31 ms·

How to Decide What to Build

630 points by danicgross 9y ago

refrigerator 9y ago
> Focus on the repeat offenders. The ideas that you keep coming back to. I totally buy this. Linked to it, I think the it's good to be able to entertain obviously bad ideas for a short while. You think of an idea because of some set of underlying prompts, so even if the idea as a whole doesn't have legs, there are often insights lurking somewhere in it that you'll end up coming back to.
- drcode 9y ago
  I'm worried though this statement is heavily colored by "survivorship bias"- Certainly ultra-successful people are often obsessed with their ideas, but it does not logically follow that being obsessed with an idea is a good metric to base decisions on. Just look at all the people obsessed with writing the great American novel and/or next hit song. I think what is more important is to focus on ideas for which you have a comparative advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage) which frequently, but certainly not always, will mean there's a certain amount of obsession as a side-effect.
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    perhaps it's not the obsession of the idea that counts but rather the obsession with the Problem you want to solve.
CryoLogic 9y ago
I like the idea of just decide on something to build and than build it. Worst case scenario you get a learning experience. And I like building things I enjoy or products I really wish I had. So I get benefit in that way. With software inputs outside of labor are low, so you won't lose out financially in most cases.
- goatherders 9y ago
  That is FAR from the worst case scenario.
  - edgartaor 9y ago
    In your opinion, what would be the worse case scenario?
    - goatherders 9y ago
      Just because you learn something doesn't mean the time isnt wasted. If you try to make a business of it and it doesn't work...more wasted time. Wasted relationships. Wasted money. Wasted confidence. I'm all for the silver lining of having learned something. That's good for sure. But there are almost always costs when building anything from model cars to software applications.
      - jcadam 9y ago
        > Wasted confidence. This is probably the biggest factor (money is the least). I've had numerous failed projects. I have a current project/business (it's in my profile) which I believe to be in the process of failing. I don't know if I have another one in me. Sure, I've learned a lot. From a purely technical standpoint, each new project has been superior to the one before - and in the case of my latest, I've at least produced something that I find useful. But, the ego can only take so much abuse. Not sure I trust myself with ideas anymore. I need someone to tell me what to build :)
        goatherders 9y ago
        After my first startup went down in a burst of flames I spent years angry at everyone and everything like a big black tumor carried inside my heart. It sounds dramatic but that doesn't make it untrue. I learned a lot but I lost a lot more.
        9y ago
ccostes 9y ago
I like the advice to actively record your ideas (every little one). Thinking about things in abstract, it can seem like all the good problems are solved, but listed out on paper it is a lot easier to analyze and notice patterns.
tudelo 9y ago
“everything in the world was created by people no smarter than you”. Is there actually any validity to that? Assuming you is a human of average intelligence...
- guntars 9y ago
  It’s certainly false though the sentiment might still be valid, basically that the lack of smarts isn’t something that’s holding up more inventions from coming into this world.
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    Yes, this is the case. Smartness is not the limiting factor. The biggest limiting factor is number of opportunities.
    - lhuser123 9y ago
      > The biggest limiting factor is number of opportunities. Could you elaborate. Do you mean more opportunities to fail and learn ?
    - tudelo 9y ago
      Someone who is more intelligent will create more opportunities for themselves. Seems to be pretty linked.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- oceanman888 9y ago
  I think what he meant is that if you look into the process of how products and system are designed, you will likely find out most of them quite comprehensible, and more than often made by a group of men/women that are not necessarily passionate about it. Hence with great passion and even average intelligence, there is no reason we can not achieve a far better product than the current one.
- 9y ago
evancharles 9y ago
Customers are also a great source of project ideas. You can pick a customer, like "small business owner" or "wealth advisor," and interview them. My favorite question that leads to ideas is "tell me everything you did from when you started your day until now," and dig into all the annoying/painful things they mention.
- danicgross 9y ago
  Yes! In many ways, all your initial idea needs to be is a launch pad. Once you get your foot in the door, you can always refine based on what users tell you. Per your point, it's important to learn from their workflow, not ask them what they want. When you ask someone what they want, they often perform attribute substitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution) and answer a different question.
  - got2surf 9y ago
    Great point. Also important that your customers may not even know what is possible, so they won't know to ask for it directly. Instead, if we ask why they want something, we can understand their intents - and translate that into technology. We've seen this a lot with text analytics - instead of trying to repeat what humans do manually (reading/annotating), we try to understand the questions that clients are interested in (the drivers behind their current workflow).
- jeff_marshall 9y ago
  This kind of question is a gold mine, IME. When I interview network protocol devs, my favorite question is: "tell me what happens between the time you type something into the address bar and when you see a result". so many opportunities to show understanding at various levels there.
  - jeff_marshall 9y ago
    The reaction here is interesting, but it won't change my opinion without concrete feedback. Please tell me why this opinion is wrong.
acconrad 9y ago
