
How to tell your friend that their startup idea sucks - peteforde
http://hackertourism.com/how-to-tell-your-friend-that-their-startup-idea-sucks
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takinola
The presumption here is that you can correctly identify a startup idea that
sucks. Here's a quick experiment you can do right now to see if that is true.
Try to think of at least one startup that you cannot understand why it is
getting traction, press, funding etc. I'm willing to bet you can think of
several (I can even think of a couple companies that have actually gone IPO
that I still think are dumb ideas).

The fact that you think an idea is dumb is irrelevant. The only opinion that
matters are those of the customers. Instead of telling your friend that their
idea sucks, ask them what their (potential) customers think of the idea. If
she doesn't know, and you really feel like being helpful, push her to get
meaningful feedback from a couple customers.

Having a real life customer tell a would-be founder that their idea sucks is
so much more impactful than the same feedback from a random friend. Plus,
there is the added benefit of saving your relationship.

~~~
k__
Getting funded doesn't mean the idea is good.

I worked for a company, that got funded many times over the course of 14 years
and didn't make any revenue the whole time.

The only thing the founders were really good at, was talking to VCs and
banks...

~~~
carrotleads
and I am jealous of such guys. How do they do it?

surely the VC's and Banks lose their deposit on such deals, so much so they
should be expert at picking out the talkers from the doers.

~~~
k__
They had big customers and their technology was web-analytics. 14 years ago,
when Google grew, they had some good point to make.

"Google did it AND we got the biggest websites of our country as customer!"

But all the engineers where much more expensive than what the customers paid.

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spodek
When does expressing judgment help?

If asked, I give constructive criticism, which they can act on or not at their
option.

If I believe something in their idea may lead to problems, I tell them about
the consequences I see. If they disagree, that's fine. I've been wrong before.
Judging or evaluating isn't necessary or helpful.

Sticking with constructive criticism and describing consequences one sees
helps in many areas beyond start-up ideas.

~~~
gedrap
I think it (assumption that friends are afraid) doesn't really apply to the
majority of HN audience. We give and read criticism (constructive or not)
every day here, it's the second nature for us.

However, we are a small group of people. The OP's post strongly applies to a
more casual audience, who won't read this post.

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twodayslate
Apparently I'm an asshole because I have no problems telling my friends their
startup ideas suck.

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ilaksh
Thing you have to realize is that you aren't judging his startup rationally.
Nobody judges anything rationally on its logical merits because humans just
don't operate that way. Humans make judgments on an emotional basis and then
afterward their brain automatically comes up with reasons they had that
emotional reaction. So the first thing to recognize is that your opinion of
your friend's startup is mainly based on the way he presents it and other
emotional factors. Most people will never believe any of this is true since
they think human decision-making is primarily rational. It isn't.

Anyway if you have that judgement try to identify the generally non-rational
reason you felt that way and tell him. Then you can go through the things like
market size, team etc. and talk about them on a rational basis, but with the
understanding that investors make decisions on an emotional level also.
Probably that reinforces market size being #1 in their evaluation, since a
large market means more money.

------
xux
Don't tell them. Most likely, you're not qualified and your opinion doesn't
matter.

~~~
boobsbr
Yup. I would've told the Twitter guys their idea was useless, but hey, turns
out people really liked it.

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pbiggar
I've told lots of people their startup ideas sucks. For a time, lots of people
asked me for my opinions and advice on their startup ideas, from a context of
"I want to raise seed funding, how do I do it".

Here's a few phrases that let people know their startup idea sucks without
being judgey on them:

\- How did you validate that there was a market for this? \- How many
businesses have committed to pay for this? \- This sounds like a 2-sided
marketplace, how are you going to solve the chicken-and-egg problem? \- Sounds
cool, but consumer is really hard. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to build a
nice B2B startup instead?

The last one is interesting. Lots of people have ideas that are "like facebook
but different". Many companies like that have succeeded (instragram, whatsapp,
twitter, secret). But those companies are very very hard to build, and
thousands of startups like that fail. So its not so much that their idea sucks
- as it might be really cool - just more that they might prefer to build a
different startup in a different space, especially if its their first startup.
Nothing says early validation like 50 people who give you their credit cards -
not easy in B2C.

