Ask HN: You have a start-up idea. Now what?

Way different than how I usually do it.

1) Meet someone at a pub and introduce each other.

2) Learn everything I can about his work/business, rank within the organization and what they do.

3) Discover something we can work on, either on the spot or after another planned meeting, this time over coffee.

4) Bet the farm and everything you own on a potential joint venture, give them a 2 month timeline til project.

5) Research like crazy and learn everything you can about the project, the client, their business.

6) Have the client write you checks weekly while you solve the general case.

7) Deliver the project, launch a "startup" on the side and get support and improvement contracts from the client.

8) Work 4-5 hours a day on this startup, reach out to the world and see who else is interested in the product and how can you help the industry.

9) Write articles for industry and trade publication and be sorta famous for computerizing one aspect of their business.

10) Gather ideas for sub-projects and launch a software sweatshop of one man, churning out good stuff for a handful of big boys, work like crazy, and be wired the whole fucking time.

11) Look around you for an exit, having discovered you pretty much painted yourself into a corner in terms of interesting problems to solve ;-)

Step 1: Figure out a way to quickly and flimsily implement the idea and release it.

Step 2: See what happens next and react to it.

Step 3: Repeat step 2 until the idea becomes a success. Or give up if its clear it could not possibly succeed.

We don't really have a process, but after years pitching and developing movie scripts, here's kinda how we think:

1. Can you explain the idea in one, declarative sentence?

2. Write out the whole project, and the revenue model, on a single sheet of A4

3. Don't create solutions for problems that don't exist

4. Get independent, verifiable market research. Anything else is just your opinion

5. Keep computer stuff out of the conversation when trying to raise funds

6. Never, ever, ever give up

NB: Most marketable ideas do no appear so in skeleton/demo/prototype form. Support, documentation, community and UI can often sell a product more than its own core functionality.

If your product doesn't have much functionality on its own, try to make it into a plugin for a popular package and try to gain some foothold (or enough licenses for ramen) that way first.

Along with developing it, you will also have to seek out the initial users and inform of them of its existence. I prefer corporate clients for this, it only takes one of them to get enough cash in hand to bootstrap the project.

Yeah, this is the closest to how I do things, too, fwiw. All the other stuff, to me, is procrastinating.

Get idea -> If I have time to implement a rough working version of the idea, then schedule it and do it; else, do not do it, and possibly file away in brain for later.

I'm horrifically busy at this point, so I don't have to bother with most of my ideas right now.

It helps that I've finally broken the bad habit of talking about ideas.

Can I ask why you consider that a bad habit?

I can't speak for the GP but I agree it's a bad idea. Maybe not for everyone, but for a certain type of person, definitely.

The problem is psychological. When you talk about an idea, you feel like you've somehow accomplished something by doing so. You hear other people's positive reactions and instead of validating that your idea should be done your brain interprets them as satisfaction in and of itself. You feel that little less "hungry" and yet you haven't even done anything.

Also, talking too much clouds the vision and you tend to expand the scope even as you talk. Your companion will have their own opinion and their feedback and ideas will merge with what you think until you're left with a union of both party's concepts, your version 0.1 getting that little bit harder to ever reach. Or worse, that person might later claim you stole their ideas.

I come from the school that believes that with very few exceptions mere ideas are nearly worthless in themselves. Anyone can imagine anything. Actually doing things is much, much harder. Talking is not doing. Don't talk to anyone until you've got at least a prototype, IMO. With modern web frameworks you should be able to whip up at least a crappy, incomplete prototype outline in a day or two. Sitting down and doing that will hone and focus your thinking. And if you can't be bothered spending a day or two implementing just the skeleton of your idea - then you obviously don't really believe it's a good idea at all, so go and think harder : D

I come from the same school.

From my experience, ideas are worthless because they don't exist. Sounds obvious but think of it is this way:

Everything can fit neatly and beautifully into anything else whilst it exists in your head. "How do we monetize this...? Easy! just do xyz!" The answers are clear, the solutions are elegant, and everyone and everything is holding hands, dancing around in a circle, singing their hearts out.

As soon as you actually get to work, and you make the transition from fantasy to reality, well: shit instantly hits the fan, and you've got a mess of a mess of a mess, and that's what really counts. Nothing works right, nobody wants it, you deal with endless bugs, its never ready, all your "plans" don't really mesh with this thing called reality.

It's kind of like fighting in a video game. You can fantasize all you want about how badass you are at street fighter. But get yourself into a real street fight and you won't ever think you know anything about anything ever again.