One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of startup ideas. To the point where I'm just consulting at the moment because I can't think of any startup idea to work on. I mean I have ideas of problems I want to solve - but they've all been met by massive resistance because they're huge problems. Like for instance one idea I had was I hate making food, but I don't want to eat out all of the time. Can you crowdsource cooking from your neighbors? So I tried building that platform. I instantly discovered there were huge safety regulations about cooking, and that really baking (or anything that isn't extremely perishable) is the only thing you can pretty much do out of your home and not get slapped by the state for violating health codes. So I'm just sort of defeated...the only problems I want to tackle just seem massive and I can't seem to find the divide-and-conquer algorithm to help the world in a smaller (but still meaningful) way.
- baxtr 9y ago
  I agree with your observation. It is difficult to find problems worth solving. I thought and read about this a lot. And I think solving problems is just one way, one flavor of deciding which thing to build. I’d say this is the Silicon Valley school of thought, very much influenced by VCs. There is a another way, which I have picked up from Seth Godin: Tell the right story. People don’t always know why they buy things. Why do I need a smart watch? Why do I need fancy shoes? They don’t solve a real problem. But, they make me feel good. Because I can tell a story to myself. A think this blend of deciding what to do is more art than rational, that’s what it’s maybe not that popular. But if you start to look around, you will notice the story of stuff people buy.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    a.k.a the Apple school of thought.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
keithnz 9y ago
I've always had lots of ideas, just none I've wanted to follow through on, now I'm in the early stages of an idea I think will be useful ( at least it will be for me ). It's an idea that was simplified out of another idea that's just too large for me to tackle at the moment. In fact it's an idea that's been part of a variety of other ideas. It's also part of a number of other peoples products, and is probably one of the trickier bits of their products, but it's not a product in itself. So, at the moment, my market size is at least 1, because I want it. Odd thing is, given I have free range on everything, I'm suffering tech choice anxiety, which is slowing me down a bit.
- andai 9y ago
  Use C#.
  - keithnz 9y ago
    I am using C# on both .net core and framework for the bulk of it.
    - suprfnk 9y ago
      Are you running into problems because of it? Or what's causing the anxiety?
  - baddash 9y ago
    How could you make such a confident and strong recommendation given the vague nature of keithnz's comment?
    - andai 9y ago
      I originally wrote, "flip a coin", but then decided to go the extra mile.
      - baddash 9y ago
        So the way you were able to make a confident and strong recommendation, despite his vague comment, is by deciding to put in effort into a proper recommendation? Well, isn't it obvious that you must have put in effort to deal with the vagueness of his comment? I already knew that. I wanted to know specifically what you did, the moves you made, in order to deal with the vagueness effectively in order to produce your strong recommendation.
baddash 9y ago
I don't believe it's true that "you are whatever you tell yourself you are". Obviously you don't change if you tell yourself you're this or that because it takes more than that to change yourself. And also, this sounds like something you'd read in The Secret: all it takes to make something happen is to believe in it or think of it. However, this is most likely not what Daniel really meant. In the same paragraph, he refers to a person who literally doesn't believe that they have the idea-generating ability. So then, what he really meant is related to someone's belief in their possession of ability to do something or make something happen. In other words, their belief in their power. So, a better articulation would be: your belief in your power affects your power. Which makes sense; if you don't actually believe you have power, you won't try to use it, and you'll have effectively crippled your power. This comment might seem trivial at this point, but I think the principle behind it is important. Namely, the principle of precise and accurate articulation of thought. The new articulation I presented is accurate, empowering, and useful. A person can directly use it and it will have a positive effect. The old articulation is confusing, inaccurate, and untrue, which I don't intend to say as an insult or an attack, but rather intend to say as an accurate description of how I understand it. Now, you might think, "I understood what it meant given the context, and so did you, so what is the point of accurately articulating it?" I believe it is true that I understood it given context because I believe that's how I came to form the new articulation. However, the effect of understanding an idea from an inaccurate phrasing or wording is that the person doesn't have a proper articulation to give form to the idea, and so it stays formless, in the subconscious, and cannot be directly used, and the person isn't consciously aware of it. The only effect it has is that it influences conscious thought and requires annoying deconstruction of thought patterns to catch if it's a bad idea ("Why do I think that?"). In contrast, proper articulation increases a person's consciousness, self-awareness, power, and gives life and color to their minds as thoughts are being fully expressed (expression leads to colorfulness, lushness, etc. etc.). So your PSA for today is: strive for precise, accurate articulation in all of your thoughts. :)
kzisme 9y ago
Many times when people ask what to build or work on (much like the author) are told to focus on things they need - Scratch your own itch! Lately I haven't really found many things to focus on working on due to this. I highly doubt I can think of many things in my life that would be close to a "stand up comedy routine". I mostly just want to figure out something I can work on in my spare time to learn outside of work. It doesn't have to be a business (although I wouldn't be upset if it eventually turned into that), but even having a userbase would be a fun experience.
greggman 9y ago
> validate your market how do you do this? Smartphones existed as PDAs for 10-20yrs before iPhone. If I had shown someone my Sony Clie and said "if I make this work with your finger instead of a stylus, simplify the UI, and charge you $80+ a month for service would you be interested?". except for a few geeks like myself the answer would have been "no, that stuff is for geeks" for most people and yet here we are 10 years later and everyone has a smartphone. So I don't really see how to "validate your market". I've got a few ideas I'm 99% sure would be successful given the correct marketing and PR but because they are new or at least new for a given country people tell me they don't get it, not interested. They might be right but it might also just something they need to correctly ibtroduced to. Netflix comes up in my mind as an example. It seems obvious but if you'd asked Mom and Dad if they wanted internet movies 10 yrs ago theyd have looked at you like your crazy
- SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
  This is a long way to say “people don’t know what you want until you give it to them”. See famous Henry Ford quote. If ‘validate your market’ means ask people what they want - that’s bad. If it means show a small audience a prototype - that’s good.
- hywel 9y ago
  Some questions I'd ask, off the top of my head: Have you ever tried a touchscreen computer? Was it better than when you use a mouse? Why? Which interface do you prefer - your computer or your phone? Why? Show me how you would go to www.altavista.com on your PDA. It looked like it was hard to find the browser - is it often hard to find the right application on your PDA? When you bought this PDA, were there cheaper PDAs you could have bought? How much more did you spend on this PDA because it was better? Do you have lots of VHS videos at home? When did you last watch one? Do you have a lot of DVDs? How are they stored? Is it a problem that you have them? Would you rather not have to store them, and why? Have you ever watched a YouTube video? Is it easier to find something on YouTube or to watch a DVD?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Advice like "validate your market," strategies for chicken-egg problems, or the first point (start from a beachhead).... These are not the same as "get a good accountant" or "incorporate this way." They're not hurdles to pass with good advice in specific detail. These are problems that need clever & creative solutions, and the answers usually aren't do exactly what you are doing now and also this thing. AirBnB started around conferences, momentary and local spikes in demand that let them solve chicken-eggs one user at a time, face to face. This gave them a beachhead strategy, a hardcore users strategy, chicken-egg strategy, a way of validating. The iphone "boiled an ocean." A thousand man years spent in secret. A big product launch, after which everything about that market changed. It's not an impossibility, boiling a metaphorical ocean. But, it's risky and mostly out of bounds to a startup. If a startup wanted to do this, they'd need to find a different path. There's a common Henry Ford quote (apocryphal, whatever) about the pointlessness of asking people. They would have told him to make a faster horse, supposedly. You can skip market validation in some cases, with historic products like the iphone, model T, teleportation, cure for baldness or magic sex dust. A lot of startup advice is about leveraging the strengths of being new and flexible. For an Amazon, Walmart or GM, they are locked in to most of what they do. Startups can adapt everything around a smart strategy.
ternaryoperator 9y ago
Edsger Dykstra wrote one of his many famous notes on project selection[1]. In his case, it was choosing projects for scientific research, but his guidelines are definitely worth a look: "Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward." "We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail." "Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you." [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD637.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EW...
Roybot 9y ago
A lot of us make the mistake of waiting for the “right” idea until we decide to pursue something. Huge mistake. Joe Gebbia put it nicely by making an analogy to the “gym of entrepreneurship.” Building a startup is one of those things that you need to work to get better at over time. Not many founders have many regrets but when they do express regrets it’s usually them wishing they had started earlier. Here’s Joes quote from his interview with Tim Ferris. “People think we woke up and Airbnb was just created out of thin air. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that we’ve talked about today, it’s that there’s a long lineage of trying things, bumping into walls, getting rejected, failing, reframing that failure into learning, and trying to continue forward. And so, by the time Airbnb came around, it was like I’d been in the gym of entrepreneurship for many years. So, it’s like you don’t wake up and just run a marathon all of a sudden. Nobody does that. You train for it. So, by the time it’s ready for race day, your body is conditioned for it. Your muscles and your system – everything is ready for you to go run 26+ miles. I think entrepreneurship is the exact same way. I think it’s a misconception when people look at the magazine covers and they read the stories of a successful company and they think, “Wow, the people who started that, they built it and everybody came.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. I think “Field of Dreams” is probably the worst movie to ever happen to entrepreneurship. It created this idea, like, “Oh, wow, if you build it, they will come.” I can tell you, if you build it, they don’t come. It takes this incredible perseverance and sometimes irrational belief in yourself to bring something to life in the face of lot of adversity and a lot of people saying it can’t happen. So, I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that I shared today, it’s that the simple act of spotting an opportunity, coming up with original solution and then taking that third, hardest step of putting something into the world, of trying something, putting your idea into practice – it doesn’t have to be the big idea. It’s just about being in the gym and doing a rep, the gym of entrepreneurship, doing curls or something. It’s just getting in the habit of those three things. You spot an opportunity, you come up with an original solution, and you put your idea into the world. And the more you can do that, the better you are at spotting the next opportunity. Airbnb just happened to be a part of the lineage of all the things I’ve told you that happened before it.”
- fuball63 9y ago
  There was an article on here a little back about how stories like "Netflix founder got a fee for returning a movie late and got the idea to start netflix" are entirely misleading. Everyone has problems, and everyone has ideas how to fix them, especially in the consumer products space. Everything outside of the idea itself, like marketing, execution, finance, and customer support are all things that take practice, or reps as you say, to gain experience which hopefully leads to instinct. I think we like these tales because they exaggerate the importance of an idea.
