9 ms·

How to brainstorm great business ideas

643 points by jhow15 7y ago

cryptoz 7y ago
It's a good article I guess, but a bit over-optimistic about execution. > You can build anything. Not really, though. The article suggests that there are no constraints to what can be built, but there on constraints to what people want / need, how you'll make money, etc. There are significant constraints around what can be built. They change over time, and in fact, finding ideas that were rejected for being too hard in the past can be a good indicator of something that could be built now. And many great business ideas that solve huge problems with clear distribution channels can fail, because the solution that works isn't possible or feasible to build yet.
notlukesky 7y ago
It’s a nice framework for many ideas I suppose, but there too many examples of “non-obvious” “stupid ideas” with no market or problem to solve that eventually succeed. And plenty of successes that were not innovative but had great execution. Like most things in life timing is everything and we only know the right timing and “ideas” in hindsight.
- MetalGuru 7y ago
  Can you give some examples of said stupid ideas?
  - distantaidenn 7y ago
    Letting strangers sleep in your empty rooms? I grew up in a high-crime city in the US which shaped my perception of the world, thus AirBnB sounded like madness to me when I first heard of it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
In a roundabout kind of way, if you find the solution first, its called learning and if your mindset is aligned to this article, its defined as research. Though in a monkey see, monkey do world, there is no shortage of mimicked expertise and flattery, so plan accordingly.
harrydry 7y ago
great post
irjustin 7y ago
Fantastic post. Lots of weight on the problem discovery area which is the right move and engineers turned entrepreneurs skip this step a lot. I know I did. A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling. I have used the techniques personally and it's great to see what users say is a huge problem vs a problem they're willing to pay for. It is easy to get stuck in a self-fulfilling trap that a user complains is a big problem. I recently spoke with a customer: - "What's your biggest problem?" (book says this question is a no no) - He replies, "If I sell 3 cars at the same time, I'm out of available float (cash) while I wait for those deals to close. This is a HUGE problem for me!" - "How do you solve this today?" I ask. - "I have other, larger car sales company who will lend me money at XX rates." Right there, it's a solved problem. The end user figured out their own way. Turns out other smaller dealers like him rely on large trade line companies. The only way I could complete is either on lower cost of financing or speed. At which point, for me, it's not a problem worth solving. The problem isn't so big for him where he's willing to throw cash at me for it. Talk to users. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-ebook/dp/B01H4G2J1U https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...
- cdiamand 7y ago
  Seconding this. Mom test is an essential read. People will say positive things about your product in order to protect your feelings, and this can lead you along the wrong path. When you ask them to purchase though, the conversation becomes really clear.
- veeralpatel979 7y ago
  I'm also a huge fan of the Mom Test! In your specific customer interview, I would probe deeper. For most real problems people have, they've hacked together a makeshift solution. It may work, but it doesn't mean it works well. It doesn't mean the problem is solved. I would ask "how is it like working with this larger company?". If you have any specific pain points working with larger companies that you've seen, I'd ask "how do you deal with pain point X?" I doubt someone would say something is their biggest problem if they have a great solution for it!
frequentnapper 7y ago
egghead founder downloaded a bunch of youtube vids and zipped them up and sold them to a mailing list? Weren't there copyright issues? I'm not sure if that sort of advice is sound, but the rest of the article resonated nicely.
- tossmeout 7y ago
  from what i know of the story he had the creators permission and later they worked together as cofounders
Ace__ 7y ago
I very much agree with this post in that analysis of the problem has to be the first step. There needs to be both a contextual and a granular appreciation of the problem. You get far too many founders looking for the most intense problem when that is just one facet of a problem. Christmas songs are a problem, painful, intense, etc. But it's only once a year, which would mean not very active users. As well as the Mom Test, off-the-top of my head, check out 1. Talking To Humans https://www.talkingtohumans.com/ https://www.talkingtohumans.com/ 2. Testing With Humans https://testingwithhumans.com/ https://testingwithhumans.com/, both by Giff Constable. There are some medical pain evaluation papers that I found highly informative, but I would need to go through my notes as I can't recollect them. And if anybody is interested, I have a free tool you can download, that will aid you to assess your idea by breaking it apart into its elemental composition and looking deeper into the problem, the audience, and the market. It's at MVP v2, so long way to go yet, and it is only for MS Access, so PC only: https://startizer.com/ https://startizer.com/