~~~
greggman
> instragram, whatsapp, twitter, secret But those companies are very very hard
> to build,

I thought part of what made those companies interesting was how easy they were
to build. I'm not saying their success was easy but they weren't hard to
create were they?

Twitter was created in 3 months. Instagram was created by 2 people. Not sure
about Whatsapp or Secret but neither seem much harder. Of course scaling might
have been a ton of work but that came after success.

~~~
pbiggar
It's the product prototype that's easy to build. The company itself is very
hard to build (gaining traction is probably the hardest part, and you won't
last long without it).

------
wpietri
My simple answer to this: don't.

I have a number of friends who are reflexively critical. Great people
generally, and I'm glad to have them as friends. But I've just stopped telling
them about new things I might be working on. If you're doing a startup, extra
discouragement is rarely something you need.

If a startup sounds dumb, that's probably because you're not an early adopter
in the target market. As an example, the first personal computers were
absolutely terrible for most people unless a) they were hugely in love with
technology, or b) had a very specific business purpose that the tech could
actually solve. A lot of people surely looked at early home computers and
thought they were dumb businesses. In retrospect, we can tell which the dumb
ones were, but at the time it sure wasn't obvious.

If you want to help a friend whose startup idea is suspicious to you, don't
critique the idea; encourage them to prove the idea with their target
audience. Prod them them to interview 10 potential customers and see how many
have the hypothesized problem. Help them to do a concierge version [1] of the
product and see how much money they can collect. Assist them in doing a
landing page test.

But please don't critique the _idea_ unless you have deep expertise in the
domain or are actually an early adopter in the target market. Feel free to
critique things within your professional skills, of course; if you're a visual
designer, it's ok to tell them their logo could use some work.

[1] [http://scottlthompson.com/lean-lesson-flashback-the-
concierg...](http://scottlthompson.com/lean-lesson-flashback-the-concierge-
mvp/)

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rjf1990
Sure, there are a lot of companies that initially sounded like bad ideas. But
there are ideas that aren't just bad; they aren't thought through.

I hear dozens of people tell me about an idea and it's apparent that there's
no chance they will succeed with this. A lot of time they're trying to enter a
market they know nothing about (as this article described), for example
finance students trying to do a clean-tech startup. Other times, it's the
market opportunity. These ideas that suck so badly are just people who haven't
been around startups to realize how to think about them. They're the kind of
people who I wonder if they've ever read The Lean Startup, PG's blog, or any
of the commonly-accepted startup wisdom.

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NicoJuicy
A friend of mine told me his startup idea once (he wasn't pursueing it then,
but he thought about it a long time and had created a small prototype in
paper).

I was just honest and came up with arguments why his niche market wouldn't pay
for his product (he thought the governement would pay for his product). If he
was truelly sure about his startup, i wouldn't be able to convince him.
Neither would anyone be able to convince me :-)

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xarien
I thought and still think the idea behind AirBnB sucks. What the hell do I
know? Ideas that seem to suck are often the ones that knock it out of the
park.

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weixiyen
If you tell 100 friends their startup idea sucks you'll be right 99 times, but
remembered for the one time you were wrong :P

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100k
I just added "Difficult Conversations" to my to-read list. Thanks for the
recommendation.

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Lambdanaut
I always give my advice for nearly anything in question form. It lets the
person figure it out for themselves. I try to put in as little judgment as
possible, so that they aren't in a "defensive" mode but more in a
"contemplative" mode.

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jarjoura
I agree with the OP that double sided businesses are extremely high bars for a
lot of founders to tackle. Yet, I think it's silly to tell someone their idea
is dumb.

Would GitHub have sounded like a great idea at the beginning? Or Twitter, or
even Facebook for that matter?

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codingdave
Nobody wants advice that starts off by making them feel like a fool.

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carrotleads
Many times you ask for blunt feedback, you rarely get it from friends. Its
like they are loathe to hurt your feelings.

Not sure if its same for all startups or the ones which may not be exactly
dumb.

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Nursie
Most startup ideas sorta suck. Doesn't mean they won't be lucrative.

