💡Idea: Blog articles distribution
It's difficult to get views on a blog that doesn't rank well on search engines. You post an interesting article and no one is reading it. This distribution problem hit authors hard. They decide to stop writing.
How can we improve this? What if we have a platform where an author adds his blog, and the platform shows the articles to relevant people? One may state it's Medium, but no. First of all, you don't own the content there. Plus, Medium doesn't show the relevant content to people. For example, I wrote multiple posts there and got 0 views.
The platform will keep track of new articles in an author's blog by RSS. When a new material releases, the platform shows it to people. If people like it, the platform shows it to more readers.
It's difficult to get views on a blog that doesn't rank well on search engines. You post an interesting article and no one is reading it. This distribution problem hit authors hard. They decide to stop writing.
How can we improve this? What if we have a platform where an author adds his blog, and the platform shows the articles to relevant people? One may state it's Medium, but no. First of all, you don't own the content there. Plus, Medium doesn't show the relevant content to people. For example, I wrote multiple posts there and got 0 views.
The platform will keep track of new articles in an author's blog by RSS. When a new material releases, the platform shows it to people. If people like it, the platform shows it to more readers.
👍26❤2
Link: Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?
Some bits from comments I like:
1. "You can validate the idea using SEO tools, check if the competitors have traffic and do some detective work to see if they are viable companies. Check the SEO space, and see how many people are running ads on the main search terms, how hard is it to rank for the the main keywords. Check if forums exists, and discount coupons for similar products in marketplaces, check for similar products on product hunt and all the other product websites like Appsumo, Capterra, etc." (link)
2. "The book The Mom Test also points out well that lots of people will say your idea is good even when they have no intention of buying." (link)
3. "A lot of times you can validate whether a market exists without writing any code." (link)
4. "does anyone want this?"
Some bits from comments I like:
1. "You can validate the idea using SEO tools, check if the competitors have traffic and do some detective work to see if they are viable companies. Check the SEO space, and see how many people are running ads on the main search terms, how hard is it to rank for the the main keywords. Check if forums exists, and discount coupons for similar products in marketplaces, check for similar products on product hunt and all the other product websites like Appsumo, Capterra, etc." (link)
2. "The book The Mom Test also points out well that lots of people will say your idea is good even when they have no intention of buying." (link)
3. "A lot of times you can validate whether a market exists without writing any code." (link)
4. "does anyone want this?"
👍22❤1
Idea: Video editing tool
Not just an idea, it's a trend. People seek simple video editing software. Of course, there are a lot of them. But you can create an app aimed at niche users. For example, tiktokers. Or, courses tutors, students in Asia, etc. The video tools we have currently are for the wide public and oftentimes they're full of unnecessary things, UI is complex and rendering/preview is slow. Is there a space for improvement? For sure.
You may dive deeper and create something like an app that edits short videos by adding a music track, a few visual effects, it allows uploading directly to TikTok. Aimed at tiktokers from Germany.
Not just an idea, it's a trend. People seek simple video editing software. Of course, there are a lot of them. But you can create an app aimed at niche users. For example, tiktokers. Or, courses tutors, students in Asia, etc. The video tools we have currently are for the wide public and oftentimes they're full of unnecessary things, UI is complex and rendering/preview is slow. Is there a space for improvement? For sure.
You may dive deeper and create something like an app that edits short videos by adding a music track, a few visual effects, it allows uploading directly to TikTok. Aimed at tiktokers from Germany.
👍19
Idea: Community for tech travelers
"During college, I took a year off to work on an e-commerce startup with a friend. We made a number of classic first-time entrepreneur mistakes, and after a year we decided to shut down the company. I went back to school, finished my degree, and started interviewing for jobs at different startups.
The whole experience left me feeling pretty burnt out on tech. While working on the startup, I'd lost touch with the intrinsic joy of building things for their own sake, and I'd been focusing on work to the point where I was neglecting my personal health.
I felt like getting back into the startup world would just continue that trend, and after spending some time reflecting I realized that what I really wanted to do was travel for an extended period and work on just-for-fun side projects.
So that's what I did. I picked up some freelance web development work and I emailed a bunch of hotels in Central America to see if they'd give me room and board in exchange for web and marketing help. I heard back from a hotel in Costa Rica, and I started working with them to promote yoga retreats during the country's low season.
However, right after we started the project, someone stole their yoga instructor's laptop, and she decided to leave Costa Rica for her native England. All of a sudden, there was no more work for me to do, and it looked like I was going to have to cut my stay there short.
I still wanted to hang out in Costa Rica, so I pitched the hotel owner on bringing a group of developers to his hotel for a "programming retreat." Occupancy rates are low in hotels during the off-season, and the idea was that we could fill his hotel for a few months when it would otherwise be empty. We threw together a landing page and started taking sign-ups. Around this time, my co-founder Alexey came on board.
It turned out there was quite a bit of interest in what we were doing — 30 people came on our first trip, and Hacker Paradise was born! People had such a great time that we decided to keep doing it, and to turn it into a sustainable business. We also decided to open up the community to designers, entrepreneurs, and other non-technical creative types."