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Smoothly done! I’m going to try your tool out. And thanks!
  - Ace__ 7y ago
    Hello QuickThrower2. Thank you for your reply. As for downloading it, brilliant, I hope it helps you. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, etc. Please do let me know. Cheers, Ace.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
samsquire 7y ago
I am a serial idea writer and I have to agree with the author. Ideas are inherently valuable, maybe not financially, but they're valuable to have and valuable to society to share. It makes me angry that people actually believe ideas are inherently worthless. Or that without any code or implementation they're worthless. It's a meme that needs to die. It's like having your cake and eating it too. Here's a free idea for you to think about and contribute to but it's not enough, you want the outcome without any effort too. So you say my idea is worthless. Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs and any thing that humanity has ever accomplished. And ideas are meant to be shared. People that think ideas are worthless are shutting down conversations about good ideas because of this obsession with the idea that execution is all that matters. And so many ideas die on the grape vine because of this poor attitude.
- fossuser 7y ago
  I think the ideas being worthless meme is an over-correction of the person that thinks the idea is all of the value and wants to hire an engineer to 'just do the implementation' for little reward. Ideas have value, and someone who can unite people with a clear vision can do incredible things but the implementation is a big part of the actual difficulty and usually you have to update the idea as you learn more from the implementation. In general I suspect the implementation is usually harder than coming up with the idea in most cases and fewer people can do it. (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper). Still, obvious value in trying to come up with things from first principles.
  - samsquire 7y ago
    I don't argue that ideas are the hardest part or that ideas are harder than implementation. I just reject that ideas are worthless. I share all my ideas online because I think they have value. I want people to steal them because I want the outcome of the idea: I want the idea's implementation to exist in the world for me to use. Some credit would be nice too of course.
  - dgb23 7y ago
    > (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper) If we look at this in a strict sense then those are implementations as well, just theoretical ones. I consider a scientific pager, a thorough technical specification or a rich, well-structured design document not 'just' ideas anymore. So in a sense those examples actually don't relativize your point, but strengthen it. Ideas are usually much more vague, they point in a general direction. Another interesting fact about them is that they are often incremental, small and pragmatic, but they are just as much ideas as the big, exciting ones. Smaller, more practical ideas are my personal bread and butter. They also need to be taken apart, composed into a sound plan and implemented, but they don't ask for much.
veeralpatel979 7y ago
I would also add learning to evaluate your idea(s) objectively. When you think you've thought of a great idea, by definition, you're biased toward it. If you then start building it, the sunk cost makes you even more resistant to abandoning it. In my experience, just "building the product" can take a lot longer than you expect. I've spent several months building out what were mostly CRUD apps. Why? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working part time, I had to figure out how to do many things for the first time, I had to keep myself motivated, and I had to do development but also design and PM work. If I was working on something new, I probably would: 1. think of a problem to work on 2. talk to a lot of users following the Mom Test (keeping in mind your product has many personas of users) to validate the problem 3. think of a lot of ideas to solve the problem 4. somehow identify what idea to prototype first and what the feature set should be 5. prototype it in Figma, show it to users, improve the prototype until customers are asking "when can I buy this?" I haven't done this yet. If anyone has any suggestions for getting from set of ideas -> a prototype users want, I would love to hear them!
cloudking 7y ago
I don't agree with the author. Sometimes good ideas solve problems people didn't know they had.
- salmonet 7y ago
