Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
46 lines (44 loc) · 4.29 KB

WhatToBuild.md

File metadata and controls

46 lines (44 loc) · 4.29 KB
  • What do you wish someone would make for you?
  • Fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems like the problem is important enough to build a company on.
    • If we keep pursuing such threads it would be hard not to end up making something of value to a lot of people
  • Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. (compare with google.com)
  • Rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it
  • Over time, most of the ideas fade. But a choice few keep on coming back. Pay attention to those. You know you’ve got something good when you’re thinking about it in the shower.
  • Make sure you enjoy thinking about it - Your primary edge as a founder will be the number of hours you spent thinking about a specific problem. (Grind factor)
  • Get in the habit of simplifying. - “Scheming mode”/“Razor mode”
  • you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them.
  • During the American gold rush the people who made the money were the ones selling shovels
  • Grind factor : Look for small ideas that you can execute well. And then execute, not for passion or ego, but as a grind. Like a regular job.
  • What task your team has to do often that is better done by a software
  • "5 whys" - to find actual problem,
  • There is no simple technique to "validate your market".
  • “gym of entrepreneurship.” Building a startup is one of those things that you need to work to get better at over time
  • "every spreadsheet is an opportunity", but trying to remove spread-sheet alone is not sufficient
  • Copy a startup that got acquired last year.
  • It's no coincidence that there have been many successful products that have started as internal tools written to solve internal problems
  • Look at "inevitable" trends. Things that seem like they will certainly be popular or prevalent in 2 to 5 years.
    • Cannabis legalization
    • VR
    • IOT
  • Do you have friends working in different fields ? Spend more time understanding their day to day job.
  • Good product ideas usually come from a deep, subtle understanding of the problem domain, not by searching for new problems in markets you don't know anything about.
  • By attending conferences where business owners are open to discovering new solutions.
    • Why not build a application where people would ready to post problem with some money to sovle it.
  • Don't come up with ideas. Finds problems.
  • Scanning the "need a coder" lists for product ideas, like: RentACoder.com, oDesk and elance jobs
  • Here is a company in New Jersey that browses amazon reviews for feature requests and creates those updated products in china and sells them on amazon. They do hundreds of millions a year in sales.

According to Dijkstra

  • "Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward."
  • "We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail."
  • "Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you."

References