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The main reason this didn't work is that the founder didn't identify a customer willing to spend money. A lot of startups fail because they never identify a cu

The main reason this didn't work is that the founder didn't identify a customer willing to spend money. A lot of startups fail because they never identify a customer. Or even a problem. This one failed because before writing a line of code the founder did not take the next step and ensure that the prospective customer was willing to spend money on a solution. This is why so many failing startups try to pivot to two-sided business models like advertising. That's one of the hardest businesses there is to start. And it's what the founder did here, too. It sounds obvious stated as follows, but every startup failure I've read or heard about fails to get these ducks in a row: - problem to be solved - customer who has the problem - customer willing to spend money to solve the problem - enough customers willing to spend money on solving the problem to fuel a startup Oddly enough, many of the startup success stories gloss over these fundamental components. The net result is that there's way too much emphasis on the idea and not nearly enough on the customer.

andi999 5y ago
Well, successful business means paying customers, that is almost a tautology. You could also say they didnt identify how to make money. The big question is how do you get people to give you money for your services/product. Classically people answer this with emphasis on the idea.
- ilamont 5y ago
  > successful business means paying customers In the startup world, founders have been taught that "success" means things other than making money, such as large "valuations" that are not tied to profit or even revenue. Another founder "success" is VC or angel funding, or getting on some list ("top founders under 30!") or media coverage. "Exit" is also a "success" even if the sale is underwater or not worth much. > You could also say they didnt identify how to make money. For a time, there was a school of thought that as long as you had incredible growth/usage for your app or service, making money wasn't important because someone would buy you.
- achillesheels 5y ago
  I believe the answer rests in offering a solution to a problem that is worth more time than money to solve on one's own, or a new solution that creates more opportunities for a customer to grow their profitability.
ilamont 5y ago
That's right. A lot of founders don't make it to #3 in your list, or they only get the "make something people want" part. It's not enough. Build something people want and will pay for. Not just say they want. Not just say they'll pay for. Make something that they see and will immediately take out their cash/cc/paypal/venmo and pay for on the spot.
- MrMan 5y ago
  the last 10 years of internet history show however that you can create something that one group wants, which creates value and a product that another group will pay for, they are not necessarily one in the same
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I've noticed this a lot - I think people are far too quick to take face-to-face positive feedback at, no pun intended, face value. To me, it seems like a pretty elementary mistake, but I think that oftentimes people are more subconsciously desiring external validation than accurate assessments.
  - Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
    This chimes a lot with what I've seen, and indeed, what I do myself. I had a few friends plough hard-earned money into a really bad start-up idea (basically an inferior pay-walled Wikipedia), and instead of telling them what I really thought of it, I weaselled out saying something bland, non-committal and mildly supportive.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Hence my rule “only ask for startup advice from friends who have told you previous ideas were incredibly stupid”.
  - carimura 5y ago
    can't remember where I heard this but the advice was basically this: When pitching your idea, and generating excitement, ask for money (or a commitment) on the spot. There's a big difference between saying you'd pay for something, and paying for something. The flip side is that sometimes it takes awhile to build the perception of value, hence free trials/freemium models. Get people hooked, then ask for $. There are many ways to be successful (and even more ways to be unsuccessful).
snarf21 5y ago
Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. Scale is unlikely.
- klabb3 5y ago
  > Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. I always feel discomfort when this gets parroted. It's clearly not true, unless you're willing to shift the definitions of "idea" and "execution" around after-the-fact. Indeed the article comes to the conclusion that the idea is near-impossible to execute – due to realities within the business domain of healthcare. If the idea was "nothing", good execution could've fixed it.
  - snarf21 5y ago
    Well, in this case, it was the "brilliant" idea they thought it was. At first, they thought end users would pay but never even stopped to think about what they would pay to be recommended Aleve over Advil, (probably $0.00). Secondly, they thought Drs (providers) would be key but then were somehow dumb founded that they wouldn't pay for this service because it doesn't really solve a problem they have in the current fee-for-service model. Now, there are companies that plug into EMRs that do medication reconciliation (MedRec) that help look for conflicting medicines and tracking patients current med and compliance, etc. There are lots of players and they need a way to differentiate. They mostly all have very similar offerings. THIS is who wants want the person was making. Additionally, they could probably get the pharma companies to give them the clinical data so that their more effective medicine shows up higher in the list when meds are suggested. So, yes, I think execution could have fixed this. But they were selling to the wrong person because they don't have any background in healthcare and didn't hire a consultant who did before they hired 5 contractors to make a website and database.
