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To start a billion dollar startup, start looking for problems
- jlebrech 9y agomy problem is the whole development lifecyle, there's no "code n run" anymore, when you have to continually deploy and test.
- tmat 9y agoSo build your own things and do it your own way. I find that is what works best for me. Put food on the table through contracting, build my own things around the contracts to provide recurring revenue. Keep going till it's enough. I hated everything about office culture and have never been happier. Right now for me that's about 20-30hrs per week freelance to make a great income, and I spend 20-30hrs per week working on my own projects.
- Sholmesy 9y agoSo, this is something that I would really like to do, mind answering some questions :D? When you say "freelance" are you contracting 'on location', or 'remote'? On location, I can't seem to find anything that isn't basically a 40+ hour gig, negating the benefit of 'freelancing', and remote seems to be highly competitive/lowest common denominator. I'm a decent developer (backend), in a decent tech city and I'm struggling to find a way to ditch my 9-5 in favour of doing my own thing. Any resources/advice would be appreciated.
- tmat 9y agoall remote.. i scower the web for RFP's and people looking for developers and pitch my services.
- thomk 9y agoPerfect. Now, just solve that problem, and make a billion dollars!
- dswalter 9y agoEven better than observing yourself is watching other people and trying to figure out what their problems are. If done with empathy, the side benefit is that you further develop abilities you will need if you ever have employees.
- slice_of_life 9y ago> come up with a solution which is easy to implement This might be better phrased as, "a solution that's easy to scale". I don't think the implementation part of most valuable things is remotely easy; at least from my experience.
- hammadnasir 9y agoThanks for the advice. I've edited the blogpost.
- syntaxing 9y agoWhen I took my optimization and design class in college, our professor would tell us "It's always smarter to find the market then design the product, rather than designing the product and finding a market for it".
- swah 9y ago> Want to start a billion dollar startup? > basically what you have to do Just.. cringe. The book recommendation reminds me of this joke: https://www.amazon.com/How-Made-290-Selling-Books/dp/B073DMV56J https://www.amazon.com/How-Made-290-Selling-Books/dp/B073DMV...
- sharemywin 9y agoback when there were magazines for starting businesses there would always be this full page ad talking about how to make millions from this secret report. Except the report would tell you to run ads selling reports.
- lou1306 9y agoAs an aside... For those not in the know, the "author" of said book is a member of funk group Vulfpeck, which I highly recommend listening to.
- sp332 9y agoOne of my favorites: "So You Want to be a Flying Ace!" http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=206 http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=206
- inthewoods 9y agoWhat I this misses (in it's rather click-baity title) is that most problems are not going to be companies that are worth $1b. There is a very small slice of problems that end up at $1b. Most, I would imagine, end up being one time problems that are worth very little.
- iplaw 9y agoOr that a large portion of the solutions to said problems require R & D spend in the hundreds of millions, if not billions.
- amelius 9y agoDoes scratching your own itch count as finding problems?
- grecy 9y agoSure. But if nobody else has the same itch, you won't be able to sell it.
- sharemywin 9y agoI think if you're talking figuratively, yes. Literally, no.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amelius 9y agoIf people were more open about their problems, we wouldn't need to find them in the first place.
- k__ 9y agoThat's the problem, haha :P We all got a big bunch of ideas and probably not 1% of them make any money. I mean just look at Twitter ;) The problem are finding people who... ...think I can help them, so they talk to me in the first place ...have problems I can solve ...can formulate their problem ...don't want to own the solution and sell it on their own
- numbsafari 9y agoFocus on yourself. What are your problems that you would pay someone to solve? Ask around and see if anyone agrees with you. If so, maybe you have something.
- jamaicahest 9y agoYou're not going to suddenly build a logistics system for dairy farmers, because you're not a dairy farmer and you don't know what kind of problems they have. But look at your own daily life. Your kids school might have some problems you could fix? Your daily shopping might have some annoyances you could invent a solution for? Look at your own life and stop ignoring the boring problems, while looking for the glamorous opportunities. Maybe keeping a pet has some annoying obligations that could be easier? Talk to people in your everyday life, your doctor for example and find out what annoys them in their lives, doesn't have to be at work.
