

Can you say this about your startup? - rokhayakebe

We are building a " 1/ simple solution(s) 2/ to overlooked problem(s) 3/ that actually need to be solved, and 4/ deliver (it) them as informally as possible, 5/ starting with a very crude version 1, then 6/ iterating rapidly."<p>If you cannot, "maybe" you should revisit the idea, the implementation or the problem.<p>EDIT: This quote is PG. To better understand it you may want to read http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html
======
ken
Surprisingly (to me), that sounds like a good description of what I'm working
on. It's more of a scratch-an-itch, and has no funding (or chance of it in the
near future) and no customers. I'm not even thinking of it as "a startup".

I'm doing it now because I'm out of a job, and don't feel like finding another
right away. This has been bouncing around my head for months, and I finally
have a chance to implement it.

I must have forgotten pg://newthings, because I've read it but I apparently
hadn't internalized it.

------
gabrielleydon
Is this some sort of mantra or are you thinking out loud?

:)

------
dbrush
Google would've been doomed...

~~~
ksvs
Sounds to me exactly like Google was.

~~~
lacker
Even the first Google search algorithm was hardly a "simple solution"....

~~~
kwamenum86
Well I don't think the search algorithm is the simple part of Google.

One example of a simple solution PG used was Viaweb. Viaweb's source code is
analogous to Google's search algorithm in that case. I think in the context of
that article the user-facing part of Viaweb (and Google) is the simple part.

"Software, to them, equalled big, honking Windows apps. Since Viaweb was the
first web-based app they'd seen, it seemed to be nothing more than a website."
[From Six Principles For Making New Things by pg]

------
antigravity
no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes

------
mixmax
yes

------
ram1024
1\. no, it's hella complicated, but we're good enough to get it done

2\. no, this problem has been discussed at length, no one has come up with the
right idea yet. (which we have, of course)

3\. yes, i mean it's not world threatening, but it will magnificently enhance
shareholder value... :D

4\. no, i think as a social site you have to either give people what they
expect, or give them what they don't expect but will definately like

5\. yes, we're going to roll into beta ASAP because it's a competitive market
and we need to stake our claim

6\. yes, we plan to grow our company and the community hand-in-hand and push
new features as we grow and acquire the right team to accomplish what we
intend as the encompasing design of our product (which may change according to
user reception, of course. incremental build allows us to gauge user feedback
and adapt accordingly).

the startup we're forming is a social networking webapp/site (challenging the
myspaces and facebooks).

