[HN Gopher] Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
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Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
Author : redm
Score : 68 points
Date : 2020-11-15 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| ape4 wrote:
| Easy - A convenient way to get a covid vaccine /s
| axegon_ wrote:
| I haven't made it to the end of the video but here's my take on
| the subject: it is true - everyone is trying to create the exact
| same thing over and over again. But there are some key components
| that everyone misses. You can't replace facebook. People complain
| about facebook, but those of us who steer clear from it are a
| minority. And if potentially I were to create a facebook which
| solves the problems I have with the existing one, I'd be making a
| facebook clone that fits the requirements of a small subset of
| those who aren't on facebook. Basically insignificant market
| share and it would be a catastrophic waste of time, effort and
| money. Hence the reason why I'm not doing it(also because I find
| social networks inherently boring).
|
| The second big misconception is that in order to make a billion
| or even a million dollar product, you need to focus on a personal
| problem you are trying to solve. Essentially your product should
| solve your problem. And this lures people into an entirely
| different rabbit hole - convincing themselves that "X" is their
| problem and that many other people have that problem. Often no
| one has that problem or it's so insignificant that no one will
| even bother giving it a thought.
|
| The next big rabbit hole are apps. Don't get me wrong, apps are
| great and I rely on my phone heavily. However the Pareto rule is
| in full effect here. People will have 60 apps installed, and will
| use around 20% of those. And they will use heavily 20% of that
| subset. Say the average human being spends, say, an hour and a
| half on his or her phone a day. 80% of which will be
| messaging/social media, where you can't compete. So you are left
| competing with 10 other apps for the user's attention for a
| portion of the remaining 36 minutes. Sure, you could get a few
| thousand users out of several billion people. But again, Pareto's
| rule: most of your revenue will come from a small subset of
| those. Which often defeats the purpose. It's really hard to
| compete as a startup or an indie developer, when thousands of
| companies have thousands of astonishing developers at their
| disposal + the finances to back up any new project.
|
| In addition, an idea in itself is worth nothing. It's what you do
| with it and how you market it that counts.
|
| Which leads me to my final point. Billion dollar ideas are really
| hard to execute because the bar has been set very high. It's not
| something a single person or a small team can pull off. Those who
| do are the black swans. On a semi-related note, when the pandemic
| started, I was pretty convinced that many people will step up
| their game and come up with relevant products which will help the
| world adapt to the new normal. Which didn't happen to my big
| surprise. And I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't take on the
| challenge either(too much on my plate already + it's hard to work
| alone on a project). There were so many opportunities that were
| entirely missed... Shame but oh well... Next time maybe...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I will push back on some
| of the popular mythology that everyone thought successful
| startups we're just toys or would fail in their early days. IMO
| that's mostly bullshit.
|
| Amazon, Google, Uber, Facebook (despite some cherry picked
| article from the video about it never being able to hit
| profitability) were all _hugely_ popular right off the bat, and
| indeed, many people saw them as being more worthy successors to
| what were already huge businesses (e.g. the pre-Google search
| engines, MySpace).
|
| In a similar vein, you often here how pg and other top VCs
| thought AirBnB was a horrible idea early on. Well, that's just
| their own individual myopic vision IMO. Couchsurfing was already
| very popular, as were other vacation rental platforms like VRBO -
| it's not hard to see how AirBnB could grow into that space.
|
| If anything, what I see as the common thread is that the most
| successful startups executed extraordinarily well at just exactly
| the right time (e.g. there were other video sites before YouTube,
| but you didn't really have enough broadband adoption until the
| late 00s the make it viable).
| fizixer wrote:
| MySpace was massive when Facebook was a year or two old. I had
| accounts on both and MySpace looked way more attractive
| compared to FB (it had the feel of Instagram).
|
| So no, FB did not take over overnight. And even a few years
| into FB, no one (yes, no one) knew that FB will go past MySpace
| and there will simply be no comparison between the two 10 or 15
| years down the road.