"During college, I took a year off to work on an e-commerce startup with a friend. We made a number of classic first-time entrepreneur mistakes, and after a year we decided to shut down the company. I went back to school, finished my degree, and started interviewing for jobs at different startups.
The whole experience left me feeling pretty burnt out on tech. While working on the startup, I'd lost touch with the intrinsic joy of building things for their own sake, and I'd been focusing on work to the point where I was neglecting my personal health.
I felt like getting back into the startup world would just continue that trend, and after spending some time reflecting I realized that what I really wanted to do was travel for an extended period and work on just-for-fun side projects.
So that's what I did. I picked up some freelance web development work and I emailed a bunch of hotels in Central America to see if they'd give me room and board in exchange for web and marketing help. I heard back from a hotel in Costa Rica, and I started working with them to promote yoga retreats during the country's low season.
However, right after we started the project, someone stole their yoga instructor's laptop, and she decided to leave Costa Rica for her native England. All of a sudden, there was no more work for me to do, and it looked like I was going to have to cut my stay there short.
I still wanted to hang out in Costa Rica, so I pitched the hotel owner on bringing a group of developers to his hotel for a "programming retreat." Occupancy rates are low in hotels during the off-season, and the idea was that we could fill his hotel for a few months when it would otherwise be empty. We threw together a landing page and started taking sign-ups. Around this time, my co-founder Alexey came on board.
It turned out there was quite a bit of interest in what we were doing — 30 people came on our first trip, and Hacker Paradise was born! People had such a great time that we decided to keep doing it, and to turn it into a sustainable business. We also decided to open up the community to designers, entrepreneurs, and other non-technical creative types."
👍36❤9👎1
Idea: Game Server Hosting
"I've always liked "___ hosting" as a business idea. I've often noticed that behind most popular open-source projects there's a multi-million-dollar business whose plan is simply to buy or rent some servers, host that open-source software, and offer a web-based control panel for the customer. Think Git, Apache, Sendmail, MySQL, ElasticSearch, and similar services. It's an easy idea to come up with, an easy product to build, and customers are easy to find, since you can just advertise wherever people gather to discuss open-source projects.
Sometimes the potential profit is huge. Companies whose business model is 'download Apache for free, set it up, and run it on commodity hardware' are now known as web hosting companies, and they're a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Game server hosting is much smaller. The total addressable market is maybe $50 million per year, but that niche size presents an opportunity. Since VCs will never fund a company with so little unicorn potential, and many potential founders would never bother starting one, the whole field has very few competitors — and many of them are less than competent.
My skills and experience are perfect for building a hosting company. I've been making web apps since middle school. My only non-self-employed job was the year I spent at Dreamhost right out of college (2009-2010). Because of that, and my own decade-plus of tinkering, I know a great deal about Linux servers and networks. I know how to get racks full of servers at below-market rates, how to manage those servers, and how to create a web app that the customer will use to control their game — a perfect combination!
My plan was always to expand to many different games, but starting with a single game made sense. It would let me test out the business model, iron out all the businessy stuff, and get some practice with promotion before I had to worry about answering support tickets for issues with dozens of games.
I chose to start with Ark: Survival Evolved because of how much growth potential I saw. Prior to launching, I researched the growth trends of a variety of games through SteamSpy and Google Trends, and Ark was the clear winner."
"I've always liked "___ hosting" as a business idea. I've often noticed that behind most popular open-source projects there's a multi-million-dollar business whose plan is simply to buy or rent some servers, host that open-source software, and offer a web-based control panel for the customer. Think Git, Apache, Sendmail, MySQL, ElasticSearch, and similar services. It's an easy idea to come up with, an easy product to build, and customers are easy to find, since you can just advertise wherever people gather to discuss open-source projects.
Sometimes the potential profit is huge. Companies whose business model is 'download Apache for free, set it up, and run it on commodity hardware' are now known as web hosting companies, and they're a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Game server hosting is much smaller. The total addressable market is maybe $50 million per year, but that niche size presents an opportunity. Since VCs will never fund a company with so little unicorn potential, and many potential founders would never bother starting one, the whole field has very few competitors — and many of them are less than competent.
My skills and experience are perfect for building a hosting company. I've been making web apps since middle school. My only non-self-employed job was the year I spent at Dreamhost right out of college (2009-2010). Because of that, and my own decade-plus of tinkering, I know a great deal about Linux servers and networks. I know how to get racks full of servers at below-market rates, how to manage those servers, and how to create a web app that the customer will use to control their game — a perfect combination!
My plan was always to expand to many different games, but starting with a single game made sense. It would let me test out the business model, iron out all the businessy stuff, and get some practice with promotion before I had to worry about answering support tickets for issues with dozens of games.
I chose to start with Ark: Survival Evolved because of how much growth potential I saw. Prior to launching, I researched the growth trends of a variety of games through SteamSpy and Google Trends, and Ark was the clear winner."
