Was the idea completely outside your domain or did you already have some knowledge in the field?
I'm desperately trying to find an idea I can work on, taking advantage of the current ease of developing MVPs.
I'm REALLY tired of working for an idea that doesn't belong to me (aka companies), but everything I create or try to do seems like there are already dozens of other solutions doing the same thing (specially in the fields of wrapping AI).
Thoughts?
The major lesson I have after +20 years doing this: WHO CARES.
This concern is valid for a huge company or anybody that wanna get like 70% of the whole market.
For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds.
They still sell.
What you has but not others is that you are small, and is the actual person other person can , FOR REAL, talk about your product.
That is the whole thing of working as a freelancer, solo, small business. You can, FOR REAL, provide personal training/consulting/support, etc.
And that works even if you just take the product made by the big corporation and just know how to use it. There is business in being the guy who knows Excel well.
Tell a prospect/customer that you'll do something, actually do it, and you'll be better than 99% of the businesses out there.
This is how you make great margins, work with people who want you to work with them, and you have no fear of the competition increasing CPC etc. Can also be more rewarding.
Once you have a decade in startups, you realize this is incredibly important. Not only that, when you do seek funding, being unique is a plus: You'll be dismissed outright or you'll be accepted. That's way more useful that being "in the ball pit" for "possible investment in our coming financial years".
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What a great analogy! I always thought of how many lawyer offices there are, from single lawyer to multiple lawyers, but I like your take on it much better.
Product's built based on brainstorming: NEVER worked.
Product built around solution to actual problems I've experienced: Always worked, BUT may not have a large enough TAM.
The best way to actually find problems to solve is to replicate something else (as a learning process to actually find the real product you need to build), or talk to people who have problems: e.g. Try an replicate a product with relatively simple core functionality all the way-end-to-end.
During that process you'll probably discover paint point that aren't addressed by any product.
Example from building: Build some GenAI based app that allows users to upload a video and have it "horrified." There may only be a small market in that, but the framework you build to do it could be productized (or subsets of the problem). A simple to use full stack solution where folks can focus on the image / video generation model prompting fine tuning, and then one-click deploy that model wrapped in a whitelabeled ios app with monetization built-in, etc. <-- sell the shovels.
Example from talking: Lot's of buddies have challenges with bringing AI based coding tools into the organization because most don't support on-prem. Is there an on-prem solution that acts like a DMZ? That is, Cursor team could securely deploy their models to containers running on on-prem hardware (with layers of physical and software security to prevent exfiltration of the model weights), while companies can load their propriety data into another container. Win-win.
It just seems like any time there is a repeatable process for doing something, people will latch onto it and then do it until it is totally exhausted. Tech Entrepreneur especially has such a low barrier to entry and so many 'How To' guides that it feels super impacted.
Makes me wish software was closer to art, where someone has something they need to make just for the sake of bringing it into existence.
Those tech guys are doing it wrong. If you want to address a particular market, the way you learn about the pain points in that area isn't to annoy the people working in it. It's to work in it yourself long enough to understand first hand.
I'm certainly not saying to avoid asking people for their expert advice, I'm saying that interviewing people is better done once you have enough baseline experience to know what questions you should be asking.
Considering that business is about compounding unfair advantages, if you have to hire people to tell you if you're going in the right direction it's going to be tough.
1: https://toyotatimes.jp/en/series/beyondmobility/004.html
2: https://global.toyota/en/mobility/frontier-research/40390293...
The unspoken thing about startups/the mom test is that now the majority of startups try to do it that way.
Well, 90% of startups still fail.
So why do the thing that 90% of the time doesn't work?
Really successful startups tend to be strongly unique and lead by a few years of personal experience with the problem. Perseverance and defiance(to the way things are/problem remaining) can't be bought though and it won't sell a book.
In other words, I gave them my damn problem but they arent interested in solving them.
So no, i aint talking to you about my problems anymore
Engineers like to build stuff. But business is about solving OTHER people's problems. It's not necessarily about building cool stuff.
Get some real world experience. Learn where the holes are. Then build a business around filling the holes.
A couple of things to consider:
- Business is more about execution than being the first to market with an idea. Marketing, customer satisfaction, pricing, reliability, ect, all come into play. Before you create, spend time looking at the "dozens of other solutions doing the same thing." You may find a weakness, unfulfilled need, niche, ect. Often times, in early markets with lots of players, the first movers have a lot of baggage that holds them back from growing.
