Build something people want and will pay for.
Not just say they want.
Not just say they'll pay for.
Make something that they see and will immediately take out their cash/cc/paypal/venmo and pay for on the spot.
This is big - lots of people (on HN and other places) say that they'd pay "$x for y" but aren't actually willing to.
I feel like I saw a post that had some pretty good evidence of the disconnect between those two things but I can't find it.
Nobody thinks they're particularly susceptible to it, but everyone still somehow knows that Chipotle exists and serves burritos...
That's not exactly true. This sentence only covers fro value generating products, not cost saving products.
It's easier to sell cost saving product, but the profit margins on those are much lower. As an example in the article - the product is a cost saving product, but the cost it saves is very small.(Finding the right headache medicine is once in a lifetime $1 investment for most, or even less)
When it comes to value generating products - that is where you need someone who can sell their own idea of value to the masses. That is where this sentence starts to make sense.
It's just that I am not sure this random startup guy and his four doctor friends are such a genie.
You're also forgetting that medication is almost exclusively a cost issue. Unless you are taking performance enhancing products - other medication is a cost to getting to your "normal". (Even antidepressants exist to get you to a baseline mental state, not to give you extra - that's performance enhancing drugs)
You already give your doctor that $100 and they literally do the research... and other than getting a better doctor, you will not get any better tool.
But back to the reason for the product and it's very clear where the idea came from. Identifying what painkiller you prefer isn't a constant issue neither it is of great value to the vast majority.
You need a product that is powerful enough to give you the leverage to change deep-seated bits of human psychology.
Henry Ford knew how to do this. So did Jobs.
$0.02. I don't want to discourage anyone from building something and making money on it; just adding on to your comment.
We have. It's the free market.
People want Reddit, people want FB and Insta. Do they pay for those? I’m not saying those are good or realistic models to follow but I think the scale of your product needs to be taken into account with your statement. ie landing millions of users can forgive the lack of a business plan _at that scale_ whereas a SAAS platform targeting B2B customers should probably require your statement to be true.
People aren't the customers of Reddit/Facebook, they're the product, that's why social media has such negative effect on mental health, the users aren't a concern beyond how many minutes they dump in for advertisers to pay for.
The advertisers are.
[1] the best kind of "correct"
yeah, if your business plan lands millions of users you better have more than $40k ready to fund it. Since most people don't have that at hand it's actually a really problematic plan, because you've got to be able to secure the funding for it right when it starts to hit, if you don't you're done, if you do you might have to do it by giving up too much control, if you won't then you're done.
To me, it seems like a pretty elementary mistake, but I think that oftentimes people are more subconsciously desiring external validation than accurate assessments.
The flip side is that sometimes it takes awhile to build the perception of value, hence free trials/freemium models. Get people hooked, then ask for $.
There are many ways to be successful (and even more ways to be unsuccessful).
In the end it's all about taking calculated risks. Should the OP have learned more about the market he was trying to operate in AT SOME POINT before quitting his day job, hiring five "contractors" and writing 200000 lines of code in 9 months? Sure. Was it a worthwhile experience that gave him more wisdom? Hard to say. To be honest I am surprised he only blew 40K, it could have been a lot worse.
For many founders, a 5x return would still be a life altering result, but to most VCs that doesn't really move the needle. It's nicer than 0x of course, but no more than that.
I was helping a friend’s son start a consumer service business (automating a manual process for postoperative and elder care with a conversation backed by GPT-3). Seemed like a great idea to me. I asked my M.D. mother if she’d use it. Definitely would, and would pay for it if it worked.
If it worked? Uuuh… I asked my mum a different question: if your doctor told you to use this would you? “Definitely not”.
The kid has a dozen people using the MVP. He knew them all of course, or they were the parents of his friends. So I suggested he let me know when he had n people whom he didn’t know using this for more than 30 days.
First n was 50 people, then 25, finally I said just anyone. So far, nope.
Idea: valuable (to humanity). But not yet “V”
>With all the negative pushback this is getting, it’s making me think he was onto something.
Or maybe the idea is bad. I see this line of thought all the time sometimes implied by the misattributed Gandhi quote.
You can define the existence of a market. You can know that there exists some customer with money and a problem you can solve. But that's not the same as being able to say, "Hey, wait a couple of years while I implement this thing. I don't suppose you'd be interested in paying up front?"