👍20❤4
idea: Professional eBay Listing Creator
"Prior to starting CrazyLister, Victor (my co-founder and our CEO) and I were eBay sellers ourselves. We started selling on eBay without any prior experience, and within 3 years we reached $4.5M in sales. The vast majority of our success as eBay sellers comes from having very high conversion rates thanks to the emphasis we put on professional design.
After winning a couple of eBay awards for the highest conversion rates, we started getting a lot of requests from companies who wanted us to do for them what we did for ourselves. We saw this as an opportunity to expand our business and started consulting for these companies.
However, after working with a few dozen customers we realized that this was not the type of business we wanted to grow into. We didn't want to be another consulting company, because it wasn't scalable in our eyes. What we needed was to provide all the knowledge we'd accumulated during these years to benefit as many sellers as possible without having to consult them one-on-one.
We knew very well that one of the biggest pains for eBay sellers is the listing design creation process which, to put it mildly, isn't a very positive experience. Moreover, eBay didn't provide a good solution — if you needed a professional design for your listings, you had to pay a lot of money to graphic designers unless you were extremely computer savvy and knew both HTML and design principles.
We poured all our knowledge about eBay sales conversion optimization into one super easy-to-use solution, and that's how CrazyLister was born. We hired a developer, and the first lines of code were written in 2013."
"Prior to starting CrazyLister, Victor (my co-founder and our CEO) and I were eBay sellers ourselves. We started selling on eBay without any prior experience, and within 3 years we reached $4.5M in sales. The vast majority of our success as eBay sellers comes from having very high conversion rates thanks to the emphasis we put on professional design.
After winning a couple of eBay awards for the highest conversion rates, we started getting a lot of requests from companies who wanted us to do for them what we did for ourselves. We saw this as an opportunity to expand our business and started consulting for these companies.
However, after working with a few dozen customers we realized that this was not the type of business we wanted to grow into. We didn't want to be another consulting company, because it wasn't scalable in our eyes. What we needed was to provide all the knowledge we'd accumulated during these years to benefit as many sellers as possible without having to consult them one-on-one.
We knew very well that one of the biggest pains for eBay sellers is the listing design creation process which, to put it mildly, isn't a very positive experience. Moreover, eBay didn't provide a good solution — if you needed a professional design for your listings, you had to pay a lot of money to graphic designers unless you were extremely computer savvy and knew both HTML and design principles.
We poured all our knowledge about eBay sales conversion optimization into one super easy-to-use solution, and that's how CrazyLister was born. We hired a developer, and the first lines of code were written in 2013."
👍15
Idea: Cloud Storage for Your App Logs
"s mobile app engineers we faced the problem of not being able to reproduce specific user problems on our own devices, be it due to a weird screen size, a strange OS version, or a specific setting. So we developed a really barebones version of this internal tool for remotely accessing logs, patched it into a special build, and began sending it to users that had a problem.
We saw that this was a recurring problem (which validated the idea itself) and thought it would be great to have the tool built in by default for all of our apps. However, sending so many logs, especially for apps with thousands or even millions of users, creates two problems:
We'd have to transfer and store millions of logs per day, which is neither cheap nor simple in terms of scalability.
If this service would always be running on the user's device, sending every log all the time, it would use a ton of data and could make their phone bills quite expensive.
To solve this we put a lot of effort into making this thing scale while at the same time reducing our traffic and data storage bills. (We're still rebuilding and optimizing things today.) And for our application-side SDKs, we put a lot of engineering thought into implementing a battery-friendly process for storing logs locally and only transferring them when requested."
"s mobile app engineers we faced the problem of not being able to reproduce specific user problems on our own devices, be it due to a weird screen size, a strange OS version, or a specific setting. So we developed a really barebones version of this internal tool for remotely accessing logs, patched it into a special build, and began sending it to users that had a problem.
We saw that this was a recurring problem (which validated the idea itself) and thought it would be great to have the tool built in by default for all of our apps. However, sending so many logs, especially for apps with thousands or even millions of users, creates two problems:
We'd have to transfer and store millions of logs per day, which is neither cheap nor simple in terms of scalability.
If this service would always be running on the user's device, sending every log all the time, it would use a ton of data and could make their phone bills quite expensive.
To solve this we put a lot of effort into making this thing scale while at the same time reducing our traffic and data storage bills. (We're still rebuilding and optimizing things today.) And for our application-side SDKs, we put a lot of engineering thought into implementing a battery-friendly process for storing logs locally and only transferring them when requested."
👍20❤3
Idea: Interviewing Platform for Programmers
"CoderPad started as a side project while I was still working a day job at Everlane (the first and only job I have enjoyed). I was interviewing a bunch of candidates and kept getting into situations where I wanted to see how a candidate would figure something out.
One asked me if a certain Ruby object supported the .map operation, and I wanted to say, "Just try it!" The problem was, we were using some old-school shared text editor like Collabedit which didn't support advanced features like that.
I thought this was ridiculous, so I tried to buy a product that would do what I wanted: provide a real-time execution environment alongside a synchronized text editor. To my surprise, I couldn't find any. I thought that it couldn't be too hard to build, so I hacked a Ruby-only prototype together in a weekend.
