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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 a

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.

vinceguidry 9y ago
This is good insight, and I upvoted you for it, but it doesn't really answer his question. Validating your market is business speak for making sure that you won't lose a ton of money at launch, assuming your execution isn't horrible. All you have to do is to collect some amount of interest through something like a landing page. It won't guarantee runaway success, but it won't break the bank either.
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  It does exactly answer the question. It's just that the answer is not what most people expect: an algorithm. Some problems have simple solutions, or simple explanations. Other problems require deep consideration and almost philosophical shifts in one's mind. There is no algorithm for this problem. This requires creative process. Creative process is impossible to describe in a couple of sentences in a way that will be enough to teach it to someone.

vinceguidry 9y ago

This is good insight, and I upvoted you for it, but it doesn't really answer his question. Validating your market is business speak for making sure that you won't lose a ton of money at launch, assuming your execution isn't horrible. All you have to do is to collect some amount of interest through something like a landing page. It won't guarantee runaway success, but it won't break the bank either.

Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
It does exactly answer the question. It's just that the answer is not what most people expect: an algorithm. Some problems have simple solutions, or simple explanations. Other problems require deep consideration and almost philosophical shifts in one's mind. There is no algorithm for this problem. This requires creative process. Creative process is impossible to describe in a couple of sentences in a way that will be enough to teach it to someone.