    - klabb3 5y ago
      Yeah, not disagreeing. But the way I interpret the conclusion of this story, is that this wasn't a particularly startup friendly idea. I'm sure it's somewhat salvagable with the right strategy. My greater point is that ideas set the boundaries for what's possible in execution, which in turn means ideas are critical. If they were unimportant a shit idea would have little impact on the outcome, which is clearly not true. They could still be "overrated" though, but then we should use that language.
slowhand09 5y ago
Can't see it at work. But sounds like a "Cool product Bro!" rather than a "Take my money" product.
dchuk 5y ago
This is timely, as I’ve been riffing on a revised lean business canvas that much more directly digs into what you list as critical to any idea. I really need to publish and share that thing…
jfengel 5y ago
That's the fundamental problem of any startup. How can you identify a customer without any product to show them? You can define the existence of a market. You can know that there exists some customer with money and a problem you can solve. But that's not the same as being able to say, "Hey, wait a couple of years while I implement this thing. I don't suppose you'd be interested in paying up front?" Every successful startup has that moment of bravery where they commit their own money and hope that the customer still exists, and is actually willing to cough up money rather than continuing to do whatever they had been doing while they waited. Every failed startup had the same moment, only the customer turned out not to be willing to spend the money. There are obvious cases where they should have known that no customer existed. But there are also a lot of cases where they simply weren't in the right place at the right time. I think it's a nice myth that the business majors tell themselves that they would always have known beforehand, but it seems more like survivorship bias to me.
- altdataseller 5y ago
  You really need a very deep understanding of the pain points in the industry. If you're solving a problem that you yourself have, that gives you a higher probability that others in the industry has the exact same problem.
tedmcory77 5y ago
Yes. The problem needs to be pervasive, painful, and willing to pay to fix it.
- jollybean 5y ago
  No, it just needs to be the last part. It needs to be the first one to be big.
vjust 5y ago
His enthusiasm overtook everything. He felt the pain, rushed/designed a solution and everything. But he never followed the money trail. I felt like this was a glaring omission. Another consideration is you consider : your solution, the end-consumer , and stop there ... and if you forget there's a middle-man (the doctor in this case) thats a miss too.. Middle-persons always complicate the situation.
rmason 5y ago
OK, how about a startup that built something that was better for a completely solved problem on the web? They had no idea at all how they'd make money but there was a significant cost building and running the product. Yet VC's had no problem funding this moonshot startup. Then another startup invented a solution that could allow them to monetize. Only problem was that it was very controversial and there were dozens of blog articles criticizing the idea. But they adopted it anyway and found incredible success. That company if you haven't already recognized it was Google. Anytime you try and take your experience and generalize it across all startups you would be wrong.
- Retric 5y ago
  >This is why so many failing startups try to pivot to two-sided business models like advertising. That seems to cover Google just fine.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  They made it better and wrestled the position from the others. Yahoo and AltaVista weren't great and Google Search was far superior. Making things work better is way easier, than creating a completely new market.
chefandy 5y ago
Not an MBA or anything, but IMO startups glossing over their early business practices indicates luck rather than hiding good practices. That touches on another big, counterintuitive trap: listening to successful founder’s personal-myth-derived advice on generating success. Important skills attributed to founders— e.g. recognizing opportunity and talent, vision, etc.— are meaningless without simultaneously having the requisite resources and personal/professional circumstances to act. Chance changes our paths in complex, unknowable ways. It’s probably not psychologically feasible or even useful for them to precisely examine the unearned factors in their or their company’s success, but so many citing ‘hard work’ as the primary factor proves they don’t try. Implying they committed as much, let some hundreds of times more cognitive, emotional, or physical effort, or even as many hours as an NYC line cook aspiring to be a chef, is laughable. Not discounting these folks’ value, but asserting those with less simply have less ambition or work ethic without providing reasonable points of comparison is justification, not reason.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  I think people forget how much luck has to do with all of it. Location, timing, access and mistakes on the side of market players - are all a matter of luck. Google could not have started in 1998 in Russia. Microsoft would not have been Microsoft, without landing the MSDOS from IBM. So on and so forth.
  - achillesheels 5y ago
    Really? Google is a product of luck and not centuries of the willfully successful extensions of men, e.g. Leland Stanford, on this continent? What, in your estimation, can be controlled then?
    - chefandy 5y ago
      Even the most straightforward occurrences are contingent on many factors. If they wasn’t true, science would br pretty easy. Saying founders heavily discount the importance of luck is different from saying it was entirely random.
synergy20 5y ago
I have a half-baked product in the making for 4 years but never had enough time (and skill) to fully make it, every time I asked potential customers all of them wanted it right away except I could not finish it. Tried to apply for HN to no avail. I just need some investment(500K should do it in one year) to hire one or two developers to help to ship the product really, but I don't know how, which is why I'm back to work full time these days.
