Yes, this. I'm self taught -- half the time I'm coding, I don't even know what a "good" approach should be. So I just get started on something, since there's no perfectionist ideal I'm visualizing that I need to hit.
The ironic part is that I face this exact problem with the thing I am formally trained in -- writing. The blank page paralyzes me in a way blank vim never does.
That's the thing - we often don't realize what was wrong (or, occasionally, what was actually awesome) about what we're trying to create until after we've put it down not just on paper (or in code), but in front of other people.
It's absolutely intrinsic to the nature of the process. And the best way to virtually guarantee that you won't be ever get to find out whether your idea was good or bad, let alone truly awesome, is... insisting on perfection before it ever gets out the gate.
Maybe. Search is a resource-intensive algorithmic problem. So you need one of two things to beat Google: more resources or a much better algorithm.
You're not going to get the first unless you're Facebook or Amazon or God, but maybe you can build a smarter algorithm. You are up against an army of some of the smartest computer scientists and mathematicians ever assembled -- but what you have going for you is a complete lack of inertia or legacy. You could try crazy things that Google might not, because they won't think it'll work. If you get lucky, one of those blows up. But you have to get very lucky (this is the Innovator's Dilemma in a nutshell).
You can also niche your space. Hoogle would be an example of that. If you know the searcher cares about Haskell functions only I imagine you can beat Google in that space. That solution probably expands to other interest spheres.
Additionally, you'll still have to find a way to make money. Even if you manage to get on par with Google's search results, it is difficult to replicate their advertising cash cow, and even more difficult to invent a completely new monetization strategy and make it successful.
Oh HN and unsolicited startup advice. A blog post and 2 minutes and you've pattern matched your way to a solution. Bravo.
Dear OP, please ignore all this sage advice from people in cushy tech jobs telling you what you should do with your baby. Life is hard. We never know if we're making the right decisions. But it sounds like you have a clear vision that is driving you - that is priceless. Don't sell it away for the smart "business" move, when you already know what you should be doing.
It's interesting that you use the phrase 'sell it away'. That's exactly what one should be doing as a business.
I stumbled my way into product-market fit by designing something that was useful to me personally, and finding that actual profitability was in the mainstream--- people who were my exact opposites in terms of tastes but still strained to use my product for themselves because it was the only thing serving a similar need.
Right now they are 98% of my client base and I struggle with the fact that I don't intuitively understand their needs. I don't have a clear vision, and instead have to do user research on a constant basis.
It took me seven years to reach that point. For the first 7 years, I was ramen profitable--certainly nothing to quit a day job about. On year 7, I made a single switch and within 1 year earned 3x the previous years revenue. The 2nd year, I earned 10x the pre-pivot revenue.
I went from being able to feed myself (barely), to being able to buy a house and support a family. Is that a fair trade off, I think it is... but your mileage may vary.
I see the 'don't sell out' motivation from a lot of small business owners in my community. For another example, there is... well was... a small greek chicken joint that operated for 15 years nearby. The owner was 1st generation american, and all he wanted to do was cook his family recipes and share them with the community. Problem is the community changed in the past decade, going from being mostly European-heritage to N. African nationals. His customer base dwindled, and he never changed his stance of doing what he loved.
A month after his restaurant closed, it was replaced with one which served all halal chicken and is now jam packed with more customers than any other business sees. It's success has convinced the owner to expand leftwards into another collapsing business.
Point is... the path to profitability is finding a customer base willing to pay you. It's not important to have a clear vision, if that vision only involves a small number of people.
It's not important to have a clear vision, if that vision only involves a small number of people.
Absolutely. A clear vision that's wrong does you no good. I know people who work too hard on their idea without testing it. No battle plan ever survives contact with the marketplace.
I hope 2016 is cheerier for you. Fwiw, when I've been burnt out, what's gotten me excited again has more often tended to be finding new interesting people to work with, rather than finding interesting projects. I think both can work, but the latter can be harder when you're struggling for motivation.
Make sure you guys get a daily newsletter going out asap. I don't have inside information, but I'd guess it drives a ton of PH's daily returnee traffic. I for one know I won't be checking this every day, but I would read something in my inbox every morning (same with PH)
Don't do daily... or atleast let people sign up for daily/weekly/monthly. The PH daily emails were too much. I already get enough crap I don't read, it just makes me resent the site if I feel they are spamming me too much.