joshschoen 9y ago
I'd love to have a peek at Daniel's idea list :)
illwrks 9y ago
The best bit of advice I saw (on HN no less) that helped frame this in my mind was "every spreadsheet is an opportunity". This was in reference to processes within a company, where employees use spreadsheets to manage data, etc.
heinrichhartman 9y ago
> One strategy is to think of annoyances you have in your life In this way you will only end up with consumer products. I did this when I was 12 and ended up building a fully automated "egg cutting machine" which solved my annoyance (and created a ton more) but had little market value. The B2B market is huge. I am most interested in solving hard problems that large organizations have with their internal processes. Unfortunately I don't work for one, so the annoyances I want to solve are not my own.
- fanzhang 9y ago
  The B2B market is huge, but still somewhat smaller than B2C. Look at the top tech companies by market cap today. Each is one that I've used as a consumer: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook. If you think the measure of dollars in top market cap companies isn't representative of companies a tier lower, this is likewise true for the highest value YC companies: Dropbox, AirBnB. As a founder or an investor, it's important not to forget about B2B, but directionally, thinking B2C is correct. (This is in contrast to, say, thinking of only game companies if you're a gamer; most tech company values are indeed not in games.)
wolfgke 9y ago
To quote from the text: "Focus on the repeat offenders. The ideas that you keep coming back to. When I think of a new idea, I get deeply infected with it. It takes over my mind. It’s all I can think about. Over time, most of the ideas fade. But a choice few keep on coming back. Pay attention to those. You know you’ve got something good when you’re thinking about it in the shower. Tell your friends what you’re doing. This accomplishes two goals. First, you’ll refine your idea. Conversation is a very powerful way of sharpening your own thoughts. Second, you’ll find yourself more motivated to finish your project. Another common refrain I hear is “I’m not good at self-motivating myself”. All this means is that you just don’t see the benefit of doing a certain thing. You can hack that feedback loop by committing to others (especially people you respect), who you won’t want to let down. Make sure you enjoy thinking about it. Your primary edge as a founder will be the number of hours you spent thinking about the specific problem. Over time, you should accumulate more hours than almost anyone on earth. This will only work if it doesn’t feel like a chore. If you genuinely are fascinated by the problem." The problem is: I love to think (and sometimes solve) deep mathematical questions. I also love to talk about them all the time. The problem is: hardly anybody except me seems to care about them. So it does not seem like a good startup idea, even though it satisfies the critera.
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  > The problem is: hardly anybody except me seems to care about them. I'm not so sure. Being able to solve hard mathematical problems probably is a niche problem but that doesn't mean you're the only one experiencing it. Fortunately, it's not limited locally but can easily be tackled at a global scale, i.e. by addressing potential customers around the world. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people interested in pondering deep mathematical questions and quite a few might be willing to pay a monthly fee for having access to a community that helps them with doing so. There are all sorts of online communities for all sorts of weird and extraordinary stuff. Why not one dedicated to solving hard mathematical problems?
jasonlotito 9y ago
Find the duct tape.
jonbarker 9y ago
I totally agree with this entire article, however the author may want to fix this awkward sentence: "Travis Kalanick started Uber was a hack to split a few private cars with his friends."
mncharity 9y ago
I'd like to see more discussion about different strategies for how to manage and live with your "idea faucet". When day after day, you frequently notice people's "pain points", and low-hanging opportunities for reducing system dysfunction, you quickly accumulate a backlog. Which makes it a triage problem. With the associated burdens of "I think I see how I might make this better... and instead I'm going to walk away". As health professional, you get advice and support on dealing with your limits with respect to people's often unhappy outcomes. We don't seem to do that much. There's some around a consultant's limits of professional responsibility. There's hierarchical workplace subordination - "above my pay grade", "not my call". And professional craftsmanship. There's a lot of entrepreneurial mission focus - find one viable/important idea to pursue, and focus narrowly on that. And the seemingly common "it's just a job, to support things like family, that actually matter". Around here, there's a lot of upbeat use of status quo as baseline. If my product helps people, it's a win. If it doesn't, a null. Anyone else's problems... they're not my market, not my problem. Market opportunity root cause analysis sometimes turns up a happy "A just hasn't talked to B yet". But sometimes turns up noisome tangles of "I'd be fine with not having seen this" ugliness. I've seen a great many posts on finding your first viable idea. But I've seen very few posts on remaining ok with leaving the idea faucet running, once it gets going.
TipVFL 9y ago
I used to make ultra-low budget short films, and I feel like there's a lot of crossover between planning those projects and planning a product. One lesson I learned: make a list of your assets and consider them when deciding on a project. Your assets include the things you own, the skills you have, and the resources of your network. By creating a project around these you can maximize your production value, and make a project that no one else could have made on your budget. I recently realized that my love of rap, and my connections to the local community of rappers and hip hop producers, is a huge and unique asset in the software industry. I'm currently working on a product for rappers, that also serves as a platform for producers to make money and advertise themselves. My network has made it really easy to solicit feedback from both my target audience and my target content providers, and create mutually beneficial zero-cost licensing agreements. So far, the response has been huge, lots of passionate support and interesting suggestions.

