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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

All this hoo haa about startup ideas - Just make products that excel at every aspect of what it does and make sure there is a demand for such a product. I see people making a better soap dispenser, the hardware equivalent of what most SaaS startups are working on. You need to invent a new kind of soap that is better than anything else out there. It should take the grime off of everything from kitchen to bathroom scum. It replaces IPA, Acetone, LimeOff, EasyOff, Ivory bar, Dawn soap, and Gojo. You've got an explosive popularity just around the corner. Popularity isn't luck. It germinates from knocking people's socks off when they use your product.

I equate startup advice to those "Teach you how to become a millionaire" books you find at grocery stores. If these people really were good at making soap, they wouldn't be around giving advice. That includes my own advice in this comment ;-).

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I've actually funded 9 unicorns in the past 8 years and work with startups at the earliest possible stage, writing checks of $1M to $5M. And I give this advice away for free, because I find those "get rich quick" guides to be totally misleading.

I'm doing YouTube mainly to directly get the things I think work for founders out to people, just to help. So, I'm with you— but you have to understand my intention for the videos is to be something very different than those millionaire books.

> I equate startup advice to those "Teach you how to become a millionaire" books you find at grocery stores.

Without these books, finance wouldn’t have enough money to play with. Schmucks are a key ingredient of the ecosystem.

Same for startups. You need a substrate of failed founders and employees to create the raw materials that feed the successful juggernauts.

Method soap is the example of a better soap dispenser like you say. It doesn't work on everything but it had the uniqueness that it was made with natural ingredients, so much that you could drink it, which the founders did to demonstrate that fact.

I never heard of Method Soap before now, but that pitch just makes me want it. Good example!

You should check out the How I Built This podcast, it has an episode about Method. Great story.

I used Method foaming hand soap for a while. I probably went through about 10 bottles, and I'd say at least half of the dispensers started experiencing pumping issues before they were empty. So, in my experience, they were actually the worst soap dispensers I ever purchased.

Well, I don't know about the dispenser but the soap is pretty good. What did you think of it?

The soap was great. However, I don't know how much of that was the soap itself and how much was simply the experience of using foaming soap compared to liquid soap for washing my hands. If the dispensers actually worked, I would have kept buying it.

At the same time, selling ordinary things in a better way has also built many fortunes. I know several self-made people running ecommerce businesses in the most mundane spaces. There's plenty of opportunity everywhere.

List some examples.

https://www.indiehackers.com/products

99% of those examples are either fake or grossly overstated

Really? Haven't really looked into indiehackers, but are you implying that it's mostly a platform for attracting investors through fake growth stories like in the good old crypto days with fantastical IPO's?

Toothpaste (as pills rather than paste), chewing gum (nootropics/flavors), sneaker care stuff, home decor, and a very specific set of auto repair tools.

Those are 5 completely separate businesses ranging from 500k/yr to 5m/yr. Only the first is a "new" product.

Yes, you're 100% right. I meant "startup" in the sense of silicon valley rush to become a unicorn giant.

Soap dispenser business is in own right quite interesting. If you made a substantially better soap dispenser, it won't be in the newspapers. It has a shorter lever, but a good business nevertheless.

Just because there is demand for something does not mean it is a viable business idea. There is tons of demand for food yet the margins selling food are tiny and it is very competitive. There is tons of demand for listening to music online, yet it was never profitable until Spotify came along. There is huge demand for watching videos online yet YouTube ran at a loss forever. Everyone thinks that their product is great and will stand out among the competitors.

OP probably meant demand is a requirement, not a guarantee, to ensure your product will be successful.

> Just make products that excel at every aspect of what it does and make sure there is a demand for such a product

Or, just make a mediocre product and make sure you have a big enough moat that competitors don't stand a chance.

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