Once I started using it to interview candidates at Everlane, it seemed pretty obvious to me that I could sell this to other people — it was providing an obvious balm to a stressful experience. I also happened to be casually interviewing at other companies for fun, so I rebuilt the prototype and started seeing if my interviewers liked it, too. They often did, which I took as a sign that it was the right time for the idea."
"CoderPad started as a side project while I was still working a day job at Everlane (the first and only job I have enjoyed). I was interviewing a bunch of candidates and kept getting into situations where I wanted to see how a candidate would figure something out.
One asked me if a certain Ruby object supported the .map operation, and I wanted to say, "Just try it!" The problem was, we were using some old-school shared text editor like Collabedit which didn't support advanced features like that.
I thought this was ridiculous, so I tried to buy a product that would do what I wanted: provide a real-time execution environment alongside a synchronized text editor. To my surprise, I couldn't find any. I thought that it couldn't be too hard to build, so I hacked a Ruby-only prototype together in a weekend.
Once I started using it to interview candidates at Everlane, it seemed pretty obvious to me that I could sell this to other people — it was providing an obvious balm to a stressful experience. I also happened to be casually interviewing at other companies for fun, so I rebuilt the prototype and started seeing if my interviewers liked it, too. They often did, which I took as a sign that it was the right time for the idea."
👍18❤1
Idea: Exceptionally Useful Weather App
"My friend Trevor and I were complaining about weather apps a few years ago. There were seemingly endless weather apps in the App Store, but nobody had really nailed a decent UI. Most apps were either too simplistic and gimmicky, or heinously overcomplicated.
We thought we could do better by making something totally obvious: an app that showed only the most important info in one straightforward view.
We also wanted to learn how to make a native app from scratch. (We were web veterans, but entirely new to native app development.) I don't think either of us anticipated that we'd actually finish a shippable product — we just wanted to fiddle around with an idea and have fun for a while."
"My friend Trevor and I were complaining about weather apps a few years ago. There were seemingly endless weather apps in the App Store, but nobody had really nailed a decent UI. Most apps were either too simplistic and gimmicky, or heinously overcomplicated.
We thought we could do better by making something totally obvious: an app that showed only the most important info in one straightforward view.
We also wanted to learn how to make a native app from scratch. (We were web veterans, but entirely new to native app development.) I don't think either of us anticipated that we'd actually finish a shippable product — we just wanted to fiddle around with an idea and have fun for a while."
👍18
Idea: 3D-Printed Personalized Jewelry
"I was raised in Coimbatore, a city located in Southern India with a very entrepreneurial culture. It's also very famous for gold jewelry manufacturing. Given this background, I felt I had a natural advantage and decided to do a startup in this space.
I had little knowledge in this industry at first, so I started off selling plain gold jewelry online under the brand name Krizda, but I soon realized that unless we had a unique value proposition it would be difficult to compete with the local jewelers. In India, there is a jewelry store easily available in a 2 mile radius almost anywhere in the country. If we were to compete here, we had to be different.
At the time we saw a lot of jewelry companies going online, but they had little online marketing experience. Given our lack of sales and high amount of competition, we pivoted into a marketplace helping other jewelers list and market their products on our platform, like Amazon for jewelry. However, this required heavy capital investment, and we did not succeed in raising capital.
One fine day, when Sachin Tendulkar (a very famous cricketer/celebrity in India) retired, there were a lot of gold and silver coins being sold with his face on them. We thought, "Why not do this for our customers and make everyone a celebrity?" That's how we introduced the personalized gold/silver coins."
"I was raised in Coimbatore, a city located in Southern India with a very entrepreneurial culture. It's also very famous for gold jewelry manufacturing. Given this background, I felt I had a natural advantage and decided to do a startup in this space.
I had little knowledge in this industry at first, so I started off selling plain gold jewelry online under the brand name Krizda, but I soon realized that unless we had a unique value proposition it would be difficult to compete with the local jewelers. In India, there is a jewelry store easily available in a 2 mile radius almost anywhere in the country. If we were to compete here, we had to be different.
At the time we saw a lot of jewelry companies going online, but they had little online marketing experience. Given our lack of sales and high amount of competition, we pivoted into a marketplace helping other jewelers list and market their products on our platform, like Amazon for jewelry. However, this required heavy capital investment, and we did not succeed in raising capital.
One fine day, when Sachin Tendulkar (a very famous cricketer/celebrity in India) retired, there were a lot of gold and silver coins being sold with his face on them. We thought, "Why not do this for our customers and make everyone a celebrity?" That's how we introduced the personalized gold/silver coins."
👍23❤1
Idea: Chrome Extension for Gmail
"During my undergrad I read about the extended mind thesis, which encourages us to think of computers as extensions of our biological minds. Since then, I've thought quite a bit about "extended mind design" — I think this is a useful frame for thinking about many techniques and tools commonly tagged as "productivity advice", "lifehacking", or "metaskills".
A key function of your extended mind is to help you allocate your attention effectively. Our daily attention environment is surprisingly hostile by default, because a lot of actors have strong incentives to misdirect our attention. Recognizing this, I began observing how my attention shifts during the day and taking measures to make my attention environment more amenable to what Cal Newport calls "Deep Work".