- datalopers 5y ago
  > 500K should do it in one year Do it in your spare time without burning so much capital. As much as YC wants you to think otherwise, VC money isn't some magical gatekeeper to innovation. Just build.
- standeven 5y ago
  Find a technical co-founder, join some other accelerator, and develop the MVP. Not many investors will drop $500k into an idea.
  - synergy20 5y ago
    I'm fairly technical myself, mostly I need someone good at frontend(vuejs), where I need help to design nice UI for the (embedded device) product. I spent my own time learning vuejs but, not as fast as I wanted so far, I am a low level developer coding in c/c++ basically. I have been thinking about hiring a (cheaper) overseas vuejs3 developer for a while using my own money, the reality is that, hiring is more challenging than learning vuejs, so I stuck with the latter, but, it's slow.
    - Workaccount2 5y ago
      I see "embedded" and get scared. Hardware is an order of magnitude (or nine, twelve) more difficult than a software startup. Expensive rev'ing, long turn arounds, supply chain mayhem, overseas production, profits thinner than the paper they are printed on. The hardware graveyard of kickstarter is chock full of dreamy eyed hardware guys for good reason.
tomhallett 5y ago
somewhat implicit in "customer willing to spend money to solve the problem" is: are they willing to spend time to solve the problem right now (integrating your software into their application, migrating to your app, etc). Often times customers will have the problem you can solve, but it's far down on their list of priorities.
jasfi 5y ago
This is why MVP exists. However validation is often needed much earlier. I think a prototype that works visually only, then collecting pre-orders, is the way to go.
- randomdata 5y ago
  As the name implies, the Minimum Viable Product exists as a way to build the least amount necessary to start generating enough revenue to keep the business viable while you expand the scope of the product to realize your full vision. The MVP isn't for proving the market, but rather capturing a small segment of the market to fund expansion into the much larger market. The validation that there is a market should take place before creating the MVP, like you say.
  - hgomersall 5y ago
    This is completely different to an MVP as defined in The Lean Startup. It's absolutely about proving whatever needs proving.
    - randomdata 5y ago
      Proving what needs to be proven is the role of the prototype. That can also be an important step on your journey, but the MVP is about building a product that is considered viable. Literally. If you don't yet know what is viable in the market, how could you even begin to build something that is viable? You don't yet know what viable means.
      - IanCal 5y ago
        I've had this argument before, from the same side you're coming at it from, and I was wrong. It's really not about building a viable product in that sense - the Dropbox demo video is the classic example of an MVP that isn't a "product" as such.
        randomdata 5y ago
lkrubner 5y ago
Over the last 20 years I've consulted with maybe 30 entrepreneurs, and what I find is that some of them get too caught up in the dream of some day being rich and famous. The ones who are successful are the ones who remain pragmatic and stay focused on what they need to do today. The irony is that, even for the dreamers, all their dreams can come true: they might some day be rich and famous and yet, perhaps paradoxically, the best way to make that happen is to not think about it, and instead stay focused on what you can do for your real customers, right now, today. (At the risk of too much self-promotion, I recently wrote a book, "One on one meetings are underrated; Group meetings waste time" and I devote a long chapter to 2 stories of pragmatic success contrasted with 2 stories of failure due to dreaming.)
gumby 5y ago
Strongly agree! Often ppl don’t even make it to your second criterion. I was helping a friend’s son start a consumer service business (automating a manual process for postoperative and elder care with a conversation backed by GPT-3). Seemed like a great idea to me. I asked my M.D. mother if she’d use it. Definitely would, and would pay for it if it worked. If it worked? Uuuh… I asked my mum a different question: if your doctor told you to use this would you? “Definitely not”. The kid has a dozen people using the MVP. He knew them all of course, or they were the parents of his friends. So I suggested he let me know when he had n people whom he didn’t know using this for more than 30 days. First n was 50 people, then 25, finally I said just anyone. So far, nope. Idea: valuable (to humanity). But not yet “V”
megablast 5y ago
Yea. That what he says.
crispyambulance 5y ago
To be fair, those "ducks-in-a-row" questions are NOT easy to answer and it's easy for someone to fool themselves with a BS answer. Moreover, there are plenty of ridiculous ideas that someone would never think anybody would "pay for" that make tons of money in spite of themselves. In the end it's all about taking calculated risks. Should the OP have learned more about the market he was trying to operate in AT SOME POINT before quitting his day job, hiring five "contractors" and writing 200000 lines of code in 9 months? Sure. Was it a worthwhile experience that gave him more wisdom? Hard to say. To be honest I am surprised he only blew 40K, it could have been a lot worse.
- acegopher 5y ago
  Right, even VCs don't know the answers. But the difference between a VC and a founder is that a VC invests in 100 companies not knowing which will succeed, but a founder only is investing in one.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    And since VCs make practically all of their returns from that one hypergrowth 1000x company, they can push founders to swing for the fences even though that also makes startups more likely to fail. For many founders, a 5x return would still be a life altering result, but to most VCs that doesn't really move the needle. It's nicer than 0x of course, but no more than that.
