into a real opportunity. Essentially the period between idea
generation and actually executing on that idea (if there is a period of
time)."

Live my life. Solve my own problems. Go talk to people and discover that other
people have the same problem(s) and their solutions suck compared to mine.
Discover there is tremendous need (demand) and some folks are strongly
interested in what I do. Spend a lot of time helping people for free. Get
burned out on that and on being so freakin' controversial. Take about 2 years
off from that while I get myself well and also try to figure out how to
package threatening/controversial information so it's palatable -- so it's
taken as an opportunity instead of a criticism/personal attack. Work on
figuring out how to monetize it without killing it because you can't pay
someone to care about your welfare. Either they do or they don't. Realize that
the only effective way to commodify what I do is to uncouple the income stream
and the output stream -- ie not charge directly for the thing people really
want/need from me. Currently pursuing those efforts as a "hobby" and working
on monetizing it.

Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme. But that's roughly the process I have
been going through.