- dmux 9y agoI've been working on a Realty Broker (common in Boston) idea for the past couple of months. I'd say the problem of finding people isn't that difficult really. I've built a list of 75+ companies including their contact info, website, location, etc. My next step is to go down the list and essentially cold call them. My plan is to ask what software they're currently using (if any); whether it meets all their needs -- if not, what are they looking for; etc. If anything, I hope to at least help a couple of them get a website up and running and start from there.
- danieltillett 9y agoWhat you really want to find are the 25 million dollar problems that you can turn into a monopoly. Sure you won't ever be famous, but you will have a great lifestyle that is 99% of what a billionaire has on the upside with none of the downside.
- ErikVandeWater 9y agoI like this point - going for an arbitrary number like 1 billion is ridiculous. But I'd like to add if you have a $25 million company, you probably have the resources and the smarts to grow into other related spaces. You might be worth 1 billion in 30 years assuming a 15% growth rate. Not entirely unachieveable, but you will be kind of old.
- hyperpallium 9y ago> turn into a monopoly Sure, but how do you do that? There's lots of textbook stuff (patents/copyright/trademark, consumer habit etc), but in practice, you must continuously improve it, promote it etc, to keep that "monopoly". There's no monopoly; only temporary monopoly. [But I'm interested to hear your thoughts]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- danieltillett 9y agoYou will most likely need to work on maintaining your monopoly, but having a monopoly position in a small market allows you to extract above average profits without attracting competition. This is the path to quiet success. From a lifestyle perspective it is much better to be a small fish in a small pond than a big fish in big pond filled with sharks.
- SwellJoe 9y agoThe more complex the solution, the easier it is to lock it in permanently. People don't want to learn a new complex thing. Note that this means the minimal complexity (or close to it). If you implement something that could be simple, and you make it complex, someone else will come along and make it simple and kick your ass at market. Imagine you've got a warehouse automation system (this is not an example of a $25 million dollar business, just an example of a problem that has no simple solutions) that is ten times as efficient for employees as the current pad-and-paper solution. If you arrive first and lock in that industry with the market leaders in owning warehouses, you don't have to worry about a competitor coming along five years later with a system that is eleven times more efficient than pad-and-paper and that costs 20% less than your system. It cost the company a half a million dollars to train all of their staff to use your system. It'd be crazy to migrate. So...not a monopoly, but a comfortable lock on a significant portion of the market.
- pqwEfkvjs 9y agoIt is far more easier to create problems for whatever you are trying to solve.
- Mahn 9y agoFor examples of ideas in search of a problem (rather than addressing a problem), see the vast majority of projects that have done an ICO this year.
- ljw1001 9y agoWant to start a $1 startup? Start finding problems instead of ideas. Works at any scale
- boyce 9y agoBack to the drawing board then, pg says to do things that don't
- ThomPete 9y agoThis is exactly the right strategy but finding big enough problems can be an issue. I asked this question in Hacker News two years ago. What problem in your industry is a potential startup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 It was a very interesting experience and I wrote an essay about some of my findings. https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-47ee63bb3511 https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
- slackoverflower 9y agoOr you could create a problem to solve! Uber is trying to underprice the taxi industry into bankrupt, then there will no more taxis and only Uber! Capitalism!
- jamaicahest 9y agoOr Snapchat. Did kids and teenagers have problems connecting with other kids and teenagers before Snapchat existed? I know I didn't. My parents didn't. Their parents didn't and so on. Until Snapchat showed us that we couldn't live without it, nobody had a problem connecting to each other.
- to_bpr 9y agoSnapchat's value prop has nothing to do with connecting with one another. It originally lay in its proclaimed transient nature and ability to communicate off the radar from parents/relatives which at the time had begun to "infest" other social media.
- no_wizard 9y agoI wonder if a profitable niche would be a startup that helps other startups or people looking to start a startup find Billion dollar maker segments ;-)
- emcf 9y agoIn my locality connecting to small cities, transportation is big issue. There is no reliable service. Is starting a transportation service like Uber or Lyft viable? How should I evaluate the market?
- cdiamand 9y agoAs a side project, I've begun collecting ideas and posting them at https://oppslist.com https://oppslist.com Most, if not all, are NOT billion dollar ideas though.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoThose descriptions and prices don't sound like they resemble anything close to what you should be charging people. You'd have to put an extra zero or two on most of them.
- curiouslurker 9y agowhy is this on the front page? It is devoid of content.
- hammadnasir 9y agoAnd why do you think so?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lazybreather 9y agoSnapchat, bitch!