  And sometimes ideas for "problems people don't know they have" are not good. I would guess this is more common.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  I posit a problem you didn’t know you had is a problem the founder knew you had through some wisdom of the crowd or even just luck that their own itch is yours too.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Good article but execution matters. Execution is like sperm. There are plenty of eggs (i.e., ideas), never a shortage. But unless an egg is properly fertilized it's going no where. Futhermore, Team A can faulter at the execution of Idea X, but later Team B can pick up Idea X and do it right. For example, the ipod. The idea of an mp3 player wasn't new.
Thorentis 7y ago
Points 2 and 3 are almost identical for every single business on Indie Hackers. Subscription model. Internet delivery, with email and social media marketing. After that, you're back to the square 1 of "now I need an idea". The post had some good points, but for the IH audience I'm not sure it would change much about how they analyse business ideas.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  An Indie Hacker isn’t going to buy a pub, or start a VC fueled startup for that matter. OTOH under the umbrella of internet delivered ideas there is a lot of choice as what to work on! And the internet bit could be trivial with most of the legwork going on in real life, or it could be a pure internet play all online with a rich app.
saadalem 7y ago
How do we ensure the upvotes on HN ? I posted this 3 days ago
- olalonde 7y ago
  It's a bit random. Depends on time of day, how "busy" the front page is, etc. Better luck next time!
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  You don’t ensure upvotes. Just luck. Getting your mates to upvote is against the rules, so best to just see what happens.
sonicxxg 7y ago
From the article : "It's been said that ideas don't matter, execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage." I think it underestimates execution. A great execution makes the dumbest ideas succeed. Reminds me of 'potatoparcel.com'. The business is solely focused on mailing potatoes, which sounds ridiculous, but it found its place.
goatherders 7y ago
The big nugget to me from my own experience is pricing. Early or inexperienced business founders charge too little. They charge just enough to make some money but not offend the wallet of the customer. This is all wrong - if your solution provides a real ROI then companies will pay a lot for it. Of your solution costs $1000 to solve a $1000000 problem then you are an idiot and priced too low by an order of magnitude.
flippy_flops 7y ago
This is good advice, but I think the fundamental issue for many people is that they are looking for a formula to supplement their own brain. In reality there are many classes of successful businesses. It’s hard to explain the success of a restaurant franchise and of flappy bird in the same formula except to over generalize it as, “decent idea with decent execution and decent timing in front of a decent audience.” I do think posts like this are very helpful at eliminating dead end habits. I know I’m guilty of searching for a lock.
tappio 7y ago
There is an interesting bias going on here. I'm wondering how many people upvoting this text has actually built a business, or just want to believe that what was written here is true? Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution. The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not. You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  > The hero ingredient is luck. This... 100% this! I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed. I teach entrepreneurs to pitch and tell them to go to relevant events. Consistently. They may need to go to 200 events and pitch at them because you have no idea what one of those 200 events will give you the break you are looking for. And then at event 124 someone says "hey, I have that problem, let's talk"... Now, it's not all about pitching at events but I'm trying to get across the story that you need to consistently do something for a while so that when luck strikes at that particular time you are there. The chances of getting lucky right out the door are very slim. Also, I make sure they understand this: Love the problem, not the solution!
  - ak39 7y ago
    >>I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed.<< Basically "keep trying and working on whatever until you either get lucky, run out of money or give up hope". (Ultimate failure being the act of giving up and trying something totally different.)
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
Starting small isn't universally applicable advice. It depends on competition and availability of substitutes. It's also an approach that will yield no more than small gains at a time.
Giorgi 7y ago
I think what all these kinds of articles are forgetting is luck. It's a lottery.
aliswe 7y ago
> iOS users who need to get tasks done but prefer modern, clean UIs", that's not an actual group of people. You're just describing the features of a product you're already biased toward building.