|
| When FB took over MySpace a full FOUR years in [0], investors
| knew FB had momentum, but no one (yes, no one) had any idea
| why.
|
| Not only that, many investors had no second thoughts about
| MySpace, and it felt like a competition space, instead of a
| winner take all. There was still an opinion that MySpace will
| retake the top spot again 'any minute now.'
|
| So why FB took over MySpace? We don't know. Yes, we don't know
| in 2020, 16 years later.
|
| (I'm not dismissing hard work, marketing, execution,
| commitment. But it was there for both FB and MySpace. It's a
| pre-requisite. You think MySpace folks slacked off and that's
| why FB got ahead? think again).
|
| Stop monday morning quarter backing.
|
| [0]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=when+did+facebook+overtake+m...
| cortesoft wrote:
| You must have had a very different experience if you think
| 'MySpace looked way more attractive compared to FB'....
| MySpace pages were ugly as hell, with tiled backgrounds,
| autoplay music, and mismatched themes. Facebook was CLEAN,
| and everyone's page looked uniform and consistently styled.
| This lack of customization, I think, is what made it become
| so popular. That, and the feed; myspace never had the concept
| of taking posts from all your friends and putting them into a
| list that you could scroll through. You had to visit each
| page to see what was on it, and that meant seeing the
| horrible styling and autoplay music.
| sjg007 wrote:
| That helped but FB was exclusive to universities at first.
| So everyone wanted in.
| alphagrep12345 wrote:
| Exactly!! I always wondered why it took so many years for
| someone to figure out a revenue model for couchsurfing
| ('couchsurfing' website started in 2003 and AirBnB in 2008).
| AirBnB is just that (atleast at start)
| yumraj wrote:
| Actually there is no fundamental difference between VRBO.com
| and Airbnb.com, with VRBO predating Airbnb by a lot, except
| for a more slick execution.
|
| Edit: Per Wikipedia VRBO was launched in 1995.
| bennysonething wrote:
| Same with stackoverflow. I remember thinking when reading
| Joel saying they were doing this "what's the point, I can
| find answers on the web already"
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The folks at the famous ad firm Widen and Kennedy like to
| say "the best story wins." AirBnB did have one thing
| different in it's story vs VRBO, which was that it was
| initially pitched at people's spare bedrooms, not owners of
| vacation properties. It's a small difference, but
| meaningful in how the marketing message spread imo, even if
| AirBnB did come to be dominated by "professional" hosts.
| yumraj wrote:
| Yes, I agree. So in a way it was a cross between VRBO and
| couchsurfing - which as you say made a much better story.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > with VRBO predating Airbnb by a lot, except for a more
| slick execution.
|
| And "the more slick execution" was key. VRBO was until
| quite recently basically just classified ads - all
| transactions were done off platform, which was a major PITA
| and left a huge vector for fraud. I remember back in the
| late 00s I rented a place in Europe, and the only form of
| payment the owner would take was cash, so I showed up and
| paid 1200 euros in cash like I was buying half a kilo of
| heroin.
|
| AirBnB solved the transaction issue right from the get go,
| with all payments going through their system and the owner
| not getting paid until like a day or two after the guest
| checked in. In addition, AirBnB worked off a commission
| model, which makes much more sense from a business
| perspective and which VRBO finally switched to a couple
| years ago.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| All this hoo haa about startup ideas - Just make products that
| excel at every aspect of what it does and make sure there is a
| demand for such a product. I see people making a better soap
| dispenser, the hardware equivalent of what most SaaS startups
| are working on. You need to invent a new kind of soap that is
| better than anything else out there. It should take the grime
| off of everything from kitchen to bathroom scum. It replaces
| IPA, Acetone, LimeOff, EasyOff, Ivory bar, Dawn soap, and Gojo.
| You've got an explosive popularity just around the corner.
| Popularity isn't luck. It germinates from knocking people's
| socks off when they use your product.