630 points by danicgross 9y ago

> Focus on the repeat offenders. The ideas that you keep coming back to. I totally buy this. Linked to it, I think the it's good to be able to entertain obviously bad ideas for a short while. You think of an idea because of some set of underlying prompts, so even if the idea as a whole doesn't have legs, there are often insights lurking somewhere in it that you'll end up coming back to.

drcode 9y ago
I'm worried though this statement is heavily colored by "survivorship bias"- Certainly ultra-successful people are often obsessed with their ideas, but it does not logically follow that being obsessed with an idea is a good metric to base decisions on. Just look at all the people obsessed with writing the great American novel and/or next hit song. I think what is more important is to focus on ideas for which you have a comparative advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage) which frequently, but certainly not always, will mean there's a certain amount of obsession as a side-effect.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  perhaps it's not the obsession of the idea that counts but rather the obsession with the Problem you want to solve.

CryoLogic 9y ago

I like the idea of just decide on something to build and than build it. Worst case scenario you get a learning experience. And I like building things I enjoy or products I really wish I had. So I get benefit in that way. With software inputs outside of labor are low, so you won't lose out financially in most cases.

goatherders 9y ago
That is FAR from the worst case scenario.
- edgartaor 9y ago
  In your opinion, what would be the worse case scenario?
  - goatherders 9y ago
    Just because you learn something doesn't mean the time isnt wasted. If you try to make a business of it and it doesn't work...more wasted time. Wasted relationships. Wasted money. Wasted confidence. I'm all for the silver lining of having learned something. That's good for sure. But there are almost always costs when building anything from model cars to software applications.
    - jcadam 9y ago
      > Wasted confidence. This is probably the biggest factor (money is the least). I've had numerous failed projects. I have a current project/business (it's in my profile) which I believe to be in the process of failing. I don't know if I have another one in me. Sure, I've learned a lot. From a purely technical standpoint, each new project has been superior to the one before - and in the case of my latest, I've at least produced something that I find useful. But, the ego can only take so much abuse. Not sure I trust myself with ideas anymore. I need someone to tell me what to build :)
      - goatherders 9y ago
        After my first startup went down in a burst of flames I spent years angry at everyone and everything like a big black tumor carried inside my heart. It sounds dramatic but that doesn't make it untrue. I learned a lot but I lost a lot more.
        9y ago

ccostes 9y ago

I like the advice to actively record your ideas (every little one). Thinking about things in abstract, it can seem like all the good problems are solved, but listed out on paper it is a lot easier to analyze and notice patterns.

tudelo 9y ago

“everything in the world was created by people no smarter than you”. Is there actually any validity to that? Assuming you is a human of average intelligence...

guntars 9y ago
It’s certainly false though the sentiment might still be valid, basically that the lack of smarts isn’t something that’s holding up more inventions from coming into this world.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  Yes, this is the case. Smartness is not the limiting factor. The biggest limiting factor is number of opportunities.
  - lhuser123 9y ago
    > The biggest limiting factor is number of opportunities. Could you elaborate. Do you mean more opportunities to fail and learn ?
  - tudelo 9y ago
    Someone who is more intelligent will create more opportunities for themselves. Seems to be pretty linked.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
oceanman888 9y ago
I think what he meant is that if you look into the process of how products and system are designed, you will likely find out most of them quite comprehensible, and more than often made by a group of men/women that are not necessarily passionate about it. Hence with great passion and even average intelligence, there is no reason we can not achieve a far better product than the current one.
9y ago

evancharles 9y ago

Customers are also a great source of project ideas. You can pick a customer, like "small business owner" or "wealth advisor," and interview them. My favorite question that leads to ideas is "tell me everything you did from when you started your day until now," and dig into all the annoying/painful things they mention.

danicgross 9y ago
Yes! In many ways, all your initial idea needs to be is a launch pad. Once you get your foot in the door, you can always refine based on what users tell you. Per your point, it's important to learn from their workflow, not ask them what they want. When you ask someone what they want, they often perform attribute substitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution) and answer a different question.
- got2surf 9y ago
  Great point. Also important that your customers may not even know what is possible, so they won't know to ask for it directly. Instead, if we ask why they want something, we can understand their intents - and translate that into technology. We've seen this a lot with text analytics - instead of trying to repeat what humans do manually (reading/annotating), we try to understand the questions that clients are interested in (the drivers behind their current workflow).
jeff_marshall 9y ago
This kind of question is a gold mine, IME. When I interview network protocol devs, my favorite question is: "tell me what happens between the time you type something into the address bar and when you see a result". so many opportunities to show understanding at various levels there.
- jeff_marshall 9y ago
  The reaction here is interesting, but it won't change my opinion without concrete feedback. Please tell me why this opinion is wrong.

acconrad 9y ago

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of startup ideas. To the point where I'm just consulting at the moment because I can't think of any startup idea to work on. I mean I have ideas of problems I want to solve - but they've all been met by massive resistance because they're huge problems. Like for instance one idea I had was I hate making food, but I don't want to eat out all of the time. Can you crowdsource cooking from your neighbors? So I tried building that platform. I instantly discovered there were huge safety regulations about cooking, and that really baking (or anything that isn't extremely perishable) is the only thing you can pretty much do out of your home and not get slapped by the state for violating health codes. So I'm just sort of defeated...the only problems I want to tackle just seem massive and I can't seem to find the divide-and-conquer algorithm to help the world in a smaller (but still meaningful) way.

