founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
When Dropbox launched, there were at least half a dozen other "online storage" businesses in existence. The Apple iPod entered a market litered with crappy MP3 players. Google was famously the Nth Internet search engine. Some good ideas have a lot of bad implementations before someone comes in and does it well enough to win big. ...
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Via: Eladgil
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Last month, Ryan Hoover had a great post about building email into your startup first, before moving on to other platforms. His awesome points: Email lets you validate ideas quickly. Since email is async, you can fake functionality with manual processes ...
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Via: Sachin
Please follow @agarwal. |
It's been interesting over the years to observe which vertical marketplaces take off sustainably and which fizzle, especially in light of the two dominant horizontal liquidity behemoths: eBay and Craigslist. For a while it looked like vertical sites would take away eBay's business category after category as experts in each vertical with the right community credentials built something better attune ...
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Via: Fabrice Grinda
Entrepreneur, student and lover of life and aspiring Renaiss |
Earlier today I got into a conversation with a colleague about the relative importance of a startup idea vs a startup team. Naturally, both the concept and the people are critically important, but if you had to pick one, which would be most important? ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
"He cares deeply about... the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands." - Laurene Powell Jobs on her husband, Steve Startups aren't here to change the world, they're here to save the world--by bringing us innovation that advances humankind. ...
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Via: Venture Hacks
I started @angellist and @venturehacks. |
How does one find new startup ideas? Every business is built around solving a customer pain. Solving a customer pain creates value which in turn, if successfully harnessed, can be monetized. Platform Thinking and Startup Ideas One of the patterns for new startup ideas, that I often see in platforms, is the following: Match an unmonetized/unvalued surplus with an unsatisfied scarcity. ...
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Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. ...
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Via: Sachin Rekhi
Entrepreneur, product guy, and software engineer. Founder & |
"It's one thing to work on stuff that seems sexy because it's socially cool and financially rewarding. But fulfillment doesn't come much from money or cool-power -- all the money in the world can't buy you a searing sense of ccomplishment." Umair Haque Recently Umair Haque wrote a great piece for HBR on meaningful work. ...
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Via: Usman Sheikh
Co-Founder of IDENTIFI. On a mission to get the right people |
I was recently speaking with a colleague of my fathers who works in education and had an idea for a product in the tutoring space. He specifically wanted to know where he could find someone with technical skills to help build out a prototype. ...
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Co-founder of @Ridejoy, a community marketplace for rideshar |
The startup world today loves hacks. Growth hacks. Venture hacks. Social hacks. The result ends up being a focus on the means, rather than the ends. And I think that's a shame. In one sense, hacking a startup is a great thing. Who doesn't want to get rich quick? I certainly wouldn't turn down easy money. But in another sense, it's a terrible thing. ...
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Entrepreneur, Investor, Writer, Dad. |
Is the European tech industry building companies poised to change people's lives, or just wasting everyone's time with pointless apps? Matthew Bostock worries it might be the latter. ...
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Via: THE KERNEL
I write stuff. I read stuff. |
I always enjoy reading Paul Graham's essays and his latest one How to get startup ideas is another great read.I'm going to focus on one of the by-products of Paul's essay which is a list of indicators that an idea might be good or an idea might be bad. ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Andrew Parker had a great post a few years ago where he sketched out all the startups going after pieces of Craigslist: Startups that have tried to go head-to-head against the entirety of Craigslist (the "horizontal approach") have struggled. Startups that have tried to go up against pieces of Craigslist (the "vertical approach") have been much more successful. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
I was reading Paul Graham's latest essay, How to Get Startup Ideas, and the second paragraph jumped out at me. He says: The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ...
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Via: MattMaroon.com
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There have been some interesting posts on Hacker News of late around side projects. Some have pointed to their potential to distract. Others, the importance of having an "end" in mind. And while these are very real considerations, I keep feeling as though the obvious has yet to be stated. The obvious being; life needs side projects. If nothing else, they are the lifeblood of creativity. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
Founder @Rocketr / EiR @JetCooper / Speakers Coach @TEDxToro |
You probably even have a system in place to captures all those ideas no matter where you are. Later, you then go through and decide which ideas are the best, most worth your time, etc. This leads to one of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make: before too long they are overwhelmed by how many projects they have going at once. ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
When I first started working on my own business ideas, I didn't understand how important it was to do something unique. I borrowed other ideas without contributing anything new or noteworthy and then scratched my head when my implementation never took off. The next time around, I decided to take the complete opposite approach. I then thought you had to invent something completely new to succeed. T ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
A curious email arrived in my inbox this morning from a new service I've recently joined. Curious mainly for a central feature that they'd woven into the footer of the email: know that you are welcome to contact us at any time about anything. And you'll get a reply from a real, live human. Personalized, human service as a competitive advantage. ...