- icedchai 5y ago
  Yes... All things considered, he got away pretty cheap. I know guys who spent most of their life savings and millions of investor money, working on an incredible opportunity that didn't pan out.
sanderjd 5y ago
This is right, but it's also clear why this happens: a lot of the best known success stories from a decade or two ago were "if you build it they will come and you will one day figure out how to make money from that". Google, Facebook, Instagram. It takes awhile for the conventional wisdom borne of a mythology like that to shift. Heck, we're probably in the process of shifting it too far; we may well be lamenting a decade from now that nobody is doing anything besides B2B because it's too hard to find customers who want to pay for things outside that space.
- istillwritecode 5y ago
  The barrier to entry for advertising was pretty small when Google entered it. They worked hard on pricing models, ads relevance, ads quality, and making it unobtrusive to users (in the beginning). That's what allowed them to gain traction. The barrier to entry in advertising is much higher now, but if you have a standout product (like TikTok) then it's possible to gain enough eyeballs to get you through the initial period with advertising.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    Right. But it is not surprising that it is taking awhile for that new conventional wisdom to sink in.
robertlagrant 5y ago
I think they did do that: doctors. They just didn't realise that doctors need to be financially incentivised to search for better health outcomes.
- ar_turnbull 5y ago
  Feels like a failure of business model imagination or just not enough runway to try something different to me. OP didn't even take three swings at bat. It's not the sexiest market if you're looking to win a Nobel prize (lol) but insurance companies seems like a potential customer with a large financial incentive...
Melatonic 5y ago
Yea I agree. You can even be solving a problem in a super amazing way but if there are no customers willing to spend the money for it then you are just making a home project for yourself. I also see a lot of people fail because they solve a problem that THEY themselves are having but that does not actually happen to a large enough set of people that it translates again to something businesses or individuals will pay for. Realistically I think the best way to do a startup is being willing to pivot hard and fast and early if necessary or to completely drop a project and move on to something else. If it is a passion project you are doing for yourself that is one thing - if you actually want to start a real business you cannot get caught in the time-already-sunk mentality.
Gatsky 5y ago
The main reason it didn’t work was because the idea was bad. See salient comments from previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25827610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25827610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829290
- kmonsen 5y ago
  The important thing is that the founder (and probably many of us would think similarly) is that even now after it failed they still think there are other reasons it failed and that there was a great idea that failed due to ... technicalities. But as you mention and seems to be widely believed is that this is a bad idea in general, or at the very least not as good as the OP thinks.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  One of the comments was >With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something. Or maybe the idea is bad. I see this line of thought all the time sometimes implied by the misattributed Gandhi quote.
trollied 5y ago
It’s bonkers. I have the opposite problem. I have a live customer (which is an accident, I was sort of doing him a favour), but now I have a waiting list for new paying clients and not enough spare time. I can’t quit my job yet. I’ll get there!
ar_turnbull 5y ago
I mean I guess it wasn't really that "fantastic" of an idea, but that aside it feels like OP was lacking imagination in terms of the addressable market. He tried the two markets with the most obvious business model -- consumers and doctors. But if consumers weren't going to work because the advertising revenue wasn't lucrative enough, and doctors weren't willing to pay for the solution, then it's time to get creative. What about insurance companies? Insurance companies have a vested interest in picking the right drug because they are on the hook if the outcome isn't good. Or what about the pharmaceutical companies themselves? Would they pay for the data for use in their own marketing campaigns much like "4 out of 5 dentists agree"? TLDR; OP went all in on two obvious markets but didn't think out of the box in terms of who might be willing to pay for his product.
- IanCal 5y ago
  Government grants to create and release this kind of thing is another direction. Or just for internal analysis.
efficax 5y ago
before spending $40k and his own time he should have made a mockup of the software invested just a few hundred bucks in interviews with his intended customers, would have found out quite soon that it had no product-market fit
- biermic 5y ago
  What are some possible ways to invest a few hundred bucks, for getting interviews with intended customers? I'm truly curious. Or do you mean he should have invested into a designer to create mockups?
  - efficax 5y ago
    You can do user testing, you can call up people in the industries and ask them, you can do a Kickstarter and spend a little on advertising it to see if it gets any traction, but mostly the reaching out to people in the target market and compensating them for a user interview
    - biermic 5y ago
      Appreciate your answer. I built a very niche monitoring product for sysadmins. Actually I built it for myself three years ago, but I want to explore if others would pay for it. If you are in the space, or anyone else who reads this I'd be grateful to receive some feedback on a 10 minute video call.

