

Ask HN: Where did your startup come from? - ambition

Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161522, I think lots of people would love to hear more about startups' early stories. How did you decide what to work on? How confident were you in the opportunity? What else was interesting about your very early days?
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patio11
Long version: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre-new/>

Short version: Somebody asked me how to create bingo cards for class. I said
"I'm sure there is a program that will do that for you if you Google for it."
She said: "I Googled, nothing works." That was my first indication there might
be a market for this. My second, which convinced me, was that when I made
something to tide her over (hacked together in 4 hours and possibly the worst
software in my life I ever inflicted on other people), I got fifteen thank you
letters and fifteen "I really want to use this but I can't because it is
broken!" letters from a mailing list with 60 people on it. That was my first,
very unplanned, exposure to the Minimum Viable Product.

I estimated the world market for my product at 2,000 teachers and thought,
with a bit of work, I might eventually sell as much as $200 a month. Turns out
I suck at math.

I don't know what you consider interesting about the early days of the
startup. Let's see. At the time I was starting I was on a severe frugality
kick and had a rigid budget every month, the better for retiring my student
loans early. My budget had $60 a month allocated for video games. So I skipped
the game and gave the business a $60 lease on life: it had to pay its own way
after that. It has.

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pedalpete
When Pandora blocked access to Canadians, I built a streaming music service
ala seeqpod, which did auto playlisting like pandora.

The music analysis stuff was really time consuming and expensive and of course
wasn't nearly as good as Pandora, so I canned it, but had this left over code
that crawled the web looking for music.

I did a few quick changes to the code so that it grabbed concerts instead of
music, and voila, <http://HearWhere.com>