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Via: Bryce DOT VC
VC, Dad |
One thing I've found through personal experience as well as looking at the paths of founders I admire, is that a startup journey is a process which is best treated like a career (read: it takes a while). Unless you are extremely lucky, the chances are that you won't hit the jackpot first time around. It took me a few tries, and in the process I learned a massive amount. I often call my previous no ...
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Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
Today's interview is with Dane Maxwell and it will cover the exact steps you need to take to go from nothing (seriously -- you don't even need an idea!) to a profitable software business. Dane has already built four six-figure software companies and his biggest seller, Paperless Pipeline, currently pulls in over $40,000 per month. Yes, every month. ...
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Via: Passive Panda
Entrepreneur. Travel Photographer in 17 countries and counti |
In my opinion, right now there's way too much hype on the technologies and not enough attention to the real businesses behind them. - Mark Cuban. Whoever said "it's what's inside that counts" was only half right. Because sexy sells. Talk to any successful CEO in an "unsexy" vertical - like financial, infrastructure, communications, or data - and you can hear it in their voice: the struggle they en ...
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Via: 500 Startups
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Three little words that mean so much. "Change the world." Entrepreneurs utter them like a badge of honor, after all its what we are put on this planet to do, right? Yet, so many of the startups I meet are trying to figure out how to put crap in a box and sell it every month, or as Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera said: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people c ...
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Via: Micah Baldwin
Live a life of extreme honesty. First company when I was 14; |
Suppose you launch your new startup and don't get the traction you were hoping for. How do you know whether to give up or keep going? This is a tough question. There are lots of examples that support seemingly contradictory theories. Instagram pivoted before launch, and Pinterest refused to pivot for years. Many other startups pivoted too early or kept working on dead-end ideas for too long. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
We had a blast at Stack Overflow Co-Founder and Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood's soapbox on May 11. During Jeff's nearly 50-minute talk, not only did he delve deep into the origins of Stack Overflow, but he gave us some great insight into why the status quo is frustrating and why it should be challenged. Here's how Jeff put it: It's like having a cold for your entire life ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
Last week, I launched The Toolbox, a directory of useful one-page sites and apps. It got upvoted a lot on Hacker News, then went viral on Twitter, and got about 11k visitors on the day of the launch. Since then, I've had a couple people ask me why I launched that site, and what kind of tools I used to do it. But first, let me share some stats for the first 10 days. ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
I recently have met a number of people who expressed how badly they wanted to do a startup but said they lacked any good ideas. I know that startup ideas are worthless, especially since I have lived through the dozens of iterations involved ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
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If something important is broken, creating a solution is a great way to create a business opportunity for yourself. The small business lending ecosystem through traditional banks is broken. Crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo (founded by two former colleagues of mine) found a way to solve the broken funding model for small businesses and creative projects. ...
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Via: Corbett Barr
I help people build cool stuff online. Seriously. It's the b |
Every investor we worked with at Habit treated us unbelievably well. That being said, accepting (and striving for) the funding led us toward building a company we hated and were bad at. Turns out, we just wanted to make a living working on creative projects with our friends. The billion dollar dream was someone else's ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
Earlier today I was on a panel titled Startups Are Not Businesses Like Caterpillars Are Not Butterflies at the TiECON Southeast 2012 conference. One of the first questions from a guest in the audience was a conundrum about her two related startups and whether or not she should do one or both simultaneously. My response was direct: focus on one startup and one idea at a time. ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
Eighty percent of startups develop products they never intended, driven by the markets they never intended to enter as dictated by the consumer. Never mind that the figure - 80 percent - was anectodal and unattributed. So what if this so-called 80-20 rule is right? What do you want to do? ...
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Via: Richard R Becker
Rich at Copywrite, Ink. Editor, LiquidHip. CTO, CelebratingL |
Me and my co-founder realized a few days ago by talking to users and doing some research that there are some serious issues with the idea we applied with to YC. The question to you is whether we should bother coming up with a new idea (which we are struggling to do) incorporating the new knowledge we have gained or simply go into the YC interview knowing that the idea they are expecting us to talk ...