andi999 5y ago

Well, successful business means paying customers, that is almost a tautology. You could also say they didnt identify how to make money. The big question is how do you get people to give you money for your services/product. Classically people answer this with emphasis on the idea.

ilamont 5y ago
> successful business means paying customers In the startup world, founders have been taught that "success" means things other than making money, such as large "valuations" that are not tied to profit or even revenue. Another founder "success" is VC or angel funding, or getting on some list ("top founders under 30!") or media coverage. "Exit" is also a "success" even if the sale is underwater or not worth much. > You could also say they didnt identify how to make money. For a time, there was a school of thought that as long as you had incredible growth/usage for your app or service, making money wasn't important because someone would buy you.
achillesheels 5y ago
I believe the answer rests in offering a solution to a problem that is worth more time than money to solve on one's own, or a new solution that creates more opportunities for a customer to grow their profitability.

ilamont 5y ago

That's right. A lot of founders don't make it to #3 in your list, or they only get the "make something people want" part. It's not enough. Build something people want and will pay for. Not just say they want. Not just say they'll pay for. Make something that they see and will immediately take out their cash/cc/paypal/venmo and pay for on the spot.

MrMan 5y ago
the last 10 years of internet history show however that you can create something that one group wants, which creates value and a product that another group will pay for, they are not necessarily one in the same
whimsicalism 5y ago
I've noticed this a lot - I think people are far too quick to take face-to-face positive feedback at, no pun intended, face value. To me, it seems like a pretty elementary mistake, but I think that oftentimes people are more subconsciously desiring external validation than accurate assessments.
- Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
  This chimes a lot with what I've seen, and indeed, what I do myself. I had a few friends plough hard-earned money into a really bad start-up idea (basically an inferior pay-walled Wikipedia), and instead of telling them what I really thought of it, I weaselled out saying something bland, non-committal and mildly supportive.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Hence my rule “only ask for startup advice from friends who have told you previous ideas were incredibly stupid”.
- carimura 5y ago
  can't remember where I heard this but the advice was basically this: When pitching your idea, and generating excitement, ask for money (or a commitment) on the spot. There's a big difference between saying you'd pay for something, and paying for something. The flip side is that sometimes it takes awhile to build the perception of value, hence free trials/freemium models. Get people hooked, then ask for $. There are many ways to be successful (and even more ways to be unsuccessful).

snarf21 5y ago

Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. Scale is unlikely.

klabb3 5y ago
> Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. I always feel discomfort when this gets parroted. It's clearly not true, unless you're willing to shift the definitions of "idea" and "execution" around after-the-fact. Indeed the article comes to the conclusion that the idea is near-impossible to execute – due to realities within the business domain of healthcare. If the idea was "nothing", good execution could've fixed it.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Well, in this case, it was the "brilliant" idea they thought it was. At first, they thought end users would pay but never even stopped to think about what they would pay to be recommended Aleve over Advil, (probably $0.00). Secondly, they thought Drs (providers) would be key but then were somehow dumb founded that they wouldn't pay for this service because it doesn't really solve a problem they have in the current fee-for-service model. Now, there are companies that plug into EMRs that do medication reconciliation (MedRec) that help look for conflicting medicines and tracking patients current med and compliance, etc. There are lots of players and they need a way to differentiate. They mostly all have very similar offerings. THIS is who wants want the person was making. Additionally, they could probably get the pharma companies to give them the clinical data so that their more effective medicine shows up higher in the list when meds are suggested. So, yes, I think execution could have fixed this. But they were selling to the wrong person because they don't have any background in healthcare and didn't hire a consultant who did before they hired 5 contractors to make a website and database.
  - klabb3 5y ago
    Yeah, not disagreeing. But the way I interpret the conclusion of this story, is that this wasn't a particularly startup friendly idea. I'm sure it's somewhat salvagable with the right strategy. My greater point is that ideas set the boundaries for what's possible in execution, which in turn means ideas are critical. If they were unimportant a shit idea would have little impact on the outcome, which is clearly not true. They could still be "overrated" though, but then we should use that language.

slowhand09 5y ago

Can't see it at work. But sounds like a "Cool product Bro!" rather than a "Take my money" product.

