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On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound en

On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing. And I often think there are too many people going around spouting wisdom for example about how you _must_ let customers and market demand drive your product design before writing a line of code. It's actually not true. There's plenty of good businesses which are built upon a fairly deep technical idea, which must have required a lot of development work in isolation before it saw the light of day. ...but I agree it's also a trap leading the death of many unknown unicorns.

cookiecaper 10y ago
>On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing. These people are usually imposters who are asking for things that are totally unrealistic or generating interest for a concept that doesn't make any sense from a technical perspective. They have an idea and assume it can be done. It's sort of like saying "Let's build a perpetual motion machine." Everyone is really interested in it, because it's a total fantasy. If the idea is practical, it's usually not hard to find someone who will implement it. As a technical person, you know the limits. That means that when you go out and sell people or kick up interest, it will be for something that's at least plausible. The frank truth is that software and technical work is relatively cheap. It cannot be the basis of your business because someone can come in and clone your product after you've done the hard work of introducing an innovative product and establishing/educating the market (I know because this happened to my business). It doesn't matter if the clone is way worse than your product, because people are only looking at the very high level. If the clone can provide the basic functionality 20% of the time as opposed to your 99% of the time, if combined with substantive marketing, that's more than enough to win. Anyone who has done any amount of product research knows that the good products are almost never the most common ones. Your brand, reputation, and intellectual property are 100x more valuable than any software or technical feat. Consider that Google and Facebook could lock 4 engineers in a closet for a year and come out with almost any software they wanted for around $1 million. Ask yourself why, then, they pay $1B+ for companies like Whatsapp and Instagram. It's certainly not because it's too complex to figure out photo sharing or text messaging. They want the brand and the users that come with it, and it's that simple. The one thing that is most expensive in business is user attention and loyalty. There are many apps that dominated app stores and were probably hopeful that they would be bought by Google/Apple and achieve fame and fortune, only to find that in the next iteration of the OS, they had been "NetScaped"; their core functionality baked into the OS either as an extension of an existing app (many souped-up camera and photo effects apps) or as a new bundled app (e.g., Keep). The most important thing for tech entrepreneurs to understand is that while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business. The main value will always be the brand and the users that come with it (and, as intimated above, beware of platform vendors, because they will always have the option to divert most of your user base to a first-party clone). Technology is comparatively cheap.
- fragmede 10y ago
  > while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business. Going out on a limb here, but I've been searching for a way to define this for a while, but... maybe those aren't tech companies? I'm talking about companies like Snapchat or Uber or AirBnB which, while they do exist as smarphone apps and lean heavily on the Internet, which unarguably involves a lot of technology, but they're brands, and not tech companies. Nothing wrong with that, but there are "tech" companies where the tech is the value... there are just a lot of non-tech "tech" companies, a majority of them B2C. Companies that are doing things that humanity previously hadn't done are tech companies. Intel, as an early semiconductor company is, at least originally, a tech company. SpaceX's technology is the company. Regardless of who ends up winning, self-driving cars are going derive a lot of value from their technology in the form of patents.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Intel and SpaceX are less vulnerable to competition because it takes hundreds of billions of dollars to compete with them (nonetheless, they do have competitors). This is not the case with anything that's in bootstrap or even VC territory. In principle, the same concept applies, it's just that it's too expensive for new entrants to come in to those industries, so they mostly don't have to worry about it. It should also be noted that businesses in other industries often attempt to install similar barriers to entry for themselves; suppressing competition is a huge part of remaining the big dog. I hate to say it, but "tech companies" are "patent companies". If you have a patent on the technology and someone decides that it's not worthwhile to try to work around it, they'll license the patent, or maybe even buy your company if your patent portfolio is strong enough. In terms of an unpatented innovation by itself or actual software, it's not worth much on its own.
  - crwalker 10y ago
    SpaceX's technology is not building a >$10B launch backlog and pulling in over $1B in funding. The SpaceX brand and culture are bringing in the right people to build the technology and the right customers to buy it: this path towards success, by definition, started before the technology was complete.
segmondy 10y ago
Having a name, logo, pitch, passionate doesn't equate having customers. Having customers means you know who you are going to sell to, you have gotten commitment in terms of cash or signed contracts that they are going to going to buy your product if you build it.
xemdetia 10y ago
My favourite was a slide deck pitched to me where they had 9 people on their 'team slide' with not one of them being a technical person. They were trying to build a phone/fax social database to compete with facebook. It still hasn't shipped and that was 5 years ago.

