Look for opportunities rather than ideas
swombat.com
swombat.com
Here's another exercise for differentiating opportunities from ideas: turn the tv on to a random channel, preferably a channel that covers some area you normally aren't interested in.
Pay close attention to the commercials. These are probably for products (ideas) that you find no value in at all. Yet somebody just like yourself is making these commercials and making a boatload of money doing it. Why? What opportunities did they see in ideas that you would find worthless? Can you see how the idea may be completely useless in your eyes, yet the opportunity very valuable?
The title was such that I was able to upvote this article before I even read it! (Yes, I did actually RTA) I knew exactly where you were going. An opportunity is an idea + value. It's the addition of the value that makes it so different than just run of the mill ideas. An idea might be to write a text indexing system built on references like research papers are ranked. An opportunity is making a simple-to-use web search engine so folks can more easily find what they are looking for. Big difference.
The more I think about it, the more I feel we should eliminate the word "idea" completely from discussions about startups. All the talk should only be about opportunities.
What is the difference between an idea and business value? How do you spot both of them at the same time, as neither can exist without the other? How do you increase business value when you're out of fresh ideas?
I don't think the points are in contradiction. Opportunities are mostly found via markets. Without a market, there is no opportunity, just an infertile idea...
1) In the middle of creating a simple CRM for a boutique marketing firm catering to startups. This is especially cool as they brought in a very sr. RoR dev to mentor me, although I'm doing the bulk of the work.
2) After that project is done, partnering with a friend who has a business that does project management for law firms, another CRM in that space. I want to have domain knowledge in that field and be exposed to his client base.
3) Further down the road looking to collaborate with a local well known Realtor here in downtown San Diego who is a data hound. I love the insights he draws from his monthly newsletters which are pretty much data driven/minimal fluff, and was surprised to find he hand compiles this data. Want to see if there is some opportunity to apply quantitative analysis to that data and make it more valuable as we enter the next real estate boom.
It's easy, so people want to believe all you need is the right idea and you're golden. The truth is much simpler, but it's also much harder to implement because it takes discipline and persistence. Probably why failure rates are so high in business as with diets...
If you think your idea is more than 5% of what matters, youve already lost.
Learning to sell is one of the biggest gifts to have. Selling your ideas, thoughts in a job, to others, is a skill that's critical, let alone doing it in business.
By speaking with customers and saying "Hey, I'm looking for something to build and I want to learn about your problems, mind giving me a few minutes?" is all the selling you'll ever need to do. There is no shortage of small business owners that won't mind.d
Remember, it's not always the problem you solve that has to be sexy. Having your time free and paid for is sexy. Learning the ropes of business on a smaller project that grows regularly is sexy.
Let go of your inhibitions and become a productivity pirate, use the technology that gives you the quickest result and most productivity.
Avoid configuration integration/masturbation like the plague or you'll lose momentum. This means, use what you know.
This is the one that really got me and why I'm often confused by HN "startups" and ideas. I simply can't figure out how they will ever make enough money for the venture to be worthwhile.
It's mindblowing how many niches there are and the huge amount of businesses that exist (take a short drive through any industrial park, write down the business names and then google them, for example). So why do programmers insist on coming up with something that never existed and trying to force-feed it to people? That will work in maybe 0.00001% of all cases when the alternative is so much more likely to be profitable.
If the business world thought like this, then we (developers) would not have to 'guess' what would be a good or valuable idea, the business world would give it to us.
How?
- Buy things and sell them back. E.g. buy an item on eBay and sell it. Keep doing that over and over again until you figure out how to make a profit in the process.
- Sell your time (directly, not via a regular job). Almost everyone has something they're good at. Do that again and again until you're good at it, then see if you can sell someone else's time.
(Well, good implementation is hard.)