dchuk 5y ago

This is timely, as I’ve been riffing on a revised lean business canvas that much more directly digs into what you list as critical to any idea. I really need to publish and share that thing…

jfengel 5y ago

That's the fundamental problem of any startup. How can you identify a customer without any product to show them? You can define the existence of a market. You can know that there exists some customer with money and a problem you can solve. But that's not the same as being able to say, "Hey, wait a couple of years while I implement this thing. I don't suppose you'd be interested in paying up front?" Every successful startup has that moment of bravery where they commit their own money and hope that the customer still exists, and is actually willing to cough up money rather than continuing to do whatever they had been doing while they waited. Every failed startup had the same moment, only the customer turned out not to be willing to spend the money. There are obvious cases where they should have known that no customer existed. But there are also a lot of cases where they simply weren't in the right place at the right time. I think it's a nice myth that the business majors tell themselves that they would always have known beforehand, but it seems more like survivorship bias to me.

altdataseller 5y ago
You really need a very deep understanding of the pain points in the industry. If you're solving a problem that you yourself have, that gives you a higher probability that others in the industry has the exact same problem.

tedmcory77 5y ago

Yes. The problem needs to be pervasive, painful, and willing to pay to fix it.

jollybean 5y ago
No, it just needs to be the last part. It needs to be the first one to be big.

vjust 5y ago

His enthusiasm overtook everything. He felt the pain, rushed/designed a solution and everything. But he never followed the money trail. I felt like this was a glaring omission. Another consideration is you consider : your solution, the end-consumer , and stop there ... and if you forget there's a middle-man (the doctor in this case) thats a miss too.. Middle-persons always complicate the situation.

rmason 5y ago

OK, how about a startup that built something that was better for a completely solved problem on the web? They had no idea at all how they'd make money but there was a significant cost building and running the product. Yet VC's had no problem funding this moonshot startup. Then another startup invented a solution that could allow them to monetize. Only problem was that it was very controversial and there were dozens of blog articles criticizing the idea. But they adopted it anyway and found incredible success. That company if you haven't already recognized it was Google. Anytime you try and take your experience and generalize it across all startups you would be wrong.

Retric 5y ago
>This is why so many failing startups try to pivot to two-sided business models like advertising. That seems to cover Google just fine.
JAlexoid 5y ago
They made it better and wrestled the position from the others. Yahoo and AltaVista weren't great and Google Search was far superior. Making things work better is way easier, than creating a completely new market.

chefandy 5y ago

Not an MBA or anything, but IMO startups glossing over their early business practices indicates luck rather than hiding good practices. That touches on another big, counterintuitive trap: listening to successful founder’s personal-myth-derived advice on generating success. Important skills attributed to founders— e.g. recognizing opportunity and talent, vision, etc.— are meaningless without simultaneously having the requisite resources and personal/professional circumstances to act. Chance changes our paths in complex, unknowable ways. It’s probably not psychologically feasible or even useful for them to precisely examine the unearned factors in their or their company’s success, but so many citing ‘hard work’ as the primary factor proves they don’t try. Implying they committed as much, let some hundreds of times more cognitive, emotional, or physical effort, or even as many hours as an NYC line cook aspiring to be a chef, is laughable. Not discounting these folks’ value, but asserting those with less simply have less ambition or work ethic without providing reasonable points of comparison is justification, not reason.

JAlexoid 5y ago
I think people forget how much luck has to do with all of it. Location, timing, access and mistakes on the side of market players - are all a matter of luck. Google could not have started in 1998 in Russia. Microsoft would not have been Microsoft, without landing the MSDOS from IBM. So on and so forth.
- achillesheels 5y ago
  Really? Google is a product of luck and not centuries of the willfully successful extensions of men, e.g. Leland Stanford, on this continent? What, in your estimation, can be controlled then?
  - chefandy 5y ago
    Even the most straightforward occurrences are contingent on many factors. If they wasn’t true, science would br pretty easy. Saying founders heavily discount the importance of luck is different from saying it was entirely random.

synergy20 5y ago

I have a half-baked product in the making for 4 years but never had enough time (and skill) to fully make it, every time I asked potential customers all of them wanted it right away except I could not finish it. Tried to apply for HN to no avail. I just need some investment(500K should do it in one year) to hire one or two developers to help to ship the product really, but I don't know how, which is why I'm back to work full time these days.