cookiecaper 10y ago

>On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing. These people are usually imposters who are asking for things that are totally unrealistic or generating interest for a concept that doesn't make any sense from a technical perspective. They have an idea and assume it can be done. It's sort of like saying "Let's build a perpetual motion machine." Everyone is really interested in it, because it's a total fantasy. If the idea is practical, it's usually not hard to find someone who will implement it. As a technical person, you know the limits. That means that when you go out and sell people or kick up interest, it will be for something that's at least plausible. The frank truth is that software and technical work is relatively cheap. It cannot be the basis of your business because someone can come in and clone your product after you've done the hard work of introducing an innovative product and establishing/educating the market (I know because this happened to my business). It doesn't matter if the clone is way worse than your product, because people are only looking at the very high level. If the clone can provide the basic functionality 20% of the time as opposed to your 99% of the time, if combined with substantive marketing, that's more than enough to win. Anyone who has done any amount of product research knows that the good products are almost never the most common ones. Your brand, reputation, and intellectual property are 100x more valuable than any software or technical feat. Consider that Google and Facebook could lock 4 engineers in a closet for a year and come out with almost any software they wanted for around $1 million. Ask yourself why, then, they pay $1B+ for companies like Whatsapp and Instagram. It's certainly not because it's too complex to figure out photo sharing or text messaging. They want the brand and the users that come with it, and it's that simple. The one thing that is most expensive in business is user attention and loyalty. There are many apps that dominated app stores and were probably hopeful that they would be bought by Google/Apple and achieve fame and fortune, only to find that in the next iteration of the OS, they had been "NetScaped"; their core functionality baked into the OS either as an extension of an existing app (many souped-up camera and photo effects apps) or as a new bundled app (e.g., Keep). The most important thing for tech entrepreneurs to understand is that while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business. The main value will always be the brand and the users that come with it (and, as intimated above, beware of platform vendors, because they will always have the option to divert most of your user base to a first-party clone). Technology is comparatively cheap.

fragmede 10y ago
> while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business. Going out on a limb here, but I've been searching for a way to define this for a while, but... maybe those aren't tech companies? I'm talking about companies like Snapchat or Uber or AirBnB which, while they do exist as smarphone apps and lean heavily on the Internet, which unarguably involves a lot of technology, but they're brands, and not tech companies. Nothing wrong with that, but there are "tech" companies where the tech is the value... there are just a lot of non-tech "tech" companies, a majority of them B2C. Companies that are doing things that humanity previously hadn't done are tech companies. Intel, as an early semiconductor company is, at least originally, a tech company. SpaceX's technology is the company. Regardless of who ends up winning, self-driving cars are going derive a lot of value from their technology in the form of patents.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Intel and SpaceX are less vulnerable to competition because it takes hundreds of billions of dollars to compete with them (nonetheless, they do have competitors). This is not the case with anything that's in bootstrap or even VC territory. In principle, the same concept applies, it's just that it's too expensive for new entrants to come in to those industries, so they mostly don't have to worry about it. It should also be noted that businesses in other industries often attempt to install similar barriers to entry for themselves; suppressing competition is a huge part of remaining the big dog. I hate to say it, but "tech companies" are "patent companies". If you have a patent on the technology and someone decides that it's not worthwhile to try to work around it, they'll license the patent, or maybe even buy your company if your patent portfolio is strong enough. In terms of an unpatented innovation by itself or actual software, it's not worth much on its own.
- crwalker 10y ago
  SpaceX's technology is not building a >$10B launch backlog and pulling in over $1B in funding. The SpaceX brand and culture are bringing in the right people to build the technology and the right customers to buy it: this path towards success, by definition, started before the technology was complete.

segmondy 10y ago

Having a name, logo, pitch, passionate doesn't equate having customers. Having customers means you know who you are going to sell to, you have gotten commitment in terms of cash or signed contracts that they are going to going to buy your product if you build it.

xemdetia 10y ago

My favourite was a slide deck pitched to me where they had 9 people on their 'team slide' with not one of them being a technical person. They were trying to build a phone/fax social database to compete with facebook. It still hasn't shipped and that was 5 years ago.