One morning I was doing some programming and I needed to ask my client a question. I opened Gmail with the intention of emailing the client, but my attention was immediately derailed by some new messages in my inbox. When I remembered my original intention (perhaps 30 minutes later), I realized that Gmail would be much less of an attentional liability for me if only my inbox were hidden by default.
I hacked a Chrome extension to implement this functionality the following day."
"During my undergrad I read about the extended mind thesis, which encourages us to think of computers as extensions of our biological minds. Since then, I've thought quite a bit about "extended mind design" — I think this is a useful frame for thinking about many techniques and tools commonly tagged as "productivity advice", "lifehacking", or "metaskills".
A key function of your extended mind is to help you allocate your attention effectively. Our daily attention environment is surprisingly hostile by default, because a lot of actors have strong incentives to misdirect our attention. Recognizing this, I began observing how my attention shifts during the day and taking measures to make my attention environment more amenable to what Cal Newport calls "Deep Work".
One morning I was doing some programming and I needed to ask my client a question. I opened Gmail with the intention of emailing the client, but my attention was immediately derailed by some new messages in my inbox. When I remembered my original intention (perhaps 30 minutes later), I realized that Gmail would be much less of an attentional liability for me if only my inbox were hidden by default.
I hacked a Chrome extension to implement this functionality the following day."
❤8👍4
Idea: Online Business Proposal Software
"Proposeful's journey starts in 2013, when I founded a small web development agency with a friend of mine. I built a project and finance management tool for us to keep track of bills, projects, and tasks. I kept improving the tool, and by 2015 it was pretty neat, so we launched it as a SaaS product.
It acquired a few customers and we were invited to a pre-acceleration program in my city. It was very focused on market validation, and as part of the program I conducted close to 80 interviews with strangers — freelancers, agency owners, consultants, and other service providers — and mapped all their needs to try to connect the dots.
I realized these people had a constant problem with keeping their sales steady and not closing deals fast enough. I had been doing that for 5 years so I understood that challenge very well and believed that by teaching the lessons I had learned and providing great tools I could help them save their businesses.
So what I did was throw away 90% of the old product's features and rebuild it as a proposal writing tool."
"Proposeful's journey starts in 2013, when I founded a small web development agency with a friend of mine. I built a project and finance management tool for us to keep track of bills, projects, and tasks. I kept improving the tool, and by 2015 it was pretty neat, so we launched it as a SaaS product.
It acquired a few customers and we were invited to a pre-acceleration program in my city. It was very focused on market validation, and as part of the program I conducted close to 80 interviews with strangers — freelancers, agency owners, consultants, and other service providers — and mapped all their needs to try to connect the dots.
I realized these people had a constant problem with keeping their sales steady and not closing deals fast enough. I had been doing that for 5 years so I understood that challenge very well and believed that by teaching the lessons I had learned and providing great tools I could help them save their businesses.
So what I did was throw away 90% of the old product's features and rebuild it as a proposal writing tool."
👍15
Idea: explore and earn crypto by watching MMA
On October 13, the first tournament in the history of MMA will be held, where the winners will receive their rewards in cryptocurrency: $5,000 in 1INCH tokens and the NFT belt. But the most important thing is that even the spectators receive the award in this tournament the.
Everyone has the opportunity to win the NFT MMA mouthguards. To participate, you need to watch the tournament and subscribe to the project's Twitter and Instagram.
Leave your email here and you don't miss the translation.
On October 13, the first tournament in the history of MMA will be held, where the winners will receive their rewards in cryptocurrency: $5,000 in 1INCH tokens and the NFT belt. But the most important thing is that even the spectators receive the award in this tournament the.
Everyone has the opportunity to win the NFT MMA mouthguards. To participate, you need to watch the tournament and subscribe to the project's Twitter and Instagram.
Leave your email here and you don't miss the translation.
👍8
Idea: Bite-sized Screencasts for Developers
"My first attempts to get something off the ground with a product business were depressing failures because I tried to deliver a product solution to an audience I didn't understand. So I changed my tune. Instead of continuing to look to solve problems for audiences I didn't fully understand or belong to, I started to look towards the group of people I already related to, and where I already had an audience.
Software developers were my tribe. I knew their problems. I knew where they hung out on the internet, and I was a trusted member of the community.
It's true that programming computers is hard. Programming computers is also a lucrative career. I was living proof that you could learn to code and jumpstart a career in a relatively short timeframe.
The question was, "How do we help people get there?"
In 2013 AngularJS was cresting its peak. I attended the BaconBiz conference in Philly, and everybody asked me what I was working on. What was my product? "I dunno, I think I'm going to write a book on Angular or something?" It was a bit embarrassing, but I did start the book.
My co-founder John was creating these excellent AngularJS screencasts on YouTube and giving them away as embedded videos on egghead.io with a donation button.
I was more eager to make money on the internet than I was to produce the content, so I pestered John for months to let me see what I could do with his badass videos. Looking back, the "first sale" that I made through egghead.io was convincing John that I could execute."