datalopers 5y ago
> 500K should do it in one year Do it in your spare time without burning so much capital. As much as YC wants you to think otherwise, VC money isn't some magical gatekeeper to innovation. Just build.
standeven 5y ago
Find a technical co-founder, join some other accelerator, and develop the MVP. Not many investors will drop $500k into an idea.
- synergy20 5y ago
  I'm fairly technical myself, mostly I need someone good at frontend(vuejs), where I need help to design nice UI for the (embedded device) product. I spent my own time learning vuejs but, not as fast as I wanted so far, I am a low level developer coding in c/c++ basically. I have been thinking about hiring a (cheaper) overseas vuejs3 developer for a while using my own money, the reality is that, hiring is more challenging than learning vuejs, so I stuck with the latter, but, it's slow.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    I see "embedded" and get scared. Hardware is an order of magnitude (or nine, twelve) more difficult than a software startup. Expensive rev'ing, long turn arounds, supply chain mayhem, overseas production, profits thinner than the paper they are printed on. The hardware graveyard of kickstarter is chock full of dreamy eyed hardware guys for good reason.

tomhallett 5y ago

somewhat implicit in "customer willing to spend money to solve the problem" is: are they willing to spend time to solve the problem right now (integrating your software into their application, migrating to your app, etc). Often times customers will have the problem you can solve, but it's far down on their list of priorities.

jasfi 5y ago

This is why MVP exists. However validation is often needed much earlier. I think a prototype that works visually only, then collecting pre-orders, is the way to go.

randomdata 5y ago
As the name implies, the Minimum Viable Product exists as a way to build the least amount necessary to start generating enough revenue to keep the business viable while you expand the scope of the product to realize your full vision. The MVP isn't for proving the market, but rather capturing a small segment of the market to fund expansion into the much larger market. The validation that there is a market should take place before creating the MVP, like you say.
- hgomersall 5y ago
  This is completely different to an MVP as defined in The Lean Startup. It's absolutely about proving whatever needs proving.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    Proving what needs to be proven is the role of the prototype. That can also be an important step on your journey, but the MVP is about building a product that is considered viable. Literally. If you don't yet know what is viable in the market, how could you even begin to build something that is viable? You don't yet know what viable means.
    - IanCal 5y ago
      I've had this argument before, from the same side you're coming at it from, and I was wrong. It's really not about building a viable product in that sense - the Dropbox demo video is the classic example of an MVP that isn't a "product" as such.
      - randomdata 5y ago

lkrubner 5y ago

Over the last 20 years I've consulted with maybe 30 entrepreneurs, and what I find is that some of them get too caught up in the dream of some day being rich and famous. The ones who are successful are the ones who remain pragmatic and stay focused on what they need to do today. The irony is that, even for the dreamers, all their dreams can come true: they might some day be rich and famous and yet, perhaps paradoxically, the best way to make that happen is to not think about it, and instead stay focused on what you can do for your real customers, right now, today. (At the risk of too much self-promotion, I recently wrote a book, "One on one meetings are underrated; Group meetings waste time" and I devote a long chapter to 2 stories of pragmatic success contrasted with 2 stories of failure due to dreaming.)

gumby 5y ago

Strongly agree! Often ppl don’t even make it to your second criterion. I was helping a friend’s son start a consumer service business (automating a manual process for postoperative and elder care with a conversation backed by GPT-3). Seemed like a great idea to me. I asked my M.D. mother if she’d use it. Definitely would, and would pay for it if it worked. If it worked? Uuuh… I asked my mum a different question: if your doctor told you to use this would you? “Definitely not”. The kid has a dozen people using the MVP. He knew them all of course, or they were the parents of his friends. So I suggested he let me know when he had n people whom he didn’t know using this for more than 30 days. First n was 50 people, then 25, finally I said just anyone. So far, nope. Idea: valuable (to humanity). But not yet “V”

megablast 5y ago

Yea. That what he says.

crispyambulance 5y ago

To be fair, those "ducks-in-a-row" questions are NOT easy to answer and it's easy for someone to fool themselves with a BS answer. Moreover, there are plenty of ridiculous ideas that someone would never think anybody would "pay for" that make tons of money in spite of themselves. In the end it's all about taking calculated risks. Should the OP have learned more about the market he was trying to operate in AT SOME POINT before quitting his day job, hiring five "contractors" and writing 200000 lines of code in 9 months? Sure. Was it a worthwhile experience that gave him more wisdom? Hard to say. To be honest I am surprised he only blew 40K, it could have been a lot worse.

acegopher 5y ago
Right, even VCs don't know the answers. But the difference between a VC and a founder is that a VC invests in 100 companies not knowing which will succeed, but a founder only is investing in one.
- webmaven 5y ago
  And since VCs make practically all of their returns from that one hypergrowth 1000x company, they can push founders to swing for the fences even though that also makes startups more likely to fail. For many founders, a 5x return would still be a life altering result, but to most VCs that doesn't really move the needle. It's nicer than 0x of course, but no more than that.
icedchai 5y ago
Yes... All things considered, he got away pretty cheap. I know guys who spent most of their life savings and millions of investor money, working on an incredible opportunity that didn't pan out.

