5 ms·

8 "frat-boy" business ideas

55 points by jasonlbaptiste 18y ago

swombat 18y ago
This article started well, but the list of "frat-boy ideas" was actually quite poor and unhelpful... seemed more like examples of business types the author doesn't like rather than inherently stupid ideas. Also, he seems under the fallacious impression that better ideas are somehow easier to implement. Sorry, pal - good ideas are just as hard to pull off as bad ideas.
- neilk 18y ago
  You lost me. What differentiates good and bad ideas other than the difficulty of pulling them off? Speaking in the abstract, of course. In reality difficulty is relative, because we all have different resources to draw on.
  - swombat 18y ago
    Good ideas have a better chance of success - but they also take stupid amounts of work, luck, timing, skill, etc. The t-shirt idea that he mentions, for instance, is a good example of an idea that is neither good nor bad. Basing a business around a handful of t-shirts is obviously a bad move, but a t-shirt business can certainly be created - and in fact that has been done many times already. There's nothing inherently bad about the idea. You could say that building a search engine in 1996 is an very difficult idea - lots of hard work, little chance of success, lots of established competitors, and requires a rare breakthrough, incredible amounts of work marketing the new engine and getting all sorts of larger companies to use it, etc, etc. Does that make it a bad idea? Hardly. Ideas are only a small component of success - execution is far more important. If the aforementioned frat boy are willing to give it their all and are competent enough, they can likely make any of these ideas succeed. Even if they fail, it's at least a great learning experience. I say go frat boys, go.
mixmax 18y ago
Now that the article mentions coffee shops: A good friend of mine started a coffeeshop six years ago, and today he has four of them. He drives a mercedes and has a huge house overlooking the ocean. He started with nothing.
- tptacek 18y ago
  It's a good anecdote, but the data seems to overwhelmingly favor his argument.
  - neilk 18y ago
    Counter-anecdote: "My Coffeehouse Nightmare". http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/ http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/
    - Tichy 18y ago
      They should have read "The E Myth Revisited" first, about the "turnkey revolution". I think it is still possible too succeed with coffeehouses, but one shouldn't be romantic about it...
  - mixmax 18y ago
    I absolutely agree, I just thought a success story would be nice in a world where most startups fail :-)
    - patio11 18y ago
      This is largely off-topic: Speaking as a guy who used to work for a local technology incubator, I really really hate the "most startups fail" factoid because it unintentionally distorts the statistic. The statistic is that most new businesses will not be going concerns X years after inception. This is true, but it does not indicate failure. I find this to be clarifying: if someone asked you for advice, saying (with wavering voice) "I'm considering taking a... job... where this company, like, pays me money every other week... is this safe?!", would you say "Pfft, most jobs fail"? Because most twentysomethings who start a job today will not be employed at the same job, by the same company, in 5 years. My second "real job" was with the aforementioned technology incubator. I worked there three years, made decent money and learned a lot, and had a better opportunity when it came to contract renegotiation, so I took it. If I had been a startup at the same incubator, that would have put me in the "fail" column. Is there any sanity in that definition of fail? (Give me another few months and I'll be failing my way forward out of the better opportunity, hopefully.)
ahoyhere 18y ago
I think the point is that the "frat boy" ideas come most often to people who have a romantic idea of business, but lack the will to actually make it happen. So if they don't really have the will to do it, then yes, one should discourage them from doing it. For their own good. People with will will ignore the advice anyway. (Will will will!) That said, the desire to build a book exchange is like a nerd disease.
lallysingh 18y ago
Loved the article. Going to school during the internet bubble, I heard most of these a lot. People want the independent business lifestyle, but don't spend more than 90 seconds thinking of the business idea. Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is. Hence the lack of analysis on if the business has been tried before, has current competitors, or what your costs per product would be comparatively.
- jjs 18y ago
  > Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is. On the other hand, if you don't price out the lifestyle you want (in terms of money and time), then you have no metric to determine whether a given business will be viable for you.
ROFISH 18y ago
I stopped reading at t-shirts because that's (kinda) my business. While it's not just about the t-shirts, I run a video game community and we sell legally unofficial merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies to support the website. If you have something you cannot advertise to (because there's no money in ads), and you cannot provide a 37signals style of direct service, never underestimate the power of merchandising.
- aston 18y ago
  If you're making money on merch, your business is your brand, not the t-shirts themselves. The article's only critical of people who think they're witty enough to sell t-shirts based just on the screen-printed content.
brianr 18y ago
NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I did a variation of this my freshman year, by actually buying about $10k of books from students on campus and then selling them on Amazon. We made about $3k all told... I guess the author is right that it didn't "really succeed" and become a huge business, but I definitely learned a ton. (And notably, Chegg is in this space and seems to be doing well enough to get Kleiner Perkins to join their $25m series B.) THERE IS NO MONEY IN T-SHIRTS. Nonsense. There's a lot of competition, but plenty of people are making tons of money. Anything where you plan to make your money exclusively from ads Bashing ad-supported business seems to be popular these days, but somehow those people are overlooking the fact that Google made $21B last year doing just this. Making significant money from ads requires getting to scale, but if you have the drive and the right mindset, getting there isn't as hard as you might think.
- Raphael 18y ago
  Google is an ad broker. A better comparison would be MySpace, which displays ads.
  - brianr 18y ago
    Most of Google's revenue comes from AdWords, the ads they run next to their search results, not from AdSense, their content network. From their 2008 Q4 earnings report ( http://investor.google.com/releases/2008Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/releases/2008Q4_google_earnings.h... ), Google-owned sites generated $3.81B while partner sites generated $1.69B.
    - t0pj 18y ago