643 points by jhow15 7y ago

It's a good article I guess, but a bit over-optimistic about execution. > You can build anything. Not really, though. The article suggests that there are no constraints to what can be built, but there on constraints to what people want / need, how you'll make money, etc. There are significant constraints around what can be built. They change over time, and in fact, finding ideas that were rejected for being too hard in the past can be a good indicator of something that could be built now. And many great business ideas that solve huge problems with clear distribution channels can fail, because the solution that works isn't possible or feasible to build yet.

notlukesky 7y ago

It’s a nice framework for many ideas I suppose, but there too many examples of “non-obvious” “stupid ideas” with no market or problem to solve that eventually succeed. And plenty of successes that were not innovative but had great execution. Like most things in life timing is everything and we only know the right timing and “ideas” in hindsight.

MetalGuru 7y ago
Can you give some examples of said stupid ideas?
- distantaidenn 7y ago
  Letting strangers sleep in your empty rooms? I grew up in a high-crime city in the US which shaped my perception of the world, thus AirBnB sounded like madness to me when I first heard of it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

aSplash0fDerp 7y ago

In a roundabout kind of way, if you find the solution first, its called learning and if your mindset is aligned to this article, its defined as research. Though in a monkey see, monkey do world, there is no shortage of mimicked expertise and flattery, so plan accordingly.

harrydry 7y ago

great post

irjustin 7y ago

Fantastic post. Lots of weight on the problem discovery area which is the right move and engineers turned entrepreneurs skip this step a lot. I know I did. A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling. I have used the techniques personally and it's great to see what users say is a huge problem vs a problem they're willing to pay for. It is easy to get stuck in a self-fulfilling trap that a user complains is a big problem. I recently spoke with a customer: - "What's your biggest problem?" (book says this question is a no no) - He replies, "If I sell 3 cars at the same time, I'm out of available float (cash) while I wait for those deals to close. This is a HUGE problem for me!" - "How do you solve this today?" I ask. - "I have other, larger car sales company who will lend me money at XX rates." Right there, it's a solved problem. The end user figured out their own way. Turns out other smaller dealers like him rely on large trade line companies. The only way I could complete is either on lower cost of financing or speed. At which point, for me, it's not a problem worth solving. The problem isn't so big for him where he's willing to throw cash at me for it. Talk to users. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-ebook/dp/B01H4G2J1U https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...

cdiamand 7y ago
Seconding this. Mom test is an essential read. People will say positive things about your product in order to protect your feelings, and this can lead you along the wrong path. When you ask them to purchase though, the conversation becomes really clear.
veeralpatel979 7y ago
I'm also a huge fan of the Mom Test! In your specific customer interview, I would probe deeper. For most real problems people have, they've hacked together a makeshift solution. It may work, but it doesn't mean it works well. It doesn't mean the problem is solved. I would ask "how is it like working with this larger company?". If you have any specific pain points working with larger companies that you've seen, I'd ask "how do you deal with pain point X?" I doubt someone would say something is their biggest problem if they have a great solution for it!

frequentnapper 7y ago

egghead founder downloaded a bunch of youtube vids and zipped them up and sold them to a mailing list? Weren't there copyright issues? I'm not sure if that sort of advice is sound, but the rest of the article resonated nicely.

tossmeout 7y ago
from what i know of the story he had the creators permission and later they worked together as cofounders

Ace__ 7y ago

I very much agree with this post in that analysis of the problem has to be the first step. There needs to be both a contextual and a granular appreciation of the problem. You get far too many founders looking for the most intense problem when that is just one facet of a problem. Christmas songs are a problem, painful, intense, etc. But it's only once a year, which would mean not very active users. As well as the Mom Test, off-the-top of my head, check out 1. Talking To Humans https://www.talkingtohumans.com/ https://www.talkingtohumans.com/ 2. Testing With Humans https://testingwithhumans.com/ https://testingwithhumans.com/, both by Giff Constable. There are some medical pain evaluation papers that I found highly informative, but I would need to go through my notes as I can't recollect them. And if anybody is interested, I have a free tool you can download, that will aid you to assess your idea by breaking it apart into its elemental composition and looking deeper into the problem, the audience, and the market. It's at MVP v2, so long way to go yet, and it is only for MS Access, so PC only: https://startizer.com/ https://startizer.com/

