Examples:
- "The academic who hasn’t built anything, yet feels comfortable telling you to use their complicated startup framework to find and validate ideas." Presumably a dig at lean startup.
- "A market need? An underserved niche? Demand? WTF do these things even mean?" Come on, these aren't that hard to define.
So in other words, a market need or underserved niche.
They are desperate usually because it is a problem that affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing something important to them, etc.
It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very core, provides clear value to specific people you can identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved niche is not enough.
Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but those are more hit-or-miss.
the thing about market needs / underserved niches / demand is that they are easy to sorta-define, but hard to actually define in a way that's useful when you are trying find them, when you actually need to understand them
the biggest unlock I've had was, 2+ years into pushing a product I had theoretically validated demand for, realizing that I didn't actually understand demand, and that demand SEEMS like it is "desire for a product" or "willingness to pay for a product" but is actually a product-agnostic thing, and when you see that, you see the world a lot more clearly. This video was super useful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU
Anyway thanks for the critique, 100% agree with half of it!
© Mark Zuckerberg
The concept that execution matters, ideas don’t, is complete rubbish.
If it was true, then you’d make a fortune executing extremely well on selling bags of dog poo.
Ideas are absolutely crucial. Without a good idea you can execute away forever and get nowhere. And you’ll need a really great idea to make it huge.
Sure you also need luck timing hard work execution but none of that is worth a whit without a good idea.
It’s strange that so many repeat this fiction that ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
But an idea is worthless as long as it's not implemented. That's why you can find free online resources sharing, for example, "70 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2025"
> Serious founders don’t just whiteboard, brainstorm, theorize. They become their potential customers, treating the task as a full-contact sport.
The days when a successful startup could be founded by a person who makes the thing and a person who sells the thing are over, because all the obvious ideas have been done. You need a third founder: the person with deep domain knowledge who knows what problems exist and which ones are worth solving.
I think the PULL framework in the post is an unnecessary formalism. My advice for finding ideas is to get out of the ecosystem of companies in the Big Tech or Silicon Valley traditions and go and work for tiny little companies where all the office staff work in the same room and your job is to modernise a C++ application that has a hard dependency on Microsoft Office 2003 and runs on a VM running Windows XP (which was the first programming job I got when I left teaching in 2021). Those businesses are full of problems that are easily solved with computers, but no one who knows how to solve those problems has discovered those problems yet.
Agreed. Except: smaller companies tend to have much smaller budgets and be less tolerant when it comes to software pricing.
I would also say from experience that there is either a lot of commonalities in the types of issues that these companies face OR they have some very unique needs. In the former case one might as well abstract away and try to attack these problems in the general case. In the latter we need to hope that the niche can be big enough to be profitable.
Would just add that the best sales people have usually been folks with deep domain expertise, partially because they tend to have a pre-existing social network of potential users due to their work.
Every time I've joined a new company, or been exposed to a new sector, I've almost immediately found some startup potential just sitting around. The more boring and entrenched the sector is, the more you find.
As a consumer, you are rarely exposed to the B2B world, or the inner workings of things. You are almost certainty limited to seeing things through consumer eyes, and thus it is easy to focus too much on the very saturated products / services.
If you're a B2C one, you launch an app/website, you get small but basically instant feedback by signups/usage. Reward is potentially low per user however.
With B2B, even if you get in conversation with customers quickly, you still might be talking about a 6-12 months cycle to even get them signed up to a free trial. For large companies they want SSO, RBAC, etc. out of the door, plus RFC on security questionaires, data governance, ISO27001, etc. etc. etc.
There are a lot of old boring things out there that are ripe for disruption.
Whatever your product is, you should be prototyping it and putting it in people's hands. Nobody knows what they want, so describing a product to them they've never seen or used tends to have extremely low signal-to-noise ratio.
andrewstuart•14h ago
That is where NEW opportunity lies.
Also, copy the best new ideas you see on hacker news, it’s far from guaranteed that the inventor is able to win the market, steal it.
jimkleiber•14h ago
iamflimflam1•11h ago
Let someone else burn money educating users and building a market.
Tuck in behind them and then zoom past when they’ve exhausted themselves.
Cruel - but it works.
walterbell•10h ago