Adam Zerner
I’ve been in pursuit of a good startup idea lately. I went through a long list I had and deleted everything. None were good enough. Finding a good idea is really hard.
One way that I think about it is that a good idea has to be the intersection of a few things.
For me at least, I want to be able to fail fast. I want to be able to build and test it in a matter of weeks. I don’t want to raise venture funding and spend 18 months testing an idea. This is pretty huge actually. If one idea takes 10 days to build and the other takes 10 weeks, well, the burden of proof for the 10 week one is way higher. You could start seven 10 day ideas in 10 weeks.
I want the demand to be real. It should ideally be a painkiller, not a vitamin. Something people are really itching for, not something that kinda sorta sounds interesting that they think they should consume but aren’t super motivated to actually consume it. And I want to feel that way myself. I want to dogfood it. When I went through my list of ideas and really was honest with myself, there weren’t any ideas that I actually felt that eager to dogfood.
There needs to be a plausible path towards acquiring customers. Word of mouth, virality, SEO, ads, influencer marketing, affiliates, TV commercials, whatever. It’s possible that a product is quick to build and really satisfies a need, but there isn’t a good way to actually get it in front of users. You need a way to get it in front of users.
Of course, the money part needs to make sense. After listening to a bunch of Indie Hackers episodes, I’m really leaning towards businesses that make money via charging people, not via selling ads or whatever. Hopefully charging high prices, and hopefully targeting businesses (with budgets!) instead of consumers. Unfortunately, unlike Jay Z, I’m not a business, so I don’t understand the needs of businesses too well. I’ve always heard people give the advice of targeting businesses, but founders typically don’t understand the needs of businesses well, and I’ve never heard a good resolution to that dilemma.
I need to have the skills to build it. Fortunately at this point I’m a pretty solid programmer so there’s a lot of web app related things I’m able to build.
Hopefully there is a path towards expanding and being a big hit, not just a niche side income sort of thing. Although at this stage of my life I’d probably be ok with the latter.
When you add more and more things to the intersection, it actually gets quite small, quite rapidly.
Microstartup Stories: Initial Thoughts
Hm yeah maybe Zvi’s posts. Scotts Much More Than You Wanted To Know feel more like research to me whereas journalism is a bit more storytelling and opinion.
The many types of blog posts
Ah, that’s good to know about clicking on it. In retrospect I’m surprised I didn’t realize that.
And that makes sense about being difficult to come up with a better option. I was thinking of having the comment appear in the middle of the screen to the left of the comment icon. That has the downside of being more intrusive. My sense is that the upsides outweigh the downsides, but I’m not particularly confident. I also think it makes sense to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good with this feature, especially wrt releasing fast and seeing what users think.
Very cool. Thanks for the response.
I am finding it somewhat difficult to work with. As I’m reading the post, scrolling down and first come across the comment icon, I hover over it. But at this point I’m scrolled down such that the comment icon is at the bottom right of the screen, which makes the text of the comment cut off. It’s also covered by the Intercom button. So I have to scroll to see the text of the comment. But when I scroll my cursor is no longer over the comment icon, so the comment text disappears.
All of that just means that I have to scroll to the right position first and then put my cursor over the comment icon. Part of me feels like that’s not really a big deal, but another part of me feels like it might be a trivial inconvenience that makes me too unmotivated to use the feature. I can’t tell yet.
This is very cool. Lining up with the text by matching blockquotes is very clever!
Yeah absolutely. I’m curious: how difficult was it to implement this feature? Utilizing blockquotes that way means you don’t have to store side comments any differently really, so maybe it was easy to implement. Then again, things are never as easy as you’d initially expect.
It’s interesting how people’s responses can be so different here. I’m someone who gets pretty extreme anxiety from the x-risk stuff, at least when I’m not repressing those feelings.
Ah, that’s a really great point about game selection and it totally escaped me! Thanks for mentioning it. Taking it further, nowadays people are moving away from holdem and towards games like PLO and Short Deck because holdem has gotten too competitive.