Every successful startup has that moment of bravery where they commit their own money and hope that the customer still exists, and is actually willing to cough up money rather than continuing to do whatever they had been doing while they waited. Every failed startup had the same moment, only the customer turned out not to be willing to spend the money.
There are obvious cases where they should have known that no customer existed. But there are also a lot of cases where they simply weren't in the right place at the right time. I think it's a nice myth that the business majors tell themselves that they would always have known beforehand, but it seems more like survivorship bias to me.
The big question is how do you get people to give you money for your services/product. Classically people answer this with emphasis on the idea.
In the startup world, founders have been taught that "success" means things other than making money, such as large "valuations" that are not tied to profit or even revenue.
Another founder "success" is VC or angel funding, or getting on some list ("top founders under 30!") or media coverage.
"Exit" is also a "success" even if the sale is underwater or not worth much.
> You could also say they didnt identify how to make money.
For a time, there was a school of thought that as long as you had incredible growth/usage for your app or service, making money wasn't important because someone would buy you.
It’s probably not psychologically feasible or even useful for them to precisely examine the unearned factors in their or their company’s success, but so many citing ‘hard work’ as the primary factor proves they don’t try. Implying they committed as much, let some hundreds of times more cognitive, emotional, or physical effort, or even as many hours as an NYC line cook aspiring to be a chef, is laughable. Not discounting these folks’ value, but asserting those with less simply have less ambition or work ethic without providing reasonable points of comparison is justification, not reason.
Location, timing, access and mistakes on the side of market players - are all a matter of luck.
Google could not have started in 1998 in Russia. Microsoft would not have been Microsoft, without landing the MSDOS from IBM. So on and so forth.
What, in your estimation, can be controlled then?
Sure, not just anybody could have founded Google, even if born to mathematics and computer science professors prioritizing their educations and offering enough of a safety net to start a company rather than toil to pay off student loans for their Stanford computer science graduate educations which facilitated a relationship with a professor willing to connect them with Andy Bechtolsheim right at the Internet’s precipice… but it sure did help.
What they did required hard work, intelligence, creativity and discipline to execute... But implying those are the only factors worth considering is garbage. Their circumstances guaranteed they’d be able to reap greater rewards than nearly anybody else for the same output even if google had failed. Just look at the Opportunity Atlas. Do you really think talent is that geographically focused? If you don’t consider their circumstances lucky or don’t think they made much difference, I’m not really sure what else to say.
I also see a lot of people fail because they solve a problem that THEY themselves are having but that does not actually happen to a large enough set of people that it translates again to something businesses or individuals will pay for.
Realistically I think the best way to do a startup is being willing to pivot hard and fast and early if necessary or to completely drop a project and move on to something else. If it is a passion project you are doing for yourself that is one thing - if you actually want to start a real business you cannot get caught in the time-already-sunk mentality.
Do it in your spare time without burning so much capital. As much as YC wants you to think otherwise, VC money isn't some magical gatekeeper to innovation. Just build.
Hardware is an order of magnitude (or nine, twelve) more difficult than a software startup. Expensive rev'ing, long turn arounds, supply chain mayhem, overseas production, profits thinner than the paper they are printed on.
The hardware graveyard of kickstarter is chock full of dreamy eyed hardware guys for good reason.
But since you don't: what kind of help are you looking for? Web development?
It's really not about building a viable product in that sense - the Dropbox demo video is the classic example of an MVP that isn't a "product" as such.
> This is completely different to an MVP as defined in The Lean Startup. It's absolutely about proving whatever needs proving.
Here's a relevant article.
https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-pro...
And
> A minimum viable product (MVP) is the most pared down version of a product that can still be released. Product demos, crowdfunding projects and landing pages are all common examples of MVPs.
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27809/minimum-viable-p...
Frank Robinson coined the Minimum Viable Product. This is what he had to say about it:
"The MVP is the right-sized product for your company and your customer. It is big enough to cause adoption, satisfaction and sales, but not so big as to be bloated and risky."
Steve Blank is credited with popularizing the term. Here he emphasizes that the MVP is about reaching sustainability for the company. What he calls an 'MVP tree', which produces potential MVP candidates, may be closer to what we're discussing here.
"An MVP tree is a way of methodically breaking your mission into smaller components and formulating MVP candidates that may get your company sustainable and scalable."