Precisely.

It took a while, but I realized that the more I talked about an idea, the less likely I was to actually make any progress with it.

On the other hand, not talking about it seems to make me reeeeaally want to actually do it, like an itch I can't quite scratch.

I don't understand the psychology behind it, but I'm definitely much more productive in recent months.

Perhaps replies should include the business(es) that was/were yielded from the the steps outlined.

I'm all for discussing ideas, but this question is more about getting better results than merely throwing out "this is how I do it".

I'd want to know how the dropbox, reddit, google, basecamp, balsamiq, uservoice, pbwiki, weebly... idea-flow worked.

Not so much the "yeah this is how i come up with ideas that never really ...uhhh...worked out ....".

No offense of course, but just so we can be clear on the matter!

On the other hand I think it's really cool hearing from those who haven't yet succeeded as well! Just because it didn't work out doesn't mean that the steps they took were bad. Plus, learning from success is good, but learning from failure (especially when it's not your own) is great as well.

We all know how crazy an entrepreneur with a world changing idea can get (I've been there). Succeed or fail, it's always an interesting story.

I think one of the earliest questions to ask is whether would you, the builder, use it yourself and secondly, whether you would pay for it. If both answers are yes, then that is a start. Build a simple workable prototype (without too much effort and cost) and start finding customers and listening to them.

I built a social news site this past spring called cuuute.com. It was a reddit for cute stuff. I built the site because I thought my wife would enjoy it, and I thought I would enjoy working on it. I was wrong on both accounts, so I shut the site down 3 months after it started. I still think it's a viable idea, I'm just not the person to make it happen.

I took a few months off, and mulled different ideas around. I'm a nurse, so I thought a lot about opportunities in health care IT. I kept coming around to "I really don't like health care, and I don't want to work in it".

I bought a list of 50,000 top paying google keywords, and cross referenced it with a google scrape of how many hits per keyword there are. That gave me a ratio of (top paying keywords)::(# of hits). I sorted the list by that ratio.

There were thousands of items near the top of that list on financial terms.

So, during the months after my last project, I traveled visited family, and rolled a lot of this information around in my head. Two weeks ago I decided to make a social news site devoted to financial news. Why? Because 1) I think it's a subject that can hold my attention for several years, and 2) I think there's a need in the market for news aggregators/filters and 3) I think it can be monetized.

Friends and family have both tried to talk me out of the idea and have encouraged me. Most of those conversations have not been helpful at all. The really helpful people have suggested ways of iterating on the social news idea to improve it.

Define idea as a problem

Find someone that has this probem [ID your target market]

Ask them if they would use your solution

"see if anyone's posted about a need"

I think most people just accept the status quo of living, so few would be likely to post about needs. Unless you read between the lines, like people complaining a lot about certain things (mostly the weather and late trains?).

- Be prepared to sell, sell, and sell - But first, you need to be sold yourself. So start answering questions in a structured way. Dave Mcclure gives a nice framework here: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/ - Even though the slides are for a VC, that's a good framework no matter who you are pitching. - Once you are convinced, start looking at building a well balanced team. - Your team / co-founder(s) will be the most critical piece. Don't compromise on the quality of people you build around yourself.

Good Luck!

Action.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Its only worth its value when ideas are converted in to action. Without action, your ideas are just that, "ideas" and everyone has one.

By actually writing it down and tweaking the idea into an oppotunity, doesn't that constitute as action? Is it smart to skip this whole process altogether?

I am not suggesting you skip those steps. I think most people falls into the "analysis paralysis" stage and end up not implementing those ideas in to action. While "tweaking with ideas" can be considered an action - it is still an "idea".

I consider action to be the beginning of an actual product or implementation of that idea. Tweaking with idea is still an idea.

Have a passion for an idea, get feedback from friends and family; majority dig it, go build it!

That's what I did, yet it was not sucessful in terms of getting an audience, but it did get a lot of attention and some funding. THough I learned from that experience, but the process for building an idea remains, except next time go around - all ideas will have solid and interesting biz models out of the gate.

Looking for competitors can be discouraging. When is it a good idea to seek out the tougher aspects of the idea? If you get discouraged too early then that's no good. Ideally one would be able to stay excited and keep working either way.

Anyone have any experience with this?

This has happened to me as well and, for lack of a better term, it sucks. Especially when they've executedso much more brilliantly than you could. The way I try to deal with these types of cases is to try my best to not get emotionally attached to the idea until I at least see the opportunity.

