Maybe the best advice you'll ever get here.
So find a customer early. Very early.
And I've become distrustful of one line advice.
I am TOTALLY guided by my customers. I wasn't always this way. I used to think that something would be so cool, so I would build it, and often, the project went nowhere. I was fortunate to have a co-founder at one time who insisted that we sell it first, then develop it. I never completely came around to his way of thinking, but now I understand where he was coming from.
My customers have never steered me wrong. They don't waste my time. They only spend energy describing things that they really need, and invariably, others need the same things.
The downside is that I never spend time working on my own pet projects. I KNOW I can build a better bridge game, fitness program, or home inventory program. I'd also love to blog. But all those things fall into the category of "No one else asked for it", so I simply don't spend time on them. Maybe some other time.
I also wonder if honesty might be another word for the skill in question - i.e., being honest with yourself about what works, what doesn't, and what's truly necessary.
His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline email clients before gmail, the key to its success was its integration with an excellent search algorithm. Without that starting point, it would have most likely been pulled towards some local optimum which had already been discovered. Okay, so Google is full of search experts, so maybe internal market forces would have been different than those of the worldwide market. Most startups don't have that kind of micro-market which takes them to some kind of new optimium though.
Taking the algorithmic analogy further, in practice you would probably not want to do pure gradient descent if it feels like you're heading for a known local optimum, and instead stochastically/heuristically "go against the flow" and experiment with idiosyncratic features.
Techniques for finding a global optimum of a numerical function are expensive, time-consuming, and often find worse solutions before they find the best one. Do this in a startup, and your local-optimum-seeking competition will crush you.
Seems to me that thinking there is a better solution that your users don't know about (which led you to the local optimum) is exactly the lack of humility that Paul was warning against.
Accidental is a good theory. It's always nice to poke fun at MySpace. http://www.zentu.net/open-space/myspace.png
I sometimes wonder how it's possible for something like this to happen on such a wide or popular scale -- does Microsoft seriously control or influence that much of the W3 standards for compliance?
(edit -- sorry. I've obviously been writing far too much HTML lately.)
I've seen many variations of the same insightful opinions like that one, but something very important that actually requires more than just product or language choice is getting up off your ass and moving to Silicon Valley. For that reason, that should be the most covered topic--at least in my experience.
You're right: it's aimed at beginners. It's also aimed everyone else.
The idea being that if people would buy your product if they saw it in a baggie, you probably have a good product/market.
Indeed. Nor to they care what technology you use (assuming it isn't thrown in their face).
