
Peer reviewed startups - apollo
In academia, when you submit your paper to a journal, it usually goes through peer review.<p>It would be cool to have a site where you submit a business plan (along with web prototype, if it's a web business) and the plan is given to 3 random people from a pool of entrepreneurs, who write a formal review of your business (and perhaps sign a digital nda).<p>Maybe Ycombinator can sponsor something like this.
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biohacker42
In academia the paper is the product. In startups the idea for the startup is
not the product, but the execution is. And how _good_ the execution is, well
that's determined by how successful the startup is. Life is the ultimate peer
review.

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pg
If you already have a version 1, why not just submit it to the market for
judgement? That's who ultimately judges it anyway.

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raghus
Unless you are doing something truly unusual or something that requires a lot
of investment in time and capital, you should just tell as many people as you
know about it and see what happens and reiterate based on feedback.

Consider some YC companies that are still fine-tuning their product. They've
been reviewed by the likes of pg and co and had the benefit of their advice
for 3 months as well as the benefit of experience from the large pool of YC
alumni. But even they need to fine tune based on what the larger market
thinks.

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keefe
This seems incredibly dangerous, a bunch of smart, tech-savvy people are
exactly the last people I want seeing my site.

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pchristensen
I disagree. I assume you're afraid they're going to steal you're idea? The
only way that would matter is if they care about it enough to do as good a job
as you're going to do. I could hear a thousand ideas and probably none of them
would be so compelling that I would drop my own projects to work on it.

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keefe
The issue is more along the lines of other startups attacking the same problem
with more funding, particularly those still in stealth mode.

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sh1mmer
I think this could be really valuable, although I wouldn't really restrict it
to 3 random people.

Flickr for example, have groups that require you to comment on the previous 2
photos to post in that group. That doesn't mean all photos in the group have
only 2 comments, many have much more because it creates a culture of critique.

As much there has been talk about "Not going dark" for programmers I think
this is equally true of businesses. If you believe in what you do enough to
tell other people about it then they can help keep you going in the right
direction. If you stay in stealth mode forever you could be digging your own
grave without knowing it.

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comatose_kid
I thought that posting here for feedback on your startup already accomplished
this?

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apollo
Yes, that is probably the best alternative. However, the main problems are

1) rigor; comments have a tendency to be whatever pops into a person's head
rather than a rigorous assessment of a business model. I think rigorous
feedback would provide an opinion on each component of a successful business.

2) reputation; I know people here are very smart, but if you have a selected
pool of entrepreneurs you can guarantee a certain level of reputation for your
feedback. On ycombinator, you can still get a scathing review from a 17 year
old startup wannabe and then sit there wondering whether they really know what
they're talking about.

3) non-disclosure; when you post on ycombinator, your business plan reaches a
public audience and gets indexed on google. With a random selection of 3
reviewers from a selected pool of advisors, this narrows the audience down,
and furthermore you can get NDAs from them. Also, if your business magically
appears the next day, you have some legal recourse if it's one of the
reviewer's best friends.

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SingAlong
You talked about getting indexed in Google. Actually, it was possible a few
days back to post it on the web and not get indexed by Google or any other
search engine. The solution was to make an embedded flash slide show on the
webpage and post the link here, but now since they are going to start indexing
flash files too, the idea loses hand-down. :)

But surely there must be some sort of solution to post it on the web and not
get indexed. Google will surely not index flash videos. Or why create a locked
page and then specify the password here. Google then cannot index your file :)

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sfg
I think people choosing to invest or not invest in you is probably the best
form of peer review in business. The fact they are committing their own money
forces honesty and helps to ensure that the quality of insight is high (mainly
as bad investors will,eventually, stop investing, while good ones will invest
more).

I hope I am wrong and what your looking for can be developed. It really would
be an excellent service.

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chrisv
On a similar note:

<http://vertonghen.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/i-have-an-idea/>

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anateus
So... you're suggesting what's currently called Closed Alpha.

I guess the innovation here is creating a randomized pool of alpha-testers.

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jmtame
if it were a prototype or demo, it would be even better. i'm trying to figure
this out right now.. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243760>

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babul
Startups often start in "stealth mode" for a reason.

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apollo
Well startups that start in stealth mode might want to get feedback. They can
post their business plan in public, go to VCs, ask whatever contacts they have
in person. The problems are posting in public defeats the purpose of stealth
mode, going to VCs doesn't make sense if you're not ready or are bootstrapped,
and you may not have many contacts with sufficient experience in
entrepreneurship.