baxtr 9y ago
I agree with your observation. It is difficult to find problems worth solving. I thought and read about this a lot. And I think solving problems is just one way, one flavor of deciding which thing to build. I’d say this is the Silicon Valley school of thought, very much influenced by VCs. There is a another way, which I have picked up from Seth Godin: Tell the right story. People don’t always know why they buy things. Why do I need a smart watch? Why do I need fancy shoes? They don’t solve a real problem. But, they make me feel good. Because I can tell a story to myself. A think this blend of deciding what to do is more art than rational, that’s what it’s maybe not that popular. But if you start to look around, you will notice the story of stuff people buy.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  a.k.a the Apple school of thought.
ajdlinux 9y ago

keithnz 9y ago

I've always had lots of ideas, just none I've wanted to follow through on, now I'm in the early stages of an idea I think will be useful ( at least it will be for me ). It's an idea that was simplified out of another idea that's just too large for me to tackle at the moment. In fact it's an idea that's been part of a variety of other ideas. It's also part of a number of other peoples products, and is probably one of the trickier bits of their products, but it's not a product in itself. So, at the moment, my market size is at least 1, because I want it. Odd thing is, given I have free range on everything, I'm suffering tech choice anxiety, which is slowing me down a bit.

andai 9y ago
Use C#.
- keithnz 9y ago
  I am using C# on both .net core and framework for the bulk of it.
  - suprfnk 9y ago
    Are you running into problems because of it? Or what's causing the anxiety?
- baddash 9y ago
  How could you make such a confident and strong recommendation given the vague nature of keithnz's comment?
  - andai 9y ago
    I originally wrote, "flip a coin", but then decided to go the extra mile.
    - baddash 9y ago
      So the way you were able to make a confident and strong recommendation, despite his vague comment, is by deciding to put in effort into a proper recommendation? Well, isn't it obvious that you must have put in effort to deal with the vagueness of his comment? I already knew that. I wanted to know specifically what you did, the moves you made, in order to deal with the vagueness effectively in order to produce your strong recommendation.

baddash 9y ago

I don't believe it's true that "you are whatever you tell yourself you are". Obviously you don't change if you tell yourself you're this or that because it takes more than that to change yourself. And also, this sounds like something you'd read in The Secret: all it takes to make something happen is to believe in it or think of it. However, this is most likely not what Daniel really meant. In the same paragraph, he refers to a person who literally doesn't believe that they have the idea-generating ability. So then, what he really meant is related to someone's belief in their possession of ability to do something or make something happen. In other words, their belief in their power. So, a better articulation would be: your belief in your power affects your power. Which makes sense; if you don't actually believe you have power, you won't try to use it, and you'll have effectively crippled your power. This comment might seem trivial at this point, but I think the principle behind it is important. Namely, the principle of precise and accurate articulation of thought. The new articulation I presented is accurate, empowering, and useful. A person can directly use it and it will have a positive effect. The old articulation is confusing, inaccurate, and untrue, which I don't intend to say as an insult or an attack, but rather intend to say as an accurate description of how I understand it. Now, you might think, "I understood what it meant given the context, and so did you, so what is the point of accurately articulating it?" I believe it is true that I understood it given context because I believe that's how I came to form the new articulation. However, the effect of understanding an idea from an inaccurate phrasing or wording is that the person doesn't have a proper articulation to give form to the idea, and so it stays formless, in the subconscious, and cannot be directly used, and the person isn't consciously aware of it. The only effect it has is that it influences conscious thought and requires annoying deconstruction of thought patterns to catch if it's a bad idea ("Why do I think that?"). In contrast, proper articulation increases a person's consciousness, self-awareness, power, and gives life and color to their minds as thoughts are being fully expressed (expression leads to colorfulness, lushness, etc. etc.). So your PSA for today is: strive for precise, accurate articulation in all of your thoughts. :)

kzisme 9y ago

Many times when people ask what to build or work on (much like the author) are told to focus on things they need - Scratch your own itch! Lately I haven't really found many things to focus on working on due to this. I highly doubt I can think of many things in my life that would be close to a "stand up comedy routine". I mostly just want to figure out something I can work on in my spare time to learn outside of work. It doesn't have to be a business (although I wouldn't be upset if it eventually turned into that), but even having a userbase would be a fun experience.

greggman 9y ago

> validate your market how do you do this? Smartphones existed as PDAs for 10-20yrs before iPhone. If I had shown someone my Sony Clie and said "if I make this work with your finger instead of a stylus, simplify the UI, and charge you $80+ a month for service would you be interested?". except for a few geeks like myself the answer would have been "no, that stuff is for geeks" for most people and yet here we are 10 years later and everyone has a smartphone. So I don't really see how to "validate your market". I've got a few ideas I'm 99% sure would be successful given the correct marketing and PR but because they are new or at least new for a given country people tell me they don't get it, not interested. They might be right but it might also just something they need to correctly ibtroduced to. Netflix comes up in my mind as an example. It seems obvious but if you'd asked Mom and Dad if they wanted internet movies 10 yrs ago theyd have looked at you like your crazy

SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
This is a long way to say “people don’t know what you want until you give it to them”. See famous Henry Ford quote. If ‘validate your market’ means ask people what they want - that’s bad. If it means show a small audience a prototype - that’s good.
hywel 9y ago
Some questions I'd ask, off the top of my head: Have you ever tried a touchscreen computer? Was it better than when you use a mouse? Why? Which interface do you prefer - your computer or your phone? Why? Show me how you would go to www.altavista.com on your PDA. It looked like it was hard to find the browser - is it often hard to find the right application on your PDA? When you bought this PDA, were there cheaper PDAs you could have bought? How much more did you spend on this PDA because it was better? Do you have lots of VHS videos at home? When did you last watch one? Do you have a lot of DVDs? How are they stored? Is it a problem that you have them? Would you rather not have to store them, and why? Have you ever watched a YouTube video? Is it easier to find something on YouTube or to watch a DVD?
dalbasal 9y ago
Advice like "validate your market," strategies for chicken-egg problems, or the first point (start from a beachhead).... These are not the same as "get a good accountant" or "incorporate this way." They're not hurdles to pass with good advice in specific detail. These are problems that need clever & creative solutions, and the answers usually aren't do exactly what you are doing now and also this thing. AirBnB started around conferences, momentary and local spikes in demand that let them solve chicken-eggs one user at a time, face to face. This gave them a beachhead strategy, a hardcore users strategy, chicken-egg strategy, a way of validating. The iphone "boiled an ocean." A thousand man years spent in secret. A big product launch, after which everything about that market changed. It's not an impossibility, boiling a metaphorical ocean. But, it's risky and mostly out of bounds to a startup. If a startup wanted to do this, they'd need to find a different path. There's a common Henry Ford quote (apocryphal, whatever) about the pointlessness of asking people. They would have told him to make a faster horse, supposedly. You can skip market validation in some cases, with historic products like the iphone, model T, teleportation, cure for baldness or magic sex dust. A lot of startup advice is about leveraging the strengths of being new and flexible. For an Amazon, Walmart or GM, they are locked in to most of what they do. Startups can adapt everything around a smart strategy.

ternaryoperator 9y ago

Edsger Dykstra wrote one of his many famous notes on project selection[1]. In his case, it was choosing projects for scientific research, but his guidelines are definitely worth a look: "Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward." "We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail." "Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you." [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD637.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EW...

Roybot 9y ago

A lot of us make the mistake of waiting for the “right” idea until we decide to pursue something. Huge mistake. Joe Gebbia put it nicely by making an analogy to the “gym of entrepreneurship.” Building a startup is one of those things that you need to work to get better at over time. Not many founders have many regrets but when they do express regrets it’s usually them wishing they had started earlier. Here’s Joes quote from his interview with Tim Ferris. “People think we woke up and Airbnb was just created out of thin air. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that we’ve talked about today, it’s that there’s a long lineage of trying things, bumping into walls, getting rejected, failing, reframing that failure into learning, and trying to continue forward. And so, by the time Airbnb came around, it was like I’d been in the gym of entrepreneurship for many years. So, it’s like you don’t wake up and just run a marathon all of a sudden. Nobody does that. You train for it. So, by the time it’s ready for race day, your body is conditioned for it. Your muscles and your system – everything is ready for you to go run 26+ miles. I think entrepreneurship is the exact same way. I think it’s a misconception when people look at the magazine covers and they read the stories of a successful company and they think, “Wow, the people who started that, they built it and everybody came.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. I think “Field of Dreams” is probably the worst movie to ever happen to entrepreneurship. It created this idea, like, “Oh, wow, if you build it, they will come.” I can tell you, if you build it, they don’t come. It takes this incredible perseverance and sometimes irrational belief in yourself to bring something to life in the face of lot of adversity and a lot of people saying it can’t happen. So, I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that I shared today, it’s that the simple act of spotting an opportunity, coming up with original solution and then taking that third, hardest step of putting something into the world, of trying something, putting your idea into practice – it doesn’t have to be the big idea. It’s just about being in the gym and doing a rep, the gym of entrepreneurship, doing curls or something. It’s just getting in the habit of those three things. You spot an opportunity, you come up with an original solution, and you put your idea into the world. And the more you can do that, the better you are at spotting the next opportunity. Airbnb just happened to be a part of the lineage of all the things I’ve told you that happened before it.”

fuball63 9y ago
There was an article on here a little back about how stories like "Netflix founder got a fee for returning a movie late and got the idea to start netflix" are entirely misleading. Everyone has problems, and everyone has ideas how to fix them, especially in the consumer products space. Everything outside of the idea itself, like marketing, execution, finance, and customer support are all things that take practice, or reps as you say, to gain experience which hopefully leads to instinct. I think we like these tales because they exaggerate the importance of an idea.