One person can build something that starts a revolution. See Woz/Apple.
The real issue here is that self-driving cars are probably the wrong place for that to happen in AI. At best, a solo project creates a crappy prototype where there was no product before (again, see Woz/Apple). The expectation for driverless cars is too high – they need to be 100% good, because your life is on the line, not 80% good.
What's the AI project that would blow people away, even if it was a shadow of a working prototype? I think that's the real question.
Imagine the day an AI vehicle causes an accident that otherwise would not have happened.
Even if AI cars are statistically better than humans on average, it's an issue of control. It's true that most accidents are avoidable and caused by human error, but most people are (perhaps overly) confident in their own ability to drive safely (this is also why people text and drive).
> Everyone is a private contractor, they are free to make their own choices and work (or not work) for a company.
I don't know if Sprig hires cooks as contractors but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the same freedom contractors usually have. See the lawsuits that brought Honejoy down, and the class action one against Uber.
I actually think this is the biggest argument in favor of Josephine, that the author didn't bring up. Sprig needs to standardize user experience, so has to walk the line between enforcing policies on their cooks and still treating them as contractors. Josephine is literally a marketplace, where your interaction is directly with that contractor. Much better, from a legal risk question.
> an even bigger problem is that once you have a startup you have to hurry to come up with an idea, and because it’s already an official company the idea can’t be too crazy. You end up with plausible sounding but derivative ideas. This is the danger of pivots.
A great point, that I haven't seen in too many places. I sometimes feel like we're seeing too many people who "want to have a startup" for the supposed fame and fortune, and not enough who are truly passionate about an idea. Believing in an idea will get you through, not dreams of gold coins.
Sam, I noticed you didn't mention watching cash burn or unit economics. Is that a later section you might add? Too many founders don't realize the importance of that until it's too late (speaking from personal experience)
As a counterpoint, the founders of Thumbtack started a startup before they had an idea, picked a very "derivative idea" and still did (and are doing) pretty well. If I had to quantify the motivation of the early team, it was much more about the company being successful than everybody being super passionate about the idea. As long as you can out-execute your competitors and people want your product, it doesn't really matter what your motivation is.
Its not even just passion that should drive a startup/business. Success it not just a matter of gaining X amount of emails and signups on your site. Its also not all about trying to think of the next thing to keep people on.
I think to really succeed at a startup is to make a product that is needed and that can be sustained throughout the years. To do so, you have to think long term.
Its ok to add the "new hotness" to your business as well, but it shouldn't be what the core business is about.
Facebook's success was not because they added photos, IM, pokes, likes, it was because there was a solid platform to find people. Sure those other features helped promote and enhance the product, but without the focus on the #1 goal (making it easier to connect the world) that platform could have easily gone by the wayside.
There's a tangential problem I've been thinking about a lot recently: the long tail of open source projects on GitHub.
There are 20M+ repos on there. Which leads to a serious discoverability + signal/noise problem around 'true' open source projects. As someone who wants to put up an open source project for collaboration (with willingness to maintain), it's hard to get the right eyes on it. Too often, it seems like no one cares. Conversely, as someone who wants to contribute to open source projects, it's a little hard to find small early ones where I feel like I can make a meaningful contribution (yes, the big ones maintained by well known companies are easy to find, but I much rather work on something put up by an individual programmer).
How do you cut through the noise on GitHub to find projects you actually want to work with (and want you too)?
Sounds like a good idea for a better unofficial open source search engine. I would be interested in contributing. It could do intelligent search of Github, Bitbucket etc for projects which might be interesting (programming languages, objectives etc).
Having access to the data set itself could unlock a lot of new, creative ideas and applications beyond the expected ones. That's one great thing I've learned from the open source community.
It could not only be used for search, but some data analysis, and what not. I think it would be fairly beneficial for github to do it, actually. Easy to work with, up to date dataset -> interesting projects -> github brand value++.
I was thinking of something maybe even simpler - a place for people to post projects they're actually interested in maintaining as open source projects. A subreddit could be the mvp.
Or go the other way, and train a searching algorithm based on a data set of actively maintained open source projects on Github, with things like commit history/contributors/etc as features.
Using a subreddit, you basically have a marketing problem and no way to seed the marketplace. One would need to do both. You are trying to restart http://freecode.com/
The ironic part is that I face this exact problem with the thing I am formally trained in -- writing. The blank page paralyzes me in a way blank vim never does.