Is my startup idea solving a real need out there?

Re:Is my startup idea solving a real need out there? by HeyLaughingBoy on Monday December 08, 2014 @05:22PM (#8719631)

First, let me say that ideas like this are near and dear to my heart. As a software dev with a hardware background who's worked in Embedded Systems his entire career, I love this stuff and I enjoy helping people on online forums.

That said, I simply won't join a site that doesn't tell me much about what it does before I have to sign up. I need to browse. I need to see what the average level of discourse is. I know what level I want to engage people at and I've been at this long enough to grow tired of the "how do I blink an LED with my Arduino?" questions. Nothing wrong with that -- everyone starts somewhere -- but it's not for me.

You're competing with, among others, http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ and http://robotics.stackexchange.com/ Show me how you're different/better before I decide to sign up.

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Re:Is my startup idea solving a real need out there? by OscarPedroso on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @12:32AM (#8721197)

Thanks for your input and links to these sites. I hadn't thought about stack exchange but definitely some good traffic on there. I think what I really want to do is spend some time understanding pain points in this space - I'm not convinced I've found that one thing yet that really needs to be solved.

So far, I've interviewed a few of our users and they seem to be looking for an elance-for-hardware type of site where technical people submit ideas and a budget and hardware/software developers come together, create teams, and build that concept into a product. Quirky and Maker's Row do something like this but I'd still have to do a bit more customer discovery.

A bit far from what I'm aiming to build but I'm wondering whether I should listen a bit closer.

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