I agree about comparative advantage, but I’m not sure that it’d be going down that path. There’s a lot that can be said about what makes a dish good/better. My sense is that it’s better to restrict the scope of the post to the idea that it’s often worth looking for a better dish than how to go about doing so.
Yeah, it’s not the best analogy. It’s not obvious enough that moving from the French omelette to the Thai-style one is in fact a significant upgrade. The whole idea of the post is that sometimes moving to a different “dish” yields much better results than improving the current one, so I wanted the “significant upgrade” part to be visceral and clear. I don’t feel like I was able to get to that point though. I messed around with the omelette example and also tried thinking of different examples but wasn’t able to get to a point where I was particularly satisfied.
Is that where you are coming from? Or are you saying that the main idea of the post didn’t shine through in the first section?
(I really appreciate this sort of feedback btw. It helps me as a writer. Thank you!)
Unironically eating the french omelette is bad… and that it’s silly to order french omelettes at restaurants
Huh, really? I didn’t realize that, I thought it was considered to be both a good chefs test and a good dish. I just skimmed through the Serious Eats post again though and am not actually seeing a claim that it is such a good dish though, so maybe you’re right. I’ve never actually had one myself.
but by virtue of being such a good idea it will tend to apologize for the imperfections of the chef making it. If the Thai omelette is a 20x multiplier on execution, then it’s more than 20x harder to tell the difference between good at execution and great at execution.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s possible that a dish has a large spread: it can be, say, 20x better if executed well and 20x worse if executed poorly. How good a dish is (when executed reasonably well) and how forgiving it is are two separate things. But perhaps they’re correlated.
I think you’re generally right that people tend to miss the point that you should not put great tests on pedestals and that it’s silly to order french omelettes at restaurants. But proxy variables do have their place. I guess my main gripe is the rest of the post doesn’t seem to follow from how you constructed the omelette story.
The main idea isn’t really about tests and proxy variables. To use a different analogy, it’s about the explore-exploit tradeoff. Sometimes continuing to exploit is unwise and you’d be much better off exploring entirely different “dishes”.
Yeah, I have very similar thoughts.
That’s an interesting point/question. My thinking is that there’s a tradeoff: if you make decisions in the moment you benefit from having that more up to date information, but you’re also going to be more tempted to do the wrong thing. I suppose that OP and others believe that the latter side of the tradeoff has more weight.
Choosing the right dish
That claim seems pretty strong to me. In general, biases are tough, but it is accepted we have at least some ability to mitigate them. It sounds like your position is saying the opposite wrt moral decision making and that seems overly pessimistic to me.
Reflective Consequentialism
Yeah that’s an interesting question as to why it isn’t happening already. As you point at there are probably lots of reasons, but my best guess is that the biggest one is the perception that a real professional wouldn’t let it impact how hard they work.
I actually experienced this myself. Ie. when working on that side project where I initially was using Webpack instead of Vite (slow build tool that takes 10 seconds instead of 1), when taking a first stab at the calculus for whether it was worth moving to Vite, I was mostly just thinking about how it’d impact my productivity, in a first order sort of way. Slower builds mean I might lose track of my thought process, which would make me a little less productive. But then it occurred to me that slow builds → frustration → choosing to lay down and watch TV instead of working on the project in the first place. And that certainly impacts productivity, let alone happiness. I think there is something sorta taboo about this thought process though. You’re supposed to be this professional who will suck it up and do the job regardless.
My second best guess is that it’s a thought that is uncommon enough where it doesn’t even occur to people in the first place.
Something like an internship would be a large investment of time that doesn’t feel like it’s worth the possibility of finding a startup idea.
I guess talking to people makes sense. I was thinking at first that it’d require more context than a lunch meeting, more like a dozen hours, but on second thought you could probably at least get a sense of where the paths worth exploring more deeply are (and aren’t) in a lunch meeting.