Ask HN: I have a business idea, what now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I have a business idea, what now?

8 pointsluksi15 comments

I'm a finance professional with strong business acumen, currently going stale in a wannabe innovative media cooperation in Germany. I somehow have a"visionary" business idea, which in my opinion is solving a problem and has the potential to reshape the rules of how we do...something.

I this regard I have two questions:

In the first step, where can I go or whom to speak to to challenge my idea and find feedback? Where to find people that are experienced and see chances, risks and the big picture from investor/scale point of view giving me confidence to start or killing the vision. How to prevent those people from staling the idea? Those people should also help me to precisely define the idea, since currently Is kind of "blurry"

I see all of this as prerequisite for starting the usual process, writing a business plan, composing a pitch presentation, pitch it to investors.

Second: I have zero tech experience, where to find hackers/co-founders and where are all the really cool people that can tell me what is feasible from technical point of view? Must I move to Berlin or take a loan to spend a few week in Silicon Valley?

Somehow...the first and second questions also go together. :-)

Thank you everybody!

In the first step, where can I go or whom to speak to to challenge my idea and find feedback?

The standard "sound" advice echoing around HN would be to make something [analogous to a rough sketch] and put it in front of users. Obviously, it probably won't be the finished product produced by a giant business...or even something which can be reproduced efficiently. But it will be enough that people who 'get it' will 'get it' if there's an 'it' there to 'get'.

For a non-technical person this means understanding enough at a high level to make a reasonable judgement about feasibility...enough physics to know the difference between sending a satellite into LEO versus shooting nuclear waste into the sun. In other words, there's some level of technical due diligence that cannot be outsourced and still be considered due diligence...just ass-covering, and that's only useful in bureaucracy and useless for a startup.

Good luck.

Google for 'minimum viable product' for more info.

It doesn't even need to be a product at the early stage. Just a mockup. That's why I think the idea of an artists sketch or study is useful. Internally, it's actual work that includes process and technique and therefore learning. Externally, points to a finished product without trying to be that product.

I've seen a landing page that asked for an email, called an MVP. Anything you can use to gauge interest in the concept.

Although it's somehow complicated to define what is the real minimum, as Joe demonstrated, I'd only like to recommend another concept that I've read about and from which I hope you could take good things out of it: The Minimum Lovable Product.

https://medium.com/the-happy-startup-school/beyond-mvp-10-st...

Cynical but there it is:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-11

There's no 'economic value' to an idea until its executed. So you're in the right direction. You need a team and funding, and that's where most of the critical work happens.

Joe,

You are fully right. My problem is where to find the team, people etc. Maybe if you are in San Francisco or studying at MIT that is no problem, but I need advice exactl on this.

A better way of looking at it:

https://sivers.org/multiply

Currently I'm about to start a tech company myself. But I'm not on my own. I found a great team while finishing my masters degree at the university. Even though founding a company is a ton of work, you learn a lot by doing so. Thus, here is the advice I can give:

Silicon Valley is a good place for you to go when you need to get in touch with other tech companies. But in order to find skilled developers you don't need to go to Silicon Valley at all. I'm living in Austria and I know that there are excellent developers right here (and I bet the same is true for Germany). You just have to know where to find them. And once you found them you need to start talking to them. I know its hard to tell total strangers about your big idea, but it needs to be done. You don't need to worry about someone stealing the idea as long as you and your expertise are still required. If the developer you told about the idea wanted to do it without you, he would face exactly the same problem as you do right now. He would need to find someone like you. And convince him of your idea. So why should he bother stealing the idea in the first place if he could just join you?

So, where do you find people that have a technical background and are also prepared to take some risks? Go to coworking spaces. That is where you find people that may be working as freelancers or in small teams up to 3 or 4 people (if the team gets bigger than that its often cheaper to rent an office for your own). But maybe you shouldn't just walk in there and distract people from their work. From time to time such coworking spaces host events. Usually they post about it somewhere on the web. And usually the people that work at the space go to such events. So this would be an ideal chance for you to talk to people that are both talented and not bound to a fixed job. My advice: Go there.

And now a suggestion concerning investors and money: Consider public funding. There are many funds that you don't have to pay back and in contrast to an investor the funding organizations don't ask for shares.

You need to find some local startup / entrepreneurship community and meet some people. You are definitely not ready to be approaching investors now, so don't worry about that at this point. It's not hard to raise money when you have the right idea in the right stage.

Forget that about somebody stealing your idea. That simply doesn't happen. You know, I had software with basically same features as the first version of Twitter at least 6 months before Twitter appeared. And look were Twitter is today, my software is definitely not. And I'm not sorry because I'm well aware how things work. It's not the idea that counts, it's all together, the complete process, people and product, every single thing counts, idea is just a tiny, tiny part of it all. There were some cases in history where idea was everything, but they are so rare that you can easily consider them to be statistical errors.

Let's see some screenshots of your Twitter!

I am a Senior Technology Professional with 16+ experience, 10+ in Banking (Tech). Get in touch leo.rajapakse@gmail.com I can think of the technical feasibility and would look at being a CoFounder

One more thing: do you see any sense in trying to contact/meet with people working in "near" fields which could benefit form the Idea? e.g. I have a idea Instagram could benefit from => approach Instagram and tell them about it

Never do that. Instagram like company have full potential to build their own. Unless you have some success and capture the audience than you can tell. Initially you should resist to do that as you have nothing just the idea.

Developer here. You can contact me with the email in my profile. I can give you feedback on your idea and maybe help you come up with a prototype to validate and/or launch it.

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