sanderjd 5y ago

This is right, but it's also clear why this happens: a lot of the best known success stories from a decade or two ago were "if you build it they will come and you will one day figure out how to make money from that". Google, Facebook, Instagram. It takes awhile for the conventional wisdom borne of a mythology like that to shift. Heck, we're probably in the process of shifting it too far; we may well be lamenting a decade from now that nobody is doing anything besides B2B because it's too hard to find customers who want to pay for things outside that space.

istillwritecode 5y ago
The barrier to entry for advertising was pretty small when Google entered it. They worked hard on pricing models, ads relevance, ads quality, and making it unobtrusive to users (in the beginning). That's what allowed them to gain traction. The barrier to entry in advertising is much higher now, but if you have a standout product (like TikTok) then it's possible to gain enough eyeballs to get you through the initial period with advertising.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Right. But it is not surprising that it is taking awhile for that new conventional wisdom to sink in.

robertlagrant 5y ago

I think they did do that: doctors. They just didn't realise that doctors need to be financially incentivised to search for better health outcomes.

ar_turnbull 5y ago
Feels like a failure of business model imagination or just not enough runway to try something different to me. OP didn't even take three swings at bat. It's not the sexiest market if you're looking to win a Nobel prize (lol) but insurance companies seems like a potential customer with a large financial incentive...

Melatonic 5y ago

Yea I agree. You can even be solving a problem in a super amazing way but if there are no customers willing to spend the money for it then you are just making a home project for yourself. I also see a lot of people fail because they solve a problem that THEY themselves are having but that does not actually happen to a large enough set of people that it translates again to something businesses or individuals will pay for. Realistically I think the best way to do a startup is being willing to pivot hard and fast and early if necessary or to completely drop a project and move on to something else. If it is a passion project you are doing for yourself that is one thing - if you actually want to start a real business you cannot get caught in the time-already-sunk mentality.

Gatsky 5y ago

The main reason it didn’t work was because the idea was bad. See salient comments from previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25827610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25827610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25829290

kmonsen 5y ago
The important thing is that the founder (and probably many of us would think similarly) is that even now after it failed they still think there are other reasons it failed and that there was a great idea that failed due to ... technicalities. But as you mention and seems to be widely believed is that this is a bad idea in general, or at the very least not as good as the OP thinks.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
One of the comments was >With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something. Or maybe the idea is bad. I see this line of thought all the time sometimes implied by the misattributed Gandhi quote.

trollied 5y ago

It’s bonkers. I have the opposite problem. I have a live customer (which is an accident, I was sort of doing him a favour), but now I have a waiting list for new paying clients and not enough spare time. I can’t quit my job yet. I’ll get there!

ar_turnbull 5y ago

I mean I guess it wasn't really that "fantastic" of an idea, but that aside it feels like OP was lacking imagination in terms of the addressable market. He tried the two markets with the most obvious business model -- consumers and doctors. But if consumers weren't going to work because the advertising revenue wasn't lucrative enough, and doctors weren't willing to pay for the solution, then it's time to get creative. What about insurance companies? Insurance companies have a vested interest in picking the right drug because they are on the hook if the outcome isn't good. Or what about the pharmaceutical companies themselves? Would they pay for the data for use in their own marketing campaigns much like "4 out of 5 dentists agree"? TLDR; OP went all in on two obvious markets but didn't think out of the box in terms of who might be willing to pay for his product.

IanCal 5y ago
Government grants to create and release this kind of thing is another direction. Or just for internal analysis.

efficax 5y ago

before spending $40k and his own time he should have made a mockup of the software invested just a few hundred bucks in interviews with his intended customers, would have found out quite soon that it had no product-market fit

biermic 5y ago
What are some possible ways to invest a few hundred bucks, for getting interviews with intended customers? I'm truly curious. Or do you mean he should have invested into a designer to create mockups?
- efficax 5y ago
  You can do user testing, you can call up people in the industries and ask them, you can do a Kickstarter and spend a little on advertising it to see if it gets any traction, but mostly the reaching out to people in the target market and compensating them for a user interview
  - biermic 5y ago
    Appreciate your answer. I built a very niche monitoring product for sysadmins. Actually I built it for myself three years ago, but I want to explore if others would pay for it. If you are in the space, or anyone else who reads this I'd be grateful to receive some feedback on a 10 minute video call.