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Not having the time/money to travel to meet customers in person and gauge their interest in ideas or products seems to be a lot bigger limiting factor in succes

Not having the time/money to travel to meet customers in person and gauge their interest in ideas or products seems to be a lot bigger limiting factor in successful startup formation than not knowing how to code or other technical skillsets (such as design). There's been a lot of criticism of the tech startup industry for focusing on problems only young people in SF/NYC have, or that only engineers have, but actually going deep in an area we're not already familiar with seems logistically and financially impractical for most people.

nostrademons 11y ago
The usual solution to that is to go deep into an area that you are familiar with. If you live in Minneapolis and work for a Fortune 500 headquarters, solve problems that big companies have. If you're in Nebraska and work on a farm, solve problems for agribusiness. Or in either case, solve problems for the customers of these companies. The tech skills to build a prototype can be learned on the Internet; for market knowledge, work with what you've got. It was a huge pain and expense for us to have to fly to New England to launch & get real user feedback. (Our target users were students at liberal arts colleges, because we believed they needed the product more than CS majors at top Bay Area universities. Even so, we did some user-testing at Berkeley and Stanford, but discounted the results because "they weren't our target market".) It was less expensive than continuing to work on the product for another month would've been. There is a reason why Facebook started at Harvard, SnapChat is in LA, and the AirBnB founders were shuttling to NYC every week during YC. They didn't have to stay there, but they made a big effort to be close to their early customers. Now imagine what someone who was a native of that area could accomplish if they went after local customers with the same energy.

nostrademons 11y ago

The usual solution to that is to go deep into an area that you are familiar with. If you live in Minneapolis and work for a Fortune 500 headquarters, solve problems that big companies have. If you're in Nebraska and work on a farm, solve problems for agribusiness. Or in either case, solve problems for the customers of these companies. The tech skills to build a prototype can be learned on the Internet; for market knowledge, work with what you've got. It was a huge pain and expense for us to have to fly to New England to launch & get real user feedback. (Our target users were students at liberal arts colleges, because we believed they needed the product more than CS majors at top Bay Area universities. Even so, we did some user-testing at Berkeley and Stanford, but discounted the results because "they weren't our target market".) It was less expensive than continuing to work on the product for another month would've been. There is a reason why Facebook started at Harvard, SnapChat is in LA, and the AirBnB founders were shuttling to NYC every week during YC. They didn't have to stay there, but they made a big effort to be close to their early customers. Now imagine what someone who was a native of that area could accomplish if they went after local customers with the same energy.