quickthrower2 7y ago
Smoothly done! I’m going to try your tool out. And thanks!
- Ace__ 7y ago
  Hello QuickThrower2. Thank you for your reply. As for downloading it, brilliant, I hope it helps you. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, etc. Please do let me know. Cheers, Ace.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

samsquire 7y ago

I am a serial idea writer and I have to agree with the author. Ideas are inherently valuable, maybe not financially, but they're valuable to have and valuable to society to share. It makes me angry that people actually believe ideas are inherently worthless. Or that without any code or implementation they're worthless. It's a meme that needs to die. It's like having your cake and eating it too. Here's a free idea for you to think about and contribute to but it's not enough, you want the outcome without any effort too. So you say my idea is worthless. Ideas are the precursors of RFCs and ISOs and any thing that humanity has ever accomplished. And ideas are meant to be shared. People that think ideas are worthless are shutting down conversations about good ideas because of this obsession with the idea that execution is all that matters. And so many ideas die on the grape vine because of this poor attitude.

fossuser 7y ago
I think the ideas being worthless meme is an over-correction of the person that thinks the idea is all of the value and wants to hire an engineer to 'just do the implementation' for little reward. Ideas have value, and someone who can unite people with a clear vision can do incredible things but the implementation is a big part of the actual difficulty and usually you have to update the idea as you learn more from the implementation. In general I suspect the implementation is usually harder than coming up with the idea in most cases and fewer people can do it. (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper). Still, obvious value in trying to come up with things from first principles.
- samsquire 7y ago
  I don't argue that ideas are the hardest part or that ideas are harder than implementation. I just reject that ideas are worthless. I share all my ideas online because I think they have value. I want people to steal them because I want the outcome of the idea: I want the idea's implementation to exist in the world for me to use. Some credit would be nice too of course.
- dgb23 7y ago
  > (Exceptions might be things like General Relativity and initial Bitcoin paper) If we look at this in a strict sense then those are implementations as well, just theoretical ones. I consider a scientific pager, a thorough technical specification or a rich, well-structured design document not 'just' ideas anymore. So in a sense those examples actually don't relativize your point, but strengthen it. Ideas are usually much more vague, they point in a general direction. Another interesting fact about them is that they are often incremental, small and pragmatic, but they are just as much ideas as the big, exciting ones. Smaller, more practical ideas are my personal bread and butter. They also need to be taken apart, composed into a sound plan and implemented, but they don't ask for much.

veeralpatel979 7y ago

I would also add learning to evaluate your idea(s) objectively. When you think you've thought of a great idea, by definition, you're biased toward it. If you then start building it, the sunk cost makes you even more resistant to abandoning it. In my experience, just "building the product" can take a lot longer than you expect. I've spent several months building out what were mostly CRUD apps. Why? I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working part time, I had to figure out how to do many things for the first time, I had to keep myself motivated, and I had to do development but also design and PM work. If I was working on something new, I probably would: 1. think of a problem to work on 2. talk to a lot of users following the Mom Test (keeping in mind your product has many personas of users) to validate the problem 3. think of a lot of ideas to solve the problem 4. somehow identify what idea to prototype first and what the feature set should be 5. prototype it in Figma, show it to users, improve the prototype until customers are asking "when can I buy this?" I haven't done this yet. If anyone has any suggestions for getting from set of ideas -> a prototype users want, I would love to hear them!

cloudking 7y ago

I don't agree with the author. Sometimes good ideas solve problems people didn't know they had.

salmonet 7y ago
And sometimes ideas for "problems people don't know they have" are not good. I would guess this is more common.
quickthrower2 7y ago
I posit a problem you didn’t know you had is a problem the founder knew you had through some wisdom of the crowd or even just luck that their own itch is yours too.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Good article but execution matters. Execution is like sperm. There are plenty of eggs (i.e., ideas), never a shortage. But unless an egg is properly fertilized it's going no where. Futhermore, Team A can faulter at the execution of Idea X, but later Team B can pick up Idea X and do it right. For example, the ipod. The idea of an mp3 player wasn't new.