|
| I equate startup advice to those "Teach you how to become a
| millionaire" books you find at grocery stores. If these people
| really were good at making soap, they wouldn't be around giving
| advice. That includes my own advice in this comment ;-).
| Swizec wrote:
| > I equate startup advice to those "Teach you how to become a
| millionaire" books you find at grocery stores.
|
| Without these books, finance wouldn't have enough money to
| play with. Schmucks are a key ingredient of the ecosystem.
|
| Same for startups. You need a substrate of failed founders
| and employees to create the raw materials that feed the
| successful juggernauts.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Just because there is demand for something does not mean it
| is a viable business idea. There is tons of demand for food
| yet the margins selling food are tiny and it is very
| competitive. There is tons of demand for listening to music
| online, yet it was never profitable until Spotify came along.
| There is huge demand for watching videos online yet YouTube
| ran at a loss forever. Everyone thinks that their product is
| great and will stand out among the competitors.
| manigandham wrote:
| At the same time, selling ordinary things in a better way has
| also built many fortunes. I know several self-made people
| running ecommerce businesses in the most mundane spaces.
| There's plenty of opportunity everywhere.
| blackrock wrote:
| List some examples.
| nostromo wrote:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/products
| cercatrova wrote:
| Method soap is the example of a better soap dispenser like
| you say. It doesn't work on everything but it had the
| uniqueness that it was made with natural ingredients, so much
| that you could drink it, which the founders did to
| demonstrate that fact.
| ghayes wrote:
| I never heard of Method Soap before now, but that pitch
| just makes me want it. Good example!
| cercatrova wrote:
| You should check out the How I Built This podcast, it has
| an episode about Method. Great story.
| [deleted]
| justiceforsaas wrote:
| Why is everyone so obsessed with ideas? Out of everything needed
| to succeed with a startup (idea, audience, acquisition channels,
| competition), the "startup idea" is the thing you can ALWAYS
| change. It's the thing you have the most control over.
|
| That's not the case, however, with acquisition channels (a topic
| I write extensively about [1]), or your audience (they come with
| pre-defined beliefs/behaviors that are hard to change.)
|
| Having this in mind, it makes more sense to focus first on
| analyzing a) The audience b) The channels through which you can
| reach to them. Once you get enough knowledge about these 2, you
| can create a pretty good startup idea WITHIN these constraints.
|
| This is why people have invented things like market-product fit
| or product-channel fit [2]. I'd like to add that you're more
| likely to succeed if you FIT your idea TO the channel/audience,
| rather than doing the reverse.
|
| Would love to hear other perspectives on this topic.
|
| [1] https://firstpayingusers.com
|
| [2] https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-
| grow...
| ankit219 wrote:
| The internet is rife with blogs (and now podcasts) about what can
| be a billion dollar startup ideas. It just depends on where
| someone sees an opportunity and exploits it. (not as easy, but
| thats about the crux of it)
|
| I wanted to touch upon the other thing Garry Tan mentioned when
| he said that reason people try the same ideas is because "desire
| is mimetic". We want what other people want. Same ideas
| especially ones which have already been successful. And he cites
| examples like Podcasts, Travel plans, and local events app.
|
| Out of the three mentioned, local events app and travel plans
| apps have been tried multiple times but never been successful.
| Its something when you ask casual travelers what they would want
| in a travel app and travel planning help is their first pick and
| local events and guidance is their second pick. Most of these
| ideas fold because travel is very cold market for an investor and
| most dont want to invest.
|
| Also, quite a few folks now pick ideas based on what is a hot
| market ergo what is being funded, and quite a few times its a
| variant or a rendition of what is already successful (or
| something a success in one vertical can be tried in another).
|
| That being said, I do think that you need to have the experiences
| of the people you are building the product for. It may or may not
| be the same experience as others.
| mushufasa wrote:
| > Most of these ideas fold because travel is very cold market
| for an investor and most dont want to invest.
|
| This isn't true. For example, AirBnB has plenty of funding.