Ries, whoever he is, was free to make up his own definition, just as I can define the sky to be the hot molten lava deep inside the earth, but his definition does not match the usage of its originator nor is it in alignment with how (most) everyone else uses the term.
The author of the book that the other poster was talking about.
> Steve Blank is credited with popularizing the term
As is Ries.
> Here he emphasizes that the MVP is about reaching sustainability for the company.
Hmm. Here's a post from him that's absolutely not about sustainability but about validating core assumptions (and not building a product): https://steveblank.com/2013/07/22/an-mvp-is-not-a-cheaper-pr...
> Ries, whoever he is, was free to make up his own definition, just as I can define the sky to be the hot molten lava deep inside the earth, but his definition does not match the usage of its originator nor is it in alignment with how (most) everyone else uses the term.
It would be very at odds with the current use of the term MVP to define what dropbox did as not an MVP.
This isn't becoming hugely productive, so I'll leave it where I started - I've had this argument before from your side, and the dropbox video is an MVP. It is not a niche view.
Another consideration is you consider : your solution, the end-consumer , and stop there ... and if you forget there's a middle-man (the doctor in this case) thats a miss too.. Middle-persons always complicate the situation.
They had no idea at all how they'd make money but there was a significant cost building and running the product.
Yet VC's had no problem funding this moonshot startup. Then another startup invented a solution that could allow them to monetize. Only problem was that it was very controversial and there were dozens of blog articles criticizing the idea. But they adopted it anyway and found incredible success.
That company if you haven't already recognized it was Google. Anytime you try and take your experience and generalize it across all startups you would be wrong.
That seems to cover Google just fine.
Yahoo and AltaVista weren't great and Google Search was far superior.
Making things work better is way easier, than creating a completely new market.
I really need to publish and share that thing…
Or do you mean he should have invested into a designer to create mockups?
I built a very niche monitoring product for sysadmins. Actually I built it for myself three years ago, but I want to explore if others would pay for it.
If you are in the space, or anyone else who reads this I'd be grateful to receive some feedback on a 10 minute video call.
It needs to be the first one to be big.
It's not the sexiest market if you're looking to win a Nobel prize (lol) but insurance companies seems like a potential customer with a large financial incentive...
But if consumers weren't going to work because the advertising revenue wasn't lucrative enough, and doctors weren't willing to pay for the solution, then it's time to get creative.
What about insurance companies? Insurance companies have a vested interest in picking the right drug because they are on the hook if the outcome isn't good. Or what about the pharmaceutical companies themselves? Would they pay for the data for use in their own marketing campaigns much like "4 out of 5 dentists agree"?
TLDR; OP went all in on two obvious markets but didn't think out of the box in terms of who might be willing to pay for his product.
I always feel discomfort when this gets parroted. It's clearly not true, unless you're willing to shift the definitions of "idea" and "execution" around after-the-fact.
Indeed the article comes to the conclusion that the idea is near-impossible to execute – due to realities within the business domain of healthcare. If the idea was "nothing", good execution could've fixed it.
My greater point is that ideas set the boundaries for what's possible in execution, which in turn means ideas are critical. If they were unimportant a shit idea would have little impact on the outcome, which is clearly not true. They could still be "overrated" though, but then we should use that language.
Yes, my original post was not verbose, but I think people are better served by hanging signs all over their start-up that say what I wrote. Ideas are fun, ideas are hopeful, ideas can be magic, ideas can fill your heart but success comes from out-working everyone else. I have several truly great company ideas but I've never started them because I know in my heart that I don't want to go do all the work required to make it success.
A lot of startups fail because they never identify a customer. Or even a problem. This one failed because before writing a line of code the founder did not take the next step and ensure that the prospective customer was willing to spend money on a solution.
This is why so many failing startups try to pivot to two-sided business models like advertising. That's one of the hardest businesses there is to start. And it's what the founder did here, too.
It sounds obvious stated as follows, but every startup failure I've read or heard about fails to get these ducks in a row:
- problem to be solved
- customer who has the problem
- customer willing to spend money to solve the problem
- enough customers willing to spend money on solving the problem to fuel a startup
Oddly enough, many of the startup success stories gloss over these fundamental components. The net result is that there's way too much emphasis on the idea and not nearly enough on the customer.