

Ask HN: How to choose a startup opportunity - shareme

Hello everyone,<p>In a few months I expect to have secured some free time and some seed capital to try out some small
scale startup ideas.<p>In my own process, I first compose a list of probable ideas without judgement and usually that can be anywhere from 5 to 20 pages.<p>The 2nd part of the process I start a judgement process where I measure up resources of seed capital and development time for each idea and
weed out the ones that do not match.<p>The problem in my set of processes is that I have not figured out whether at this point measuring
of whether there is fast development of market or not should have a role in the decision making process of what opportunities I want to try.<p>Thus, I was wondering what HN readers and community members are using as far as their process?<p>Let me give you an example, in the mobile area there are still a lot of small scale SAAS plays to
both mobile developers and their clients. With the low cost of cloud services from amazon and or Google(appEngine has a 1 million hits per month  before they charge)one could certainly build out a
SAAS startup play and see if one can get enough
traction to get a full funding round. FB/Twitter/GoogleBuzz context, etc.<p>Yeah, someone already did my social enabled by NCF idea..but I have another list of ideas :)<p>Thanks for taking the time to respond.
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baremetal
I think it's best if you do go after ideas related to things you are
passionate about, as amac suggested. IMO startups and businesses in general
are largely about vision, especially in the early stages. It's hard to have
vision for something you aren't passionate about or don't know well. Vision
isn't something that can be harnessed with an x step business process either.

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amac
I'm in a similar position though I think I've improved my focus vastly
compared to previous projects. Please feel free to email me if you want to
discuss in private.

In terms of advice, probably the best thing to do is to pursue what you care
about, and not to let others define who you are or what you do.