joshschoen 9y ago

I'd love to have a peek at Daniel's idea list :)

illwrks 9y ago

The best bit of advice I saw (on HN no less) that helped frame this in my mind was "every spreadsheet is an opportunity". This was in reference to processes within a company, where employees use spreadsheets to manage data, etc.

heinrichhartman 9y ago

> One strategy is to think of annoyances you have in your life In this way you will only end up with consumer products. I did this when I was 12 and ended up building a fully automated "egg cutting machine" which solved my annoyance (and created a ton more) but had little market value. The B2B market is huge. I am most interested in solving hard problems that large organizations have with their internal processes. Unfortunately I don't work for one, so the annoyances I want to solve are not my own.

fanzhang 9y ago
The B2B market is huge, but still somewhat smaller than B2C. Look at the top tech companies by market cap today. Each is one that I've used as a consumer: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook. If you think the measure of dollars in top market cap companies isn't representative of companies a tier lower, this is likewise true for the highest value YC companies: Dropbox, AirBnB. As a founder or an investor, it's important not to forget about B2B, but directionally, thinking B2C is correct. (This is in contrast to, say, thinking of only game companies if you're a gamer; most tech company values are indeed not in games.)

wolfgke 9y ago

To quote from the text: "Focus on the repeat offenders. The ideas that you keep coming back to. When I think of a new idea, I get deeply infected with it. It takes over my mind. It’s all I can think about. Over time, most of the ideas fade. But a choice few keep on coming back. Pay attention to those. You know you’ve got something good when you’re thinking about it in the shower. Tell your friends what you’re doing. This accomplishes two goals. First, you’ll refine your idea. Conversation is a very powerful way of sharpening your own thoughts. Second, you’ll find yourself more motivated to finish your project. Another common refrain I hear is “I’m not good at self-motivating myself”. All this means is that you just don’t see the benefit of doing a certain thing. You can hack that feedback loop by committing to others (especially people you respect), who you won’t want to let down. Make sure you enjoy thinking about it. Your primary edge as a founder will be the number of hours you spent thinking about the specific problem. Over time, you should accumulate more hours than almost anyone on earth. This will only work if it doesn’t feel like a chore. If you genuinely are fascinated by the problem." The problem is: I love to think (and sometimes solve) deep mathematical questions. I also love to talk about them all the time. The problem is: hardly anybody except me seems to care about them. So it does not seem like a good startup idea, even though it satisfies the critera.

BjoernKW 9y ago
> The problem is: hardly anybody except me seems to care about them. I'm not so sure. Being able to solve hard mathematical problems probably is a niche problem but that doesn't mean you're the only one experiencing it. Fortunately, it's not limited locally but can easily be tackled at a global scale, i.e. by addressing potential customers around the world. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people interested in pondering deep mathematical questions and quite a few might be willing to pay a monthly fee for having access to a community that helps them with doing so. There are all sorts of online communities for all sorts of weird and extraordinary stuff. Why not one dedicated to solving hard mathematical problems?

jasonlotito 9y ago

Find the duct tape.

jonbarker 9y ago

I totally agree with this entire article, however the author may want to fix this awkward sentence: "Travis Kalanick started Uber was a hack to split a few private cars with his friends."

mncharity 9y ago

I'd like to see more discussion about different strategies for how to manage and live with your "idea faucet". When day after day, you frequently notice people's "pain points", and low-hanging opportunities for reducing system dysfunction, you quickly accumulate a backlog. Which makes it a triage problem. With the associated burdens of "I think I see how I might make this better... and instead I'm going to walk away". As health professional, you get advice and support on dealing with your limits with respect to people's often unhappy outcomes. We don't seem to do that much. There's some around a consultant's limits of professional responsibility. There's hierarchical workplace subordination - "above my pay grade", "not my call". And professional craftsmanship. There's a lot of entrepreneurial mission focus - find one viable/important idea to pursue, and focus narrowly on that. And the seemingly common "it's just a job, to support things like family, that actually matter". Around here, there's a lot of upbeat use of status quo as baseline. If my product helps people, it's a win. If it doesn't, a null. Anyone else's problems... they're not my market, not my problem. Market opportunity root cause analysis sometimes turns up a happy "A just hasn't talked to B yet". But sometimes turns up noisome tangles of "I'd be fine with not having seen this" ugliness. I've seen a great many posts on finding your first viable idea. But I've seen very few posts on remaining ok with leaving the idea faucet running, once it gets going.

TipVFL 9y ago

I used to make ultra-low budget short films, and I feel like there's a lot of crossover between planning those projects and planning a product. One lesson I learned: make a list of your assets and consider them when deciding on a project. Your assets include the things you own, the skills you have, and the resources of your network. By creating a project around these you can maximize your production value, and make a project that no one else could have made on your budget. I recently realized that my love of rap, and my connections to the local community of rappers and hip hop producers, is a huge and unique asset in the software industry. I'm currently working on a product for rappers, that also serves as a platform for producers to make money and advertise themselves. My network has made it really easy to solicit feedback from both my target audience and my target content providers, and create mutually beneficial zero-cost licensing agreements. So far, the response has been huge, lots of passionate support and interesting suggestions.