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> I simply don't accept the premise that you can start from anywhere you like Is anyone saying that? I believe it's a strawman. What people say is "ideas are w

• Silhouette 14y ago
  Is anyone saying that? I believe it's a strawman. What people say is "ideas are worthless" which is quotable hyperbole used to club stubborn NDA wielding entrepreneurs over the head. That is surely how it started, but I'm not sure everyone on the start-up scene today got the memo. Unfortunately, until you start to execute, you only have the an extremely hazy understanding if your starting point was good. I still respectfully disagree. Some of the most successful small businesses I'm familiar with started out with a disruptive idea in a specialised market that was so far beyond what was available at the time that there was never really any doubt that it would be viable and a successful company would result, the only question was how successful. The common factors in each case were founders with a shared interest in/understanding of some specific field, often an existing support network in that field, a solid combination of general technical and non-technical skills, and most importantly, going where no other team with those combined strengths had been before. If you stop trying to appeal to the entire planet and start looking into niche areas (which does not necessarily imply tiny markets, just smaller than "everyone"), it's amazing how many opportunities there are to apply modern technology to do things qualitatively or at least order-of-magnitude quantitatively better, and how many real problems you can solve for businesses and private individuals alike. Many of those businesses are also counterexamples to the popular wisdom that if you have no competitors in a market then that's a bad sign because there isn't really a market there. Sometimes you really are just that much better than everyone else, because if your market isn't full of geeks who build their own hardware or write software just for fun, even applying quite basic (by geek standards) skills can put you far beyond old school, manual ways of doing things.
  • acgourley 14y ago
    So I concede your point, but I think those are also smaller and smaller markets. In an efficient world those obvious-at-the-start ideas are only unsolved AND obvious because they perceived value of solving them is low. Not so low they are not worth doing, but low enough they won't support a rapid growth and investment seeking startup.
    • Silhouette 14y ago
      I think those are also smaller and smaller markets. [...] Not so low they are not worth doing, but low enough they won't support a rapid growth and investment seeking startup. I think we agree on the basic situation, just perhaps have a different idea of the scale. To me, having a business that has merely millions of potential paying customers, but where those customers have a particular interest in what you're offering and there is relatively little competition because you really are doing something new, is worth more by any metric I care about than having a business with billions of potential paying customers who have no particular interest in what you're offering and dozens of competitors offering something similar. About the only metric where this doesn't come out on top in B2C world is "probability of hitting it out of the park", which is of interest to VCs and serial entrepreneurs playing the long game, but possibly not so relevant if you're just trying to start a successful business for yourself. Your comment about "in an efficient world" is interesting, because I think this is where the received wisdom breaks down: the real world is nowhere close to an idealised efficient economy. Many people have the skills to use modern technology effectively, but a lot of them are working for someone else in some large business, and the overheads of that large business make many of these smaller projects commercially unappealing. The "correct" economic response for the people with the skills to take advantage of the market that would pay for them is for those people to break away and set up their own small, efficient businesses that can then make a very tidy profit by genuinely helping a lot of people who are below the radar of big business. Of course, that requires skills other than technical ones, and an awareness of the possibilities, and a willingness to take a risk with your income when perhaps you have a mortgage to pay and a family to support, and all of those things influence what actually happens. But that is why there really are still a lot of very lucrative (by individual/small business standards) opportunities out there for those who are willing and able to make that jump.