|
| Investors as the constraint currently happens for capital-
| intensive opportunities, like nuclear fusion. There's plenty of
| investors for software as a service.
|
| There are lots of other reasons why there aren't more "apps for
| x." The main barrier for any app is that it has to improve on
| the alternative. In this case, tech services like AirBnB and
| TripAdvisor are competing with DIY search, or simply talking to
| a friend or travel consultant and having a human conversation.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Ideas are rarely the problem. It's the execution and commitment.
| paulpauper wrote:
| https://youtu.be/3YKNr-LiblI?t=212
|
| i guess he never heard of ebay.
|
| patreon is just paypal donation button but they take a bigger cut
| and have developed a habit of terminating creators from the
| service for vague TOS violations
|
| When he says that a company is worth 1 billon or 3 billon etc. ,
| this is based on the last funding round in a very illiquid
| market. The collapse of wework shows that these purportedly large
| numbers are less impressive than they seem
| gfodor wrote:
| Hacker News sure has changed into Slashdot 2.0 when this kind
| of shallow dismissivemess is so common.
| blackrock wrote:
| The comment rating on Slashdot is better. You can mark
| comments as funny or insightful.
|
| HN readers tend to have a single linear viewpoint, and if you
| dissent from that angle, then you get downvoted to oblivion,
| or worse, flagged, even if you may have a valid viewpoint.
|
| Edit: And I just got downvoted. So this proves my point.
| formalsystem wrote:
| I'd like to offer a counterpoint to starting a billion dollar
| startup, instead of trying your best to be a billionaire - you
| can pursue multiple small bets that can pay you better than your
| current full time job. That way you don't have to sacrifice your
| interests for financial independence.
|
| I spent the last 2 years working on a research heavy startup that
| I felt would change game development forever, it was hard from an
| engineering, research, marketing and sales standpoint.
|
| Late into the second year I started to feel burnt out and decided
| instead to write a robotics textbook which got way more attention
| to both myself and my project in about 2 months worth of work
| than 2 years did. This then got me to take Twitter a bit more
| seriously in terms of making friends, peers that I can easily see
| turn into collaborators or customers in the future. Sort of an
| audience first approach as opposed to product first approach.
| Tools like Twitter, Medium and Substack make this approach a lot
| more feasible today.
|
| I even remember having a sort of disdain for freelancing because
| I thought it didn't scale whereas if I did pursue it more
| seriously I'd imagine I'd have had more direct solo enterprise
| sales experience, met more clients, figured out what their
| problems were and solving them instead of imagining an ideal
| where game developers would solve their problems like I wanted
| them to. Seeing my savings decrease every month took a mental
| toll on me, I figured there would be a light at the end of the
| tunnel and I essentially feel like I miscalibrated my goals.
| Instead of trying to build a billion dollar startup, I should
| have spent more time figuring out how to never need a job ever
| again.
|
| The benefits of the multiple small bets approach is that when
| you're wrong it doesn't cost you 2 years of your life, you're
| less fragile to sudden decreases in income from one small bet,
| you don't have a boss, pandemics don't affect you, you choose
| your peers and hours etc.. Making your first few dollars online
| (not from a paycheck) changes you, makes a you a lot better at
| pursuing opportunities when they happen.
|
| After COVID hit I started looking for a job again and my
| interviewing experience was very interesting to say the least. I
| described very honestly my failures and startups loved my story
| and appreciated my openness - bigger companies on the other hand
| essentially told me that well your startup didn't work out so you
| must be lazy and dumb. The outcome is what determines if I'm a
| good founder or not but it was really painful being lectured by
| people who had never taken a risk in their lives.
|
| I see so many founders dreaming of huge companies going towards
| IPO when I can see solo founder companies being a lot happier if
| they pursued multiple small bets instead. You can't hedge your
| life over multiple billion dollar startups with a 1% chance of
| working out but you can certainly hedge it over multiple small
| bets each with a 10-30% chance of success. What's good for the
| aggregate or society isn't necessarily what is best for you.
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