Thorentis 7y ago

Points 2 and 3 are almost identical for every single business on Indie Hackers. Subscription model. Internet delivery, with email and social media marketing. After that, you're back to the square 1 of "now I need an idea". The post had some good points, but for the IH audience I'm not sure it would change much about how they analyse business ideas.

quickthrower2 7y ago
An Indie Hacker isn’t going to buy a pub, or start a VC fueled startup for that matter. OTOH under the umbrella of internet delivered ideas there is a lot of choice as what to work on! And the internet bit could be trivial with most of the legwork going on in real life, or it could be a pure internet play all online with a rich app.

saadalem 7y ago

How do we ensure the upvotes on HN ? I posted this 3 days ago

olalonde 7y ago
It's a bit random. Depends on time of day, how "busy" the front page is, etc. Better luck next time!
quickthrower2 7y ago
You don’t ensure upvotes. Just luck. Getting your mates to upvote is against the rules, so best to just see what happens.

sonicxxg 7y ago

From the article : "It's been said that ideas don't matter, execution does. I wholeheartedly disagree. You need both to succeed, but you can only get so good at execution. A great idea gives you much more leverage." I think it underestimates execution. A great execution makes the dumbest ideas succeed. Reminds me of 'potatoparcel.com'. The business is solely focused on mailing potatoes, which sounds ridiculous, but it found its place.

goatherders 7y ago

The big nugget to me from my own experience is pricing. Early or inexperienced business founders charge too little. They charge just enough to make some money but not offend the wallet of the customer. This is all wrong - if your solution provides a real ROI then companies will pay a lot for it. Of your solution costs $1000 to solve a $1000000 problem then you are an idiot and priced too low by an order of magnitude.

flippy_flops 7y ago

This is good advice, but I think the fundamental issue for many people is that they are looking for a formula to supplement their own brain. In reality there are many classes of successful businesses. It’s hard to explain the success of a restaurant franchise and of flappy bird in the same formula except to over generalize it as, “decent idea with decent execution and decent timing in front of a decent audience.” I do think posts like this are very helpful at eliminating dead end habits. I know I’m guilty of searching for a lock.

tappio 7y ago

There is an interesting bias going on here. I'm wondering how many people upvoting this text has actually built a business, or just want to believe that what was written here is true? Building a business is messy. Most ideas suck initially. Companies who got the problem right the first time are extremely rare. Just as rare as companies who succeeded with a crappy idea having great execution. The hero ingredient is luck. Using all the tricks of the non scientific entrepreneurship self-help literature may grant you better odds at getting lucky, or may not. You know if the problem/idea/execution was good/real after you have customers paying you. And even after that you don't really know was it execution or idea that won the game, only that they were enough good to succeed.

_Understated_ 7y ago
> The hero ingredient is luck. This... 100% this! I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed. I teach entrepreneurs to pitch and tell them to go to relevant events. Consistently. They may need to go to 200 events and pitch at them because you have no idea what one of those 200 events will give you the break you are looking for. And then at event 124 someone says "hey, I have that problem, let's talk"... Now, it's not all about pitching at events but I'm trying to get across the story that you need to consistently do something for a while so that when luck strikes at that particular time you are there. The chances of getting lucky right out the door are very slim. Also, I make sure they understand this: Love the problem, not the solution!
- ak39 7y ago
  >>I've mentored and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs and small businesses over the last few years and I mention this to all of them but it's not a case of "if I wait around I'll get lucky". You still need to be active and work hard and fix the right problem with the right solution and then, if you get lucky, you'll succeed.<< Basically "keep trying and working on whatever until you either get lucky, run out of money or give up hope". (Ultimate failure being the act of giving up and trying something totally different.)

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

Starting small isn't universally applicable advice. It depends on competition and availability of substitutes. It's also an approach that will yield no more than small gains at a time.

Giorgi 7y ago

I think what all these kinds of articles are forgetting is luck. It's a lottery.

aliswe 7y ago

> iOS users who need to get tasks done but prefer modern, clean UIs", that's not an actual group of people. You're just describing the features of a product you're already biased toward building.