"My first attempts to get something off the ground with a product business were depressing failures because I tried to deliver a product solution to an audience I didn't understand. So I changed my tune. Instead of continuing to look to solve problems for audiences I didn't fully understand or belong to, I started to look towards the group of people I already related to, and where I already had an audience.
Software developers were my tribe. I knew their problems. I knew where they hung out on the internet, and I was a trusted member of the community.
It's true that programming computers is hard. Programming computers is also a lucrative career. I was living proof that you could learn to code and jumpstart a career in a relatively short timeframe.
The question was, "How do we help people get there?"
In 2013 AngularJS was cresting its peak. I attended the BaconBiz conference in Philly, and everybody asked me what I was working on. What was my product? "I dunno, I think I'm going to write a book on Angular or something?" It was a bit embarrassing, but I did start the book.
My co-founder John was creating these excellent AngularJS screencasts on YouTube and giving them away as embedded videos on egghead.io with a donation button.
I was more eager to make money on the internet than I was to produce the content, so I pestered John for months to let me see what I could do with his badass videos. Looking back, the "first sale" that I made through egghead.io was convincing John that I could execute."
👍15❤2👎1
Idea: Invoice Reception Service
"Here in Mexico, in order for an invoice to be deductible, you must get an XML file from your vendor. Usually, you find all of your invoices in your email at the end of the month, download them, and then type them into an Excel file. I thought this process was madness! Why should I have to print a digital file and then capture it again digitally?
I started looking for a simple service: one that receives the XML files, parses them, and stores them in a ZIP that also includes an Excel file, so I can forward it to my accountant. Simple, right?
Well, it didn't exist. Even worse, the more I looked into it, the more I found out that the whole industry is lagging behind 10+ years, starting with the government agency itself! This was a golden opportunity.
At this point I had a simple Ruby script for my own needs, which I'd already been using for half a year. I have my own agency, and during some months of 2015 I had nothing to do client-wise, so I chose to give myself another job and started working on turning the script into Box Factura.
I started in January, and by April I had an MVP."
"Here in Mexico, in order for an invoice to be deductible, you must get an XML file from your vendor. Usually, you find all of your invoices in your email at the end of the month, download them, and then type them into an Excel file. I thought this process was madness! Why should I have to print a digital file and then capture it again digitally?
I started looking for a simple service: one that receives the XML files, parses them, and stores them in a ZIP that also includes an Excel file, so I can forward it to my accountant. Simple, right?
Well, it didn't exist. Even worse, the more I looked into it, the more I found out that the whole industry is lagging behind 10+ years, starting with the government agency itself! This was a golden opportunity.
At this point I had a simple Ruby script for my own needs, which I'd already been using for half a year. I have my own agency, and during some months of 2015 I had nothing to do client-wise, so I chose to give myself another job and started working on turning the script into Box Factura.
I started in January, and by April I had an MVP."
👍18
Idea: Quality Control for Content
"I had a few product sites in my portfolio when I started out on my own, the biggest of which is Cheatography, a cheat sheet generator and repository. I also had a little cash in the bank, and a reasonably regular flow of freelance development work for a collection of clients.
I knew I wanted to eventually transition to a product business, but didn't have any one idea for a product in particular that grabbed me above the others. I've always had a bit of what I call shiny-thing syndrome — I like building something new, but haven't usually been as excited by the prospect of getting it in front of people!
In 2004 I wrote a small piece of code to measure the readability of text. It was a coding exercise at the time, but I added it to my website and continued merrily releasing cheat sheets and writing blog posts. It was a few years later that I spotted that the tool was getting quite a lot of traffic, so I moved it to its own domain. The traffic grew, so I added a small premium offering, and used it as a test bed for some pricing experiments — pay what you want pricing, and things like that.
At the end of 2015, the site was sending a trickle of income my way, but based on decent traffic. The conversion rate was about 0.04%, so I decided it was about time I gave the project the attention it deserved."
"I had a few product sites in my portfolio when I started out on my own, the biggest of which is Cheatography, a cheat sheet generator and repository. I also had a little cash in the bank, and a reasonably regular flow of freelance development work for a collection of clients.
I knew I wanted to eventually transition to a product business, but didn't have any one idea for a product in particular that grabbed me above the others. I've always had a bit of what I call shiny-thing syndrome — I like building something new, but haven't usually been as excited by the prospect of getting it in front of people!
In 2004 I wrote a small piece of code to measure the readability of text. It was a coding exercise at the time, but I added it to my website and continued merrily releasing cheat sheets and writing blog posts. It was a few years later that I spotted that the tool was getting quite a lot of traffic, so I moved it to its own domain. The traffic grew, so I added a small premium offering, and used it as a test bed for some pricing experiments — pay what you want pricing, and things like that.
At the end of 2015, the site was sending a trickle of income my way, but based on decent traffic. The conversion rate was about 0.04%, so I decided it was about time I gave the project the attention it deserved."
