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Idea is hard
What does the biggest problem in making a startup? Idea. Choose a right idea is hard. No, it's scary. Mostly because it's irreversible, you can change your product, but you can't revert your idea once chosen. Well, you can, but it requires lots of guts. To admit your initial idea was bad. Then a lot of work to make a pivot.
So we want to pick a perfect startup idea. This obsession often leads to procrastination. Been there many times. Even more often makers choose idea randomly. They follow a sparks spend months and end up having no people using their app.
Why this happens. We often look at our own paints and pick an idea from our own lives, the most obvious way. It is. valid at approach to start a business, if many other people will have the same pain. They will use your product. The problem is you are a person , an individual, your idea will solve a pain of a person. Most possibly it will be yet another to-do list app or a screenshot maker or a fitness tracker or news app. Which will be fun. But you will earn no money.
Again, you are a person, not a company. You have problems of a person. If you solve it, you will get a B2C product. A B2C startup is the worst thing to do, especially if you're a beginner.
Why?
B2C is extremely hard to sell. It is oversaturated. It is underpaid. And you will have to compete with have huge corporations and you will lose.
Let's talk about the two main problems of the B2C market.
Problems of B2C
First slowing down or the internet users growth. By 2016, everyone who could be on the internet was there. Therefore the number of users has already hit a possible cap.
The total amount of users is fixed. So cost of attracting a new user is constantly growing, which will make you pay more and more to get a user.
And the second reason the B2C markets are oversaturated today. The amount of time people spend on their phones have reached a theoretical maximum. And the head of Netflix has stated several times that their main competitor is sleep.
If you do B2C, you will have to boil an ocean to get the attention of new users. Will you be able to compete, sleep?
This is why you need to go to the markets where the money is. So let's just go there, make a B2B business. This is the solution.
My idea is simple. Make a startup for startups. Why startups? Why not other niches with money on it. Oil, robots, ads. There are six concrete reasons why startups:
First it's extremely easy to pick an idea. Don't stress about coming up with a groundbreaking concept, just pick any existing startup tool and clone it.
Second friendly crowd. The startup community is super welcoming. You will make friends here fast friends will help you with a product and growth. Can you imagine making friends in the oil industry?
Third, startups love innovations. They are always on the lookout for new tools to boost their marketing efforts, save time and money. They are ready to discover and invest in new solutions. For example, yours π
Next, startup for startups is easy to market. Tell about making your startup and attract other startup founders, AKA building and public Or just do cold outreach. It still works too. If done properly. I often check out new tools, which are offered to me by strangers (send me yours if you are desperate!).
Next one, there are plenty of niche communities within the startup world, such as Product Hun, HackerNews, some subreddits, IndieHackers. There you can freely pitch and find potential clients even remotely.
The last one we've startup clients, you can charge more.
Just think:
50 clients at $100 per month could mean. Solid in month revenue, $100 is nothing for a startup, even outside of the US but you. But you will never, make, for example, a teacher (an individual) to pay you this amount.
Ethics
Some may say it is unethical to steal an idea from others.
I assure you every startup you will find is not unique. All of them took an idea of an existing projects. There is no such thing as a unique startup. Uber and Airbnb were unique but google their stories. Travis Kalanick and Brayan Checky & Joe Gabbia had to work so hard to bring their unique ideas to life.
Those are exceptions to the rules in the startup world. The fact is that you don't need a unique startup idea. Forget unique ideas.
Even more, if it's unique, it's a red flag. If it wasn't created by someone else, it means it has no market. No one needs it. No one buys it.
My personal maker's career started with copying an existing business too, I made a landing page builder. Who needs yet another website builder when we have Webflow, Framer , Squarespace, Wix. People told me I am crazy and I have to make something new, one guy even called me a thief once. But I made it. And I added something new to the project, something the others didn't have. In my case, it was a combination of simplicity and terrific design. And it worked well. I sold my builder, my SaaS for almost a million dollars and the project is still alive and growing.
Here's an exact plan for you
1) Go to Product Hunt.
2) Monitor it for a month. Get in the trends. See what problems are solved often, which tools are most discussed. Startups have many solvable pains. I assure you thousands of them: sending emails, customer support, payment processing, code deployment communications, social media, hiring. Hundreds of pains to choose from.
3) Choose any product that got traction on Product Hunt.
4) They solve a real problem and you'll be able to earn money solving this problem too.
5) Clone their product and make it niched down.
Let me explain you with an example. Imagine you see a landing page builder for startups. How to niche it down?
Make the same product, but for mobile apps only. Provide more various templates for mobile apps owners when Wix have only 10 templates for mobile apps offer 100.
Then add some unique features that are relevant for the small audience only. For mobile apps owners. For example, fetch their app data from App Store and automatically generate a landing page based on that data, such a feature will only be used by mobile app owners.
But you only need to make one audience happy. No, not just happy. Amazed. Make them amazed. And they will prefer you over Wix.
Let's sum up the formula of success. Choose one concrete pain from the huge and versatile market of startups. Solve it. Earn money guaranteed!*
*Disclaimer: Earning of money is not guaranteed.
Thanks for reading my stuff! π If you like it, you can follow me on π and read my lightweight ad-free email newsletter for indie makers.