      Google-owned sites generated $3.81B while partner sites generated $1.69B. I think the act of comparing the amount Google makes from AdWords to AdSense is moot -- Both of these channels are very successful. Both of these numbers end with a capital "B". So question: Do I become an ad broker and take on Google or simply utilize Google to display ads on my property and make some coin? At this point, I don't care how much Google is making off of me as a percentage, but I do care how much money I actually do put in my own pocket.
uberc 18y ago
This is more a screed against a "frat-boy" -- i.e. naive, un-thought-through -- approach to business ideas than a useful list of ideas to avoid.
burke 18y ago
Actually, I threw together a book exchange in a weekend and sold most of my books on it. Quite a few people are still using it. Granted, it doesn't make any money, and it's operated through the Engineering Student Society, so I guess it doesn't count.
danielrhodes 18y ago
There was an article linked to from there on Slate where this quote ended the piece "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love." That quote is both very true and very wrong. It's true that you can get into entrepreneurship with very idealistic values that drive you to ignore some of the more important financial aspects of running a business, and wrong in that if you don't do it for at least some type of love then you are probably going to fail for lack of passion.
pg 18y ago
The problem he's describing is certainly real. There are characteristic traps young founders fall into when thinking of startup ideas. I don't think he's gotten to the root of the problem, though. The root of the problem is not certain categories of ideas. It's a half-baked way of looking at the world. As long as you avoid that, there are good ideas to be had in several of the categories he describes. For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever? And if “Flickr + ___” is a recipe for failure, it wasn't always. YouTube's goal was to be the Flickr of video, and that worked out well for them.
- prospero 18y ago
  For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever? For better or worse, Google defines the baseline in online advertising. New companies can't compete on ubiquity, so their service has to be superior in how it targets specific demographics. Assuming that succeeds, they then have to then figure out how to leverage that limited dominance into something broader. It's certainly possible, but it's also certainly more difficult than it was ten years ago.
  - netcan 18y ago
    >so their service has to be superior in how it targets specific demographics I think you are mistaken. You are taking ideas from the old magazine world of advertising. I don't think demographics, appealing to a certain demographic or any such thing. Google's success has nothing to do with this. In fact, in many ways it is the opposite of magazine advertising. The normal ad model is distribute a magazine & plaster ads on it or create an event & plaster sponsors on it. The ad has nothing to do with the thing the ad is on. Google's model is different (for search anyway). For some businesses, being found on Google means business. They are willing to pay for Google to do what they do anyway, send searchers to web pages. They're genius is that their ads are not ads.
    - prospero 18y ago
      There's always an intermediate step between advertising and making money off the consumer interest it generates. The Internet hasn't changed that. Google targets people who are searching for a keyword. In some cases, these may be people who are looking to buy a product. However, people looking to hire (say) expert C++ programmers can do better than advertising against a keyword, because searching for that term implies nothing about skill or experience. In this particular case, something like LinkedIn would be a much more valuable advertising resource, because it has much more relevant information about the audience. Google has an extremely clever advertising model. In many cases it is much more efficient and effective than traditional print and television advertisements. But it's still advertising.
jasonlbaptiste 18y ago
I read this article about 3 years ago. I found it again today while googling around or something of the sorts. Hacker News wasn't around the first time I found the article, so I was curious to see the HN comments around the article, hence the submission. Some of my notes: * These ideas aren't destined to fail. Look at chegg. * Just because it's been done before, doesn't mean you can't. ie- busted tees. This goes back to our is there room for another photo sharing site discussion from last week. Here's why I don't particularly agee with the article, despite Ramit being a badass: *It focuses on the business types MORE than it focuses on why they won't work. It doesn't focus on things like: uniqueness, execution, design, segmenting growth at first to niches,etc.
Tichy 18y ago
Every idea is a "frat-boy idea" until it succeeds. Ignoring the naysayers is one of the necessities for being successful (I think, from my unsuccessful perspective...).
- potatolicious 18y ago
  Well, there's a lot of value in appreciating how your predecessors have failed. I think his objection is not so much against the list of ideas, but rather people who ignore the mountain of failed attempts in the same field, who seem to believe that they're magically different, and somehow destined to succeed despite the sheer number of failures in the past.
- bemmu 18y ago
  Even though I had none of the ideas he mentioned, reading this article gives me a strange urge to start a business in each of these categories, just to prove him wrong.
fallentimes 18y ago
>Anything that is “the Netflix of ___,” “Flickr + ___,” or “MySpace + ___.” > Those are just ways to describe an idea, not necessarily the idea itself. People do this to quickly convey their message or business; it's straight out of the excellent book Made to Stick.
rm999 18y ago
As long as an idea can make things more efficient or provide a useful service people are willing to pay for, it's a viable idea. This is an illogical argument: "NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I HATE TO CRUSH DREAMS BUT PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THIS."
lionhearted 18y ago
Also remember: There's rarely money in the most glamorous stuff. Simple supply and demand there: Everyone wants to run an airline, no one wants to run a sanitation company. If you're in tech, it's cool to play for first-mover, but don't forgot about markets people don't want. "What are other people unwilling or unable to do?" That's your play. After social networking has been firmly established, everyone wants to Lord over the next Facebook. "Yeah, I could see myself running a social networking empire" they say. Yeah, you and 150,000 other people. Good luck with that. Things other people are unable to do - because you're better, or think "outside the box", play on. Things other people are unwilling to do - sanitation, rehab, WYSIWYG website creators for people who are bad with computers - play on. T-shirts, coffeeshops, airlines, social networks? Might want to go back to the drawing board there...
timcederman 18y ago
This is one of my all-time favourite entrepreneurial articles. I still think of it all the time, especially when I see a new business being pitched.

