Re:How to tell your friend that their startup idea sucks
by wpietri on Sunday May 18, 2014 @11:01PM
(#7765494)
My simple answer to this: don't.
I have a number of friends who are reflexively critical. Great people generally, and I'm glad to have them as friends. But I've just stopped telling them about new things I might be working on. If you're doing a startup, extra discouragement is rarely something you need.
If a startup sounds dumb, that's probably because you're not an early adopter in the target market. As an example, the first personal computers were absolutely terrible for most people unless a) they were hugely in love with technology, or b) had a very specific business purpose that the tech could actually solve. A lot of people surely looked at early home computers and thought they were dumb businesses. In retrospect, we can tell which the dumb ones were, but at the time it sure wasn't obvious.
If you want to help a friend whose startup idea is suspicious to you, don't critique the idea; encourage them to prove the idea with their target audience. Prod them them to interview 10 potential customers and see how many have the hypothesized problem. Help them to do a concierge version [1] of the product and see how much money they can collect. Assist them in doing a landing page test.
But please don't critique the idea unless you have deep expertise in the domain or are actually an early adopter in the target market. Feel free to critique things within your professional skills, of course; if you're a visual designer, it's ok to tell them their logo could use some work.
I have a number of friends who are reflexively critical. Great people generally, and I'm glad to have them as friends. But I've just stopped telling them about new things I might be working on. If you're doing a startup, extra discouragement is rarely something you need.
If a startup sounds dumb, that's probably because you're not an early adopter in the target market. As an example, the first personal computers were absolutely terrible for most people unless a) they were hugely in love with technology, or b) had a very specific business purpose that the tech could actually solve. A lot of people surely looked at early home computers and thought they were dumb businesses. In retrospect, we can tell which the dumb ones were, but at the time it sure wasn't obvious.
If you want to help a friend whose startup idea is suspicious to you, don't critique the idea; encourage them to prove the idea with their target audience. Prod them them to interview 10 potential customers and see how many have the hypothesized problem. Help them to do a concierge version [1] of the product and see how much money they can collect. Assist them in doing a landing page test.
But please don't critique the idea unless you have deep expertise in the domain or are actually an early adopter in the target market. Feel free to critique things within your professional skills, of course; if you're a visual designer, it's ok to tell them their logo could use some work.
[1] http://scottlthompson.com/lean-lesson-flashback-the-concierg...