(IE, the first movers made a lot of false starts and end up with Frankenstien products. You can "bypass" them by better understanding the market and building something with less functionality, but just enough functionality to meet most of the market's needs. This is a huge advantage because you aren't wasting time fixing a feature that only 2-3 people use, or making sure you don't break that one feature that 2 people use.)
- Look at books like "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" by Don Lancaster or "Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling.
- Read through (and watch) a lot of YC material about starting a business. Although it isn't focused on solopreneurs, a lot of the concepts are very similar.
Me: I realized that I enjoy joining a company early and turning the MVP into an industrial-strength product.
It took me far too long to learn how deep this truth runs. There's a reason for the saying "the pioneers get all the arrows". From a purely business point of view, you don't want to be first to market. The real sweet spot is to be second or third, learning from the mistakes of the first.
Also: ideas are far less important than execution [1]. That's why it's best to work on problems you actually care about. If you don't, you'll end up cutting corners or burning out well in advance of success.
[1] https://sive.rs/multiply
There are fields out there that are crying out for tech solutions because they are lumbering dinosaurs that haven't changed with the times. One example is the maritime industry. It's amazing how much is still done with pen and paper on a ship. True, there is often a reluctance to adopt new tech, but the younger cohort of mariners are far more eager and receptive to tech solutions than the previous generation.
My suggestion is to look for those industries and talk to folks in those fields about their pain points. The bar may be so low that you could step over it.
That can certainly happen. But you should at least have some domain experience or have a partner who does. Otherwise, not only will it be hard to come to the correct solution, you'll struggle to get your foot in the door to the industry.
The best idea in the world without execution: worth zero.
A very simple idea (say, a hamburguer stand) but executed well is worth a lot.
Then you have everything in between.
Like you say, even a mediocre execution on a great idea can be worth something - which is often the case of business software. You do run the risk of a competitor out-executing you, and the risk is greater the worse the execution was.
Ideas do matter, but they're also a dime a dozen. Also, a mediocre idea executed well is far better than a fantastic idea executed poorly.
You're not wrong but that should be self-evident. Most people know when they have a bad idea, they just lack the humility to admit it.
I did this a dozen times for different companies. So, I started a startup that focused on the 10% of features I had become an expert at and made it available as a self-service SaaS with a much smaller price. But then you still need to sell the damn thing, which is a drag and I don't put much effort into. I let the product grow pretty organically as users (who are SME's within departments of most companies) change their jobs and are looking for better solutions within their new employer's.
Sorry intentionally vague, not really willing to give specifics.
I think the world is full of ideas to work on. You can look into almost anything, and see that existing ways of working and systems are mostly crap. Just start working on something. Probably you will encounter other problems -- i.e. ideas -- when working on the first one.
The biggest thing is not the coding, but all the other stuff. Sales, invoicing etc. I find that tiresome.
I found an area far outside of tech that had very real problems that nobody was really solving; in fact, the existing tools that should have solved this problem turned out to be a nightmare for the intended users. I've been working on it for a few months now and gotten very positive feedback, and have a steadily-growing userbase now. It's more of a side-project right now, maybe 10 hours/week, but maybe someday it'll evolve into an actual business (:
Not willing to share specifics about the specific area I'm doing this in, but the general idea stands. It helps a lot that the problem I'm working to solve is one I personally dealt with, so I understood a lot about what the problem was and was able to effectively solve it for myself. This translated into producing something that a lot of people like and use regularly.
Even more broadly: solve your own problems, then generalise out. If you're solving a real problem that you have, that isn't incredibly specific to something about you/your life/the way you do things/..., then odds are there's probably others out there with the same problem. Every even modestly successful project I've had started with solving my own problems, then polishing the solutions for others to use.
It's amazing how many different kinds of businesses there are. I once talked to a Dutch guy who designed and manufactured machines that clean astroturf in stadiums. He was rolling in it, small company. So many industries like this you have no idea existed.
I also tend to get lots of gotchas while walking, I use the Voice Memo in the phone to just talk to and I write it down when I'm home and in front of the computer.
I also have lots of pen-paper notebooks that I write like crazy all the time. I'm beginning to take a lot care about my "CommonPlace Notebooks" now. Earlier, I use notebooks as a temporary idea-holding medium.