This article started well, but the list of "frat-boy ideas" was actually quite poor and unhelpful... seemed more like examples of business types the author doesn't like rather than inherently stupid ideas. Also, he seems under the fallacious impression that better ideas are somehow easier to implement. Sorry, pal - good ideas are just as hard to pull off as bad ideas.

neilk 18y ago
You lost me. What differentiates good and bad ideas other than the difficulty of pulling them off? Speaking in the abstract, of course. In reality difficulty is relative, because we all have different resources to draw on.
- swombat 18y ago
  Good ideas have a better chance of success - but they also take stupid amounts of work, luck, timing, skill, etc. The t-shirt idea that he mentions, for instance, is a good example of an idea that is neither good nor bad. Basing a business around a handful of t-shirts is obviously a bad move, but a t-shirt business can certainly be created - and in fact that has been done many times already. There's nothing inherently bad about the idea. You could say that building a search engine in 1996 is an very difficult idea - lots of hard work, little chance of success, lots of established competitors, and requires a rare breakthrough, incredible amounts of work marketing the new engine and getting all sorts of larger companies to use it, etc, etc. Does that make it a bad idea? Hardly. Ideas are only a small component of success - execution is far more important. If the aforementioned frat boy are willing to give it their all and are competent enough, they can likely make any of these ideas succeed. Even if they fail, it's at least a great learning experience. I say go frat boys, go.

mixmax 18y ago

Now that the article mentions coffee shops: A good friend of mine started a coffeeshop six years ago, and today he has four of them. He drives a mercedes and has a huge house overlooking the ocean. He started with nothing.

