Well, to be fair, Color did not make anyone any money. The company sold in a fire-sale for less than the amount raised; and the only thing that founders / employees likely got out of it was a mediocre retention bonus.

Not to mention, the idea wasn't necessarily worthless. It wasn't any worse than, say, Instagram. We only remember it that way because Instagram succeeded and Color failed.

What was Color's idea? I had heard of it at the time, including the talk about the high funding for what may have been a simple idea, but did not check (partly due to reading about it being overhyped, probably). Something to with color and photos?

Color was an "elastic" social photo network based on shared locations. Elastic meaning that instead of having binary "friends" and "non-friends," your friendship with people is was a algorithmic strength value based on how often you shared photos from the same location. (Which would map to how often you were together or at least at the same events, presumably mapping to how close you are in the present.)

Interesting, thanks.

>for any startup with VC money plans, the primary goal is not building a good product, but convincing VCs they're building a good product

I'm not sure that's true. For angel investors maybe but come VC time most companies already have traction and the VC money is to go from $10m value to $1bn. If the product's bad the founders get wiped out so it's not so helpful.

The idea is that great ideas look stupid; but they aren't stupid.

Good ideas may look good, but good-looking ideas capable of creating huge companies (thus great) are almost certainly tested already, so you are either wrong or late to the game.

Of course, YMMV. Nobody ever agrees on what an idea looks like.

Depends what your goal is as well, I've no interest in creating a startup with the potential to be a huge company, 1) those ideas are really hard to come by 2) they will inevitably attract competition 3) unless they are not trivial well funded competition can and probably will catch you rapidly 4) first mover advantage works on a product that has network effects but not much else.

The product I want to build next is a niche product for a very specific (but quite large in absolute) terms demographic, profit per user (after tax/VAT/Hosting minus staff) is approx $6 per month, at 500 users I'd be doubling my current income, at a 1000 I'd be able to work on it full time, at 2000 I'd be very comfortable, anymore than that would just be gravy.

It's not even a difficult build (I've built much more complex projects for clients) but the market doesn't exist at all (which means it's either a really good idea (unlikely) or a terrible idea (more likely)).

In either case I'm gonna give it a shot since it's a product I'd have bought if it existed immediately and happily.

Why not start by building a landing page and seeing if you can get at least a few hundred people to sign up? Seems like a much easier way to determine if the market's there than diving in head first.

Honestly? Because if I can't sell it, I'll give it away, its something I badly wish existed for my mum over the last few years so if I can't make a living on it I'll host it for free and fund through my current business as a donation.

True, lots of great ideas look like bad ideas at first (again, pg). But there's things that look bad because they're bizarre (hey, let's rent out bedrooms!), and things that look bad because they're trivial (hey, let's help people find the nearest bar!).

The good bizarre ones could wipe out an existing industry. That's what makes them interesting.