<story><title>How to pick startup ideas</title><url>http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>inthewoods</author><text>Interesting article - a lot of good stuff in it but I found it a bit to general to be really useful. As an example, the author states: &amp;quot;So you need to get to market with a viable product before anyone else does.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the type of statement that I question - there are plenty of examples of companies creating products in saturated markets where they were not the first mover. In fact, sometime being a first mover can be a disadvantage as you must, as a startup, spend huge amounts of time and money educating the market.&lt;p&gt;Now, the author&amp;#x27;s approach of &amp;quot;look at the trend, get in front of it&amp;quot; is great - but it&amp;#x27;s pretty rare that someone can do that. In startups, I&amp;#x27;ve usually seen that luck plays a bigger role in it than anyone wants to admit - that is, you start a company, and you happen onto the right market wave at the right time.&lt;p&gt;Definitely bookmarking it!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinceguidry</author><text>I found the article great in forcing me to reconsider my goals in that space. I&amp;#x27;d always had this belief that it was possible, eventually, to find the right idea and break through and become the next Microsoft &amp;#x2F; Google &amp;#x2F; Apple. The more I actually understand about the broader economic environment, and the more I read about the people in question who started these companies, the more it just looks like right-place-right-time luck.&lt;p&gt;The article puts that neatly in proper perspective. And that changes the personal self-actualization path calculus for me considerably. Targeting &amp;quot;building a rocket ship&amp;quot; as a goal doesn&amp;#x27;t make you any more likely to actually build a rocket ship than just starting a company in wherever you find your passion. Where you find your passion is, just due to the way humans are, more likely to be rocket-ship-worthy than any idea borne out of any rational brainstorming process aimed at producing one.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to pick startup ideas</title><url>http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>inthewoods</author><text>Interesting article - a lot of good stuff in it but I found it a bit to general to be really useful. As an example, the author states: &amp;quot;So you need to get to market with a viable product before anyone else does.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the type of statement that I question - there are plenty of examples of companies creating products in saturated markets where they were not the first mover. In fact, sometime being a first mover can be a disadvantage as you must, as a startup, spend huge amounts of time and money educating the market.&lt;p&gt;Now, the author&amp;#x27;s approach of &amp;quot;look at the trend, get in front of it&amp;quot; is great - but it&amp;#x27;s pretty rare that someone can do that. In startups, I&amp;#x27;ve usually seen that luck plays a bigger role in it than anyone wants to admit - that is, you start a company, and you happen onto the right market wave at the right time.&lt;p&gt;Definitely bookmarking it!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coffeemug</author><text>&amp;gt; there are plenty of examples of companies creating products in saturated markets where they were not the first mover&lt;p&gt;There is an &amp;quot;exceptions&amp;quot; section closer to the end of the post that discuss this, though it probably should have been longer.&lt;p&gt;The biggest issue with exceptions like this is that first-time founders often jump into a saturated market and think &amp;quot;we can do better -- look at all the counterexamples&amp;quot;, but they end up losing the overwhelming majority of the time. You &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; jump into a saturated market, but you need a hypothesis as to why you&amp;#x27;re going to win (a distribution edge that existing competitors don&amp;#x27;t have, a new trend that existing competitors can&amp;#x27;t capitalize on, etc.) Especially in the latter case, one could make an argument that you will have discovered a new trend&amp;#x2F;market, though at that point it&amp;#x27;s a matter of definitions.</text></comment>