tptacek 18y ago
It's a good anecdote, but the data seems to overwhelmingly favor his argument.
- neilk 18y ago
  Counter-anecdote: "My Coffeehouse Nightmare". http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/ http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/
  - Tichy 18y ago
    They should have read "The E Myth Revisited" first, about the "turnkey revolution". I think it is still possible too succeed with coffeehouses, but one shouldn't be romantic about it...
- mixmax 18y ago
  I absolutely agree, I just thought a success story would be nice in a world where most startups fail :-)
  - patio11 18y ago
    This is largely off-topic: Speaking as a guy who used to work for a local technology incubator, I really really hate the "most startups fail" factoid because it unintentionally distorts the statistic. The statistic is that most new businesses will not be going concerns X years after inception. This is true, but it does not indicate failure. I find this to be clarifying: if someone asked you for advice, saying (with wavering voice) "I'm considering taking a... job... where this company, like, pays me money every other week... is this safe?!", would you say "Pfft, most jobs fail"? Because most twentysomethings who start a job today will not be employed at the same job, by the same company, in 5 years. My second "real job" was with the aforementioned technology incubator. I worked there three years, made decent money and learned a lot, and had a better opportunity when it came to contract renegotiation, so I took it. If I had been a startup at the same incubator, that would have put me in the "fail" column. Is there any sanity in that definition of fail? (Give me another few months and I'll be failing my way forward out of the better opportunity, hopefully.)

ahoyhere 18y ago

I think the point is that the "frat boy" ideas come most often to people who have a romantic idea of business, but lack the will to actually make it happen. So if they don't really have the will to do it, then yes, one should discourage them from doing it. For their own good. People with will will ignore the advice anyway. (Will will will!) That said, the desire to build a book exchange is like a nerd disease.

lallysingh 18y ago

Loved the article. Going to school during the internet bubble, I heard most of these a lot. People want the independent business lifestyle, but don't spend more than 90 seconds thinking of the business idea. Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is. Hence the lack of analysis on if the business has been tried before, has current competitors, or what your costs per product would be comparatively.

jjs 18y ago
> Then they convince themselves on the concept by how much they'll enjoy the lifestyle, not how viable the business idea is. On the other hand, if you don't price out the lifestyle you want (in terms of money and time), then you have no metric to determine whether a given business will be viable for you.

ROFISH 18y ago

I stopped reading at t-shirts because that's (kinda) my business. While it's not just about the t-shirts, I run a video game community and we sell legally unofficial merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies to support the website. If you have something you cannot advertise to (because there's no money in ads), and you cannot provide a 37signals style of direct service, never underestimate the power of merchandising.

aston 18y ago
If you're making money on merch, your business is your brand, not the t-shirts themselves. The article's only critical of people who think they're witty enough to sell t-shirts based just on the screen-printed content.

brianr 18y ago

NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I did a variation of this my freshman year, by actually buying about $10k of books from students on campus and then selling them on Amazon. We made about $3k all told... I guess the author is right that it didn't "really succeed" and become a huge business, but I definitely learned a ton. (And notably, Chegg is in this space and seems to be doing well enough to get Kleiner Perkins to join their $25m series B.) THERE IS NO MONEY IN T-SHIRTS. Nonsense. There's a lot of competition, but plenty of people are making tons of money. Anything where you plan to make your money exclusively from ads Bashing ad-supported business seems to be popular these days, but somehow those people are overlooking the fact that Google made $21B last year doing just this. Making significant money from ads requires getting to scale, but if you have the drive and the right mindset, getting there isn't as hard as you might think.

Raphael 18y ago
Google is an ad broker. A better comparison would be MySpace, which displays ads.
- brianr 18y ago
  Most of Google's revenue comes from AdWords, the ads they run next to their search results, not from AdSense, their content network. From their 2008 Q4 earnings report ( http://investor.google.com/releases/2008Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/releases/2008Q4_google_earnings.h... ), Google-owned sites generated $3.81B while partner sites generated $1.69B.
  - t0pj 18y ago
    Google-owned sites generated $3.81B while partner sites generated $1.69B. I think the act of comparing the amount Google makes from AdWords to AdSense is moot -- Both of these channels are very successful. Both of these numbers end with a capital "B". So question: Do I become an ad broker and take on Google or simply utilize Google to display ads on my property and make some coin? At this point, I don't care how much Google is making off of me as a percentage, but I do care how much money I actually do put in my own pocket.

uberc 18y ago

This is more a screed against a "frat-boy" -- i.e. naive, un-thought-through -- approach to business ideas than a useful list of ideas to avoid.

burke 18y ago

Actually, I threw together a book exchange in a weekend and sold most of my books on it. Quite a few people are still using it. Granted, it doesn't make any money, and it's operated through the Engineering Student Society, so I guess it doesn't count.

danielrhodes 18y ago

There was an article linked to from there on Slate where this quote ended the piece "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love." That quote is both very true and very wrong. It's true that you can get into entrepreneurship with very idealistic values that drive you to ignore some of the more important financial aspects of running a business, and wrong in that if you don't do it for at least some type of love then you are probably going to fail for lack of passion.