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Via: MattMaroon.com
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As the tools to create incredible inventions become more accessible to the masses, the classic "inventor" profile is being expanded, exploded, and reconfigured. Designers, web developers, and entrepreneurs are joining scientists and tinkerers to yield the next wave of world-changing inventions. ...
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Via: The99Percent
We're now posting under @99U - come follow for insights on m |
What if I told you that there were 3 simple steps you could take to find a profitable idea and set yourself up for success. Let's talk about those 3 steps right now. ...
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Via: Passive Panda
Entrepreneur. Travel Photographer in 17 countries and counti |
It wasn't long into the conversation when she mentioned she would soon have a lawyer draw up a Non-Disclosure Agreement regarding the project, at which point I had to interject. "Ah, let me stop you right there for a sec and let you know this up front: I will almost never sign an NDA." ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
Cofounder of GrantTree and Woobius, Blogger @ http://swombat |
Before you start your first business, do a relevant project. Businesses have overhead. Projects don't. If you tell me you'll pay $20k for a solid developer hire, and I think I might be able to dig up someone great, then I don't need to go off and set up a headhunting company. I just need to do a project. ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
With so much technology out there to make our lives easier and more entertaining, what about some that address real problems, like a solution for world hunger, an app for purifying water, or a tool that gives a voice to those who have been silenced? ...
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Via: Venture Beat
CEO & Co-founder of AnchorFree (makers of Hotspot Shield), e |
We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. ...
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Via: Steve Blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford, |
Ever so often, I get asked a question like "Should I be worried about telling people my idea?" The question almost always comes from first-time entrepreneurs. It's a commonly blogged about topic among entrepreneurs and VC's, but I'd like to add in my two cents. ...
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Via: Nat Turner
Co-founder of Flatiron Health. Previously Co-Founder/CEO of |
Over the years, I’ve heard mixed opinions on this topic. Some say keep your job and work on your idea on the side, because you need the income and you never know if your idea is good enough. Others say having a job will prevent you from giving your full attention to your idea and ... ...
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Via: Amir Khella
Made in Egypt, Assembled in America. Entrepreneur, UX , hack |
Imitation is an easy trap product designers can easily get stuck in. The desire to be the next Facebook or the next [insert a popular social media product here] is tempting. But as we've said before, imitation is suicide. Yet, product designers continue to be dead serious about imitating what's popular and the argument has been made that they should be. Or has it? ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
In my first post in this series I listed a number of criteria I use to evaluate startup ideas. The very first was user acquisition. It and the second one (revenue model) are closely related and, I think, are the easiest way to at least disqualify an idea upfront. ...
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Via: MattMaroon.com
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One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them. ...
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Via: Paul Graham
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I'd like to take everyone's advice and talk to potential customers and investors about my ideas, but what if someone else steals my idea? If a competitor got ahold of this - especially a well-funded one - I could die before I ever got started! Don't VCs do that? Almost all founders I encounter are leery about discussing their product plans. Now with the Social Network movie promulgating this fear, ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
We live in a culture that attributes reckless indifference to theory and learning lightly. That has consequences. Why? Because everyone is leading with solutions in search of a problem -- we don't stay with problems long enough to understand them. You could say the people who win, are the ones who has the lower degree of misunderstandings today. ...
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Via: Conversation Agent
Sr. Director Strategy, Empathy Lab. [Make sense. Make do. Ma |
Do you have lots of ideas rattling around in your head? Do you mostly dismiss them? Or do you pick one and dwell on it for a while. Are you a breadth person (lots of simple ideas) or depth person (deep dive into an idea). No matter what you do ...
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Via: Dorai's Learn Log
Favorite topics - Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurshi |
I'm going to give you my thought process on evaluating startup ideas in its current state of evolution. This might sound idiotic to me in a year, or to you now, but if I had to start another business right now, here's how I'd evaluate it. ...
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Via: MattMaroon.com
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A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I'd think of a way to disagree. I'd push back hard if something didn't fit my world-view. It's like I had to be first with an opinion - as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn't thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
Every founder who's been in the game a few years has clouds of potential ideas floating around that they can't find the time to work on. They might not all be good, but there are always too many of them. At the same time, though some people have this cloud of ideas following them even before they run their first business, many start off with few ideas. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
Cofounder of GrantTree and Woobius, Blogger @ http://swombat |
In my last article I wrote a few of my realizations and how I plan to adapt myself in 2012. In this sequel article I will share some of my personal inspirations, which have shaped me to become who I am, and how I think. I will also share with you one of my latest projects and my… Read the rest of this entry » ...
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Blogger and Internet business entrepreneur from Australia |
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