I'm currently working on a startup, and while our market isn't crowded by any means, I think having a few strong competitors puts us in a better position - they've made the mistakes so we don't have to.

Each competitor I see certainly nudges the bar higher, but it's only a nudge. Ultimately, we're all building web applications. They're just code, markup and javascript. The great thing about the web is that the entry requirements are very low and your competitors, no matter how strong, can never raise those requirements.

FWIW, my startup is testled.com. Our competitors are people like userfly.com, clicktale.com etc.

Check out your homepage on IE8! Those little green buttons are a problem.

Thanks for the notice - we're rolling out a new version of our homepage really soon, we'll have all this fixed. Cheers!

Yup, it is discouraging, but it's one of those things you have to do, otherwise you're just fooling yourself.

You have to ask yourself, why am I being discouraged by this competitor? Usually it's because you're afraid that whatever you had in mind has already been done. And that they're already doing it better than you'll ever can. In that case, you should take your discouragement as a real signal.

Take care of the tougher aspects asap, you'll have to go through them anyway.

I agree it is discouraging. Plus if you have an idea chances are someone else has already thought of it and probably implemented it (assuming it was a good idea). So you might as well assume there's already an competitor and just focus on the competitor's flaws and try to improve on them.

Facebook started off nicely despite having Myspace and a bunch of other social networks.

1. What can I build to improve some aspect of my life 2. Is there something out there that already does this and satisfies my needs well? If not, exit. 3. Build it 4. How can this be made into something that can generate money? If it can't, exit (not likely). 5. Modify it.

1. Code a demo.

2. Show prospective consumers of the app. The more the better.

3. Use their feedback along with your judgment to scrap or enhance the project for the next cycle of feedback. Your judgment is just as important as their feedback, maybe even more so. Sometimes you just gotta go with your gut or else nothing would ever change. OTOH, if they brutalize your dream, maybe they're right and you just gotta kill it and move on.

#1 is the most important. By taking immediate action by building something, you'll probably learn a lot and even modify the idea. So get started!

> 1. Lots of Google searching for potential keywords to see if anyone's posted about a need

That's good. Make something people want.

#2, ideally, is get some money. Like, make your first $20 ASAP in the market. There's been lots of "cool ideas" that don't make money. A lot of smart people in tech gun for a Facebook-style massive victory. But for every Facebook/Linkedin/Myspace/Youtube, there's orders of magnitude more sites than never catch on.

Or worse! They do catch on, but then you can't get any money! I imagine nothing hurts as much as being wildly popular and bankrupt. There are many of these stories.

So try to get some money fast. Money does all sorts of wonderful things in terms of letting you expand or getting some security, but most importantly, it proves that people really, truly want you're selling. And if you are going to be looking for funding, there's not many things that are going to be as good for getting quality terms as being profitable. You can wait out the right deal and you're not desperate. And one of investors' biggest fears - no market - is alleviated. Get that first $20 ASAP. It'll teach you what you're doing wrong and show you what to do next.

Edit: Also, don't do excessive planning on your first business, competitive analysis, and all that such. Your assumptions are wrong, you don't have the instincts for what people pay for yet, and competition doesn't matter when you're small. Seriously, leave the SWOT analysis for big corporations fighting over 3% market share and distribution in supermarkets. I've learned this lesson the hard way. Damn near all of that planning is useless if not validated with getting some money. Your assumptions are almost certainly wildly incorrect when not validated with the getting of money from customers.

"Just curious what everyone's process for turning an idea that you just thought of into a real opportunity. Essentially the period between idea generation and actually executing on that idea (if there is a period of time)."

Live my life. Solve my own problems. Go talk to people and discover that other people have the same problem(s) and their solutions suck compared to mine. Discover there is tremendous need (demand) and some folks are strongly interested in what I do. Spend a lot of time helping people for free. Get burned out on that and on being so freakin' controversial. Take about 2 years off from that while I get myself well and also try to figure out how to package threatening/controversial information so it's palatable -- so it's taken as an opportunity instead of a criticism/personal attack. Work on figuring out how to monetize it without killing it because you can't pay someone to care about your welfare. Either they do or they don't. Realize that the only effective way to commodify what I do is to uncouple the income stream and the output stream -- ie not charge directly for the thing people really want/need from me. Currently pursuing those efforts as a "hobby" and working on monetizing it.

Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme. But that's roughly the process I have been going through.