pg 18y ago

The problem he's describing is certainly real. There are characteristic traps young founders fall into when thinking of startup ideas. I don't think he's gotten to the root of the problem, though. The root of the problem is not certain categories of ideas. It's a half-baked way of looking at the world. As long as you avoid that, there are good ideas to be had in several of the categories he describes. For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever? And if “Flickr + ___” is a recipe for failure, it wasn't always. YouTube's goal was to be the Flickr of video, and that worked out well for them.

prospero 18y ago
For example, I'm sure there will be huge new businesses that depend mainly on advertising. Is Google going to be the last, ever? For better or worse, Google defines the baseline in online advertising. New companies can't compete on ubiquity, so their service has to be superior in how it targets specific demographics. Assuming that succeeds, they then have to then figure out how to leverage that limited dominance into something broader. It's certainly possible, but it's also certainly more difficult than it was ten years ago.
- netcan 18y ago
  >so their service has to be superior in how it targets specific demographics I think you are mistaken. You are taking ideas from the old magazine world of advertising. I don't think demographics, appealing to a certain demographic or any such thing. Google's success has nothing to do with this. In fact, in many ways it is the opposite of magazine advertising. The normal ad model is distribute a magazine & plaster ads on it or create an event & plaster sponsors on it. The ad has nothing to do with the thing the ad is on. Google's model is different (for search anyway). For some businesses, being found on Google means business. They are willing to pay for Google to do what they do anyway, send searchers to web pages. They're genius is that their ads are not ads.
  - prospero 18y ago
    There's always an intermediate step between advertising and making money off the consumer interest it generates. The Internet hasn't changed that. Google targets people who are searching for a keyword. In some cases, these may be people who are looking to buy a product. However, people looking to hire (say) expert C++ programmers can do better than advertising against a keyword, because searching for that term implies nothing about skill or experience. In this particular case, something like LinkedIn would be a much more valuable advertising resource, because it has much more relevant information about the audience. Google has an extremely clever advertising model. In many cases it is much more efficient and effective than traditional print and television advertisements. But it's still advertising.

jasonlbaptiste 18y ago

I read this article about 3 years ago. I found it again today while googling around or something of the sorts. Hacker News wasn't around the first time I found the article, so I was curious to see the HN comments around the article, hence the submission. Some of my notes: * These ideas aren't destined to fail. Look at chegg. * Just because it's been done before, doesn't mean you can't. ie- busted tees. This goes back to our is there room for another photo sharing site discussion from last week. Here's why I don't particularly agee with the article, despite Ramit being a badass: *It focuses on the business types MORE than it focuses on why they won't work. It doesn't focus on things like: uniqueness, execution, design, segmenting growth at first to niches,etc.

Tichy 18y ago

Every idea is a "frat-boy idea" until it succeeds. Ignoring the naysayers is one of the necessities for being successful (I think, from my unsuccessful perspective...).

potatolicious 18y ago
Well, there's a lot of value in appreciating how your predecessors have failed. I think his objection is not so much against the list of ideas, but rather people who ignore the mountain of failed attempts in the same field, who seem to believe that they're magically different, and somehow destined to succeed despite the sheer number of failures in the past.
bemmu 18y ago
Even though I had none of the ideas he mentioned, reading this article gives me a strange urge to start a business in each of these categories, just to prove him wrong.

fallentimes 18y ago

>Anything that is “the Netflix of ___,” “Flickr + ___,” or “MySpace + ___.” > Those are just ways to describe an idea, not necessarily the idea itself. People do this to quickly convey their message or business; it's straight out of the excellent book Made to Stick.

rm999 18y ago

As long as an idea can make things more efficient or provide a useful service people are willing to pay for, it's a viable idea. This is an illogical argument: "NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I HATE TO CRUSH DREAMS BUT PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THIS."

lionhearted 18y ago

Also remember: There's rarely money in the most glamorous stuff. Simple supply and demand there: Everyone wants to run an airline, no one wants to run a sanitation company. If you're in tech, it's cool to play for first-mover, but don't forgot about markets people don't want. "What are other people unwilling or unable to do?" That's your play. After social networking has been firmly established, everyone wants to Lord over the next Facebook. "Yeah, I could see myself running a social networking empire" they say. Yeah, you and 150,000 other people. Good luck with that. Things other people are unable to do - because you're better, or think "outside the box", play on. Things other people are unwilling to do - sanitation, rehab, WYSIWYG website creators for people who are bad with computers - play on. T-shirts, coffeeshops, airlines, social networks? Might want to go back to the drawing board there...

timcederman 18y ago

This is one of my all-time favourite entrepreneurial articles. I still think of it all the time, especially when I see a new business being pitched.