👍17
Idea: Unlimited Premium Design Services
"After my graduation, I flew to Uganda to do an internship at the Belgian embassy (my first real job), but I hated it. I travelled a bit in the region and was seriously wondering what I would do next. I had a degree, applied to a few jobs, and kept checking my friends' LinkedIn accounts, wondering if I too should get a corporate job. It's quite stressful when you've had success doing your own thing and don't know if you'll hit it big again. You think you were just lucky and begin doubting yourself and losing confidence.
After traveling around Africa, I bought a one-way ticket to Asia after a recommendation from a friend who was living there. I thought I would find inspiration in a new place. I went to Taipei and finally decided to live in Bangkok for two months. I booked a coworking space and didn't know what to do next.
When I arrived at my coworking space I saw a small board at the entrance with many notes like "Looking for a freelance designer" and "Looking for a UX designer", and I overheard some members complaining about how hard it was to hire graphic designers. I didn't have that problem since I had a huge Skype list full of great designers, and I thought, "Maybe let's fix that problem. Let's make a website where I guarantee the quality (with a refund guarantee), streamline operations, pay designers a fixed price per month so they stay with me, and let's hunt for clients."
"After my graduation, I flew to Uganda to do an internship at the Belgian embassy (my first real job), but I hated it. I travelled a bit in the region and was seriously wondering what I would do next. I had a degree, applied to a few jobs, and kept checking my friends' LinkedIn accounts, wondering if I too should get a corporate job. It's quite stressful when you've had success doing your own thing and don't know if you'll hit it big again. You think you were just lucky and begin doubting yourself and losing confidence.
After traveling around Africa, I bought a one-way ticket to Asia after a recommendation from a friend who was living there. I thought I would find inspiration in a new place. I went to Taipei and finally decided to live in Bangkok for two months. I booked a coworking space and didn't know what to do next.
When I arrived at my coworking space I saw a small board at the entrance with many notes like "Looking for a freelance designer" and "Looking for a UX designer", and I overheard some members complaining about how hard it was to hire graphic designers. I didn't have that problem since I had a huge Skype list full of great designers, and I thought, "Maybe let's fix that problem. Let's make a website where I guarantee the quality (with a refund guarantee), streamline operations, pay designers a fixed price per month so they stay with me, and let's hunt for clients."
👍22
idea: Photo-to-Painting Service
"I had a friend who was re-selling replica paintings of classical artwork in the US. She gave me the idea to build a site that allowed people to order replica paintings by specifying the painting. Instead of doing that, I built a simple landing page that could take any photo, and send back a real hand-made painting from the photo since the painters were doing the replicas off arbitrary photos of the replica paintings in the first place.
While I was super excited about the idea at the time, I was super excited about most of my other ideas too, and they mostly failed. I had already learned to spend as little effort as possible testing new ideas. I set up a single plain HTML page with a Stripe Checkout form and worried about fulfillment later.
After launch it clearly made the most money relative to past ideas, granted it was not high by absolute standards (a few thousands dollars in a few weeks). That was enough to keep me focused on the project for longer than normal. A lack of alternative revenue streams and dwindling funds kept me focused on the business.
With enough persistence I slowly bumped up sales year over year. It was not an overnight success, but having done so many ideas made it easier to identify the one that I should stick with. The business grew with time and effort, and it wasn't always obvious to continue down a path except from the belief that constantly improving the product will generally pay off."
"I had a friend who was re-selling replica paintings of classical artwork in the US. She gave me the idea to build a site that allowed people to order replica paintings by specifying the painting. Instead of doing that, I built a simple landing page that could take any photo, and send back a real hand-made painting from the photo since the painters were doing the replicas off arbitrary photos of the replica paintings in the first place.
While I was super excited about the idea at the time, I was super excited about most of my other ideas too, and they mostly failed. I had already learned to spend as little effort as possible testing new ideas. I set up a single plain HTML page with a Stripe Checkout form and worried about fulfillment later.
After launch it clearly made the most money relative to past ideas, granted it was not high by absolute standards (a few thousands dollars in a few weeks). That was enough to keep me focused on the project for longer than normal. A lack of alternative revenue streams and dwindling funds kept me focused on the business.
With enough persistence I slowly bumped up sales year over year. It was not an overnight success, but having done so many ideas made it easier to identify the one that I should stick with. The business grew with time and effort, and it wasn't always obvious to continue down a path except from the belief that constantly improving the product will generally pay off."
👍24❤4
Trend: Cannabidiol industry
The global cannabidiol market was valued at USD 4.6 billion in 2018 and is anticipated to witness a lucrative CAGR of 22.2% over the forecast period. The demand for cannabidiol (CBD) for medical and wellness purposes is high due to its healing properties, which is the key factor driving the growth of the market. Moreover, growing product adoption and utilization owing to government approvals is a major factor anticipated to drive the demand for cannabidiol infused products.
Useful links: CDB market size
The global cannabidiol market was valued at USD 4.6 billion in 2018 and is anticipated to witness a lucrative CAGR of 22.2% over the forecast period. The demand for cannabidiol (CBD) for medical and wellness purposes is high due to its healing properties, which is the key factor driving the growth of the market. Moreover, growing product adoption and utilization owing to government approvals is a major factor anticipated to drive the demand for cannabidiol infused products.
Useful links: CDB market size
👍10❤6
Forwarded from Per Aspera Ad Astra ✨
What Business Model (BM) Should You Choose For A Startup? 🤑
First off, I wanna start with different business models and then explain why some of them might perform worse than others.
Obviously, while coming up with your startup idea (there is gonna be a separate post about it) you shouldn't be guided only by what kind of BM to choose. However, there are certain patterns that had developed over the years which you should be aware of IMO.
So, according to YC's slides, almost every billion-dollar company can fit into one of these 9 BMs:
1. Saas - cloud-based subscription software
2. Transactional - facilitate transactions and take a cut (certain percentage)
3. Marketplaces - facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers
4. Hard-tech - lots of technical risk and long time horizons
5. Usage-based - pay-as-you-go based on consumption
6. Enterprise - sell large contracts to huge companies (5k+ employees)
7. Advertising - sell ads to monetize free users
8. E-commerce - sell products online
9. Bio - science-based tech companies
It is a good sign if your startup's BM is one of these not only because YC says so, but also since there are a lot more companies to use as an example, a lot more materials and content available for helping these businesses grow (they are eventually the most profitable as the history shows).
Take a look at the picture (in the presentation, 10th slide) - SaaS, 31% (Slack, Zoom), Transactional, 22% (Stripe), and Marketplace, 14% (Airbnb, Opensea) companies are the most popular AND profitable within YC.
Why is that? Let's try to find that out. A huge advantage and premise to the growth of all of the aforementioned BMs are that after a certain point they can hyperscale almost effortlessly. For Saas you "only" have to build a software and sell it properly - they gonna have recurring monthly benefits. Transactional ones are taking a small percentage from gigantic amounts of transactions made through the platform thereby having permanent cash flow. And lastly, for Marketplaces (the toughest one to be honest) it is hard to get the critical mass of users. But once they do it - the snowball effect kicks in and user acquisition costs decrease drastically.
Choose wisely 😉
#YCombinatorAgain
First off, I wanna start with different business models and then explain why some of them might perform worse than others.
Obviously, while coming up with your startup idea (there is gonna be a separate post about it) you shouldn't be guided only by what kind of BM to choose. However, there are certain patterns that had developed over the years which you should be aware of IMO.
So, according to YC's slides, almost every billion-dollar company can fit into one of these 9 BMs:
1. Saas - cloud-based subscription software
2. Transactional - facilitate transactions and take a cut (certain percentage)
3. Marketplaces - facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers
4. Hard-tech - lots of technical risk and long time horizons
5. Usage-based - pay-as-you-go based on consumption
6. Enterprise - sell large contracts to huge companies (5k+ employees)
7. Advertising - sell ads to monetize free users
8. E-commerce - sell products online
9. Bio - science-based tech companies
It is a good sign if your startup's BM is one of these not only because YC says so, but also since there are a lot more companies to use as an example, a lot more materials and content available for helping these businesses grow (they are eventually the most profitable as the history shows).
Take a look at the picture (in the presentation, 10th slide) - SaaS, 31% (Slack, Zoom), Transactional, 22% (Stripe), and Marketplace, 14% (Airbnb, Opensea) companies are the most popular AND profitable within YC.
Why is that? Let's try to find that out. A huge advantage and premise to the growth of all of the aforementioned BMs are that after a certain point they can hyperscale almost effortlessly. For Saas you "only" have to build a software and sell it properly - they gonna have recurring monthly benefits. Transactional ones are taking a small percentage from gigantic amounts of transactions made through the platform thereby having permanent cash flow. And lastly, for Marketplaces (the toughest one to be honest) it is hard to get the critical mass of users. But once they do it - the snowball effect kicks in and user acquisition costs decrease drastically.
Choose wisely 😉
#YCombinatorAgain
Google Docs
SUS: Business Models & Pricing - Public
👍45❤17
Idea: Generating avatars with your face
Now with DALL-E and Stable Diffusion technologies, we can generate any images by saying what we want. But also we can train our own models with our faces to generate any images with us. Imagine I want to pretend to be a photo editor professional, a meme maker, or I want to put cool photos with me on Instagram. But! I need to spend a lot of time to set up the things and I also need a powerful computer to do the generation.
Why don't we create an online service that allow everybody to generate images with them for a fair price? I bet people started creating such services maybe a week ago and they continue doing so. Only a few will see the market, as usual.
A video reference
Now with DALL-E and Stable Diffusion technologies, we can generate any images by saying what we want. But also we can train our own models with our faces to generate any images with us. Imagine I want to pretend to be a photo editor professional, a meme maker, or I want to put cool photos with me on Instagram. But! I need to spend a lot of time to set up the things and I also need a powerful computer to do the generation.
Why don't we create an online service that allow everybody to generate images with them for a fair price? I bet people started creating such services maybe a week ago and they continue doing so. Only a few will see the market, as usual.
A video reference
👍24❤3