> The... ecosystem [of random startup ideas] would be
> arguably more diverse, more innovative and overall better
> for consumers. Instead of having 8 million photo sharing
> apps and 11 million social network aggregators, you would
> instead have an infinite number of truly bold products.
Creation of truly new things happens at most just a few times in a human life span.
The rest revolves around taking existing stuff and making it better. And there's nothing bad about it. It's how our technological evolution has worked since the "invention" of the wheel.
And there is definitely a better approach, it's called "market research". :-)
>Have the courage to try things that look like they could only have been conceived by an inexhaustible supply of apes. It’s not necessarily a terrible thing to be an Infinite Monkey Startup.
No thanks, I'm going to spend my valuable time trying to build things that fit a market and satisfy genuine customer problems.
I don't get this, it starts off talking about human startups being bad at customer development and feedback loops, but then says "just do something random, lol". I know it's supposed to be light hearted, but I've read more interesting articles on TechCrunch. (Zing).
Please don't make it sound like not making "free/libre open source" would equal being a greedy capitalist who only cares for profits.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/mammals/monkeys-vs-...
Some advice: just forking something and hacking on it is just the start. If you'd like to give something back to the open source community, be sure you communicate with the other people involved in the project about your changes. That may be a pull request, but for more complex things, might well also involve writing something to the mailing list.
But for an average monkey before the startup experiment this looks rather bad. Unfortunately this is just the monkey you are.
If we had a social system that had a softer cushion for failure or a start-up incubator that rewarded ideas that were creative we may see a larger group of people taking risks and interesting ideas.
One of the primary differences between humans and monkeys creating start-ups is that humans have human lives. We have bills, families, responsibilities, higher wants and needs, and so much more. The start-up arguments seem to forget that we are all people, real human people. Even entrepreneurs are people, and they will have to address their humanity at some point.
I've longed believed that addressing the hair-on-fire needs of real customers was the best way to stay on the critical path. But every once in a while, the world throws you a curve ball and things work out differently.
Just recently I needed to build a bunch of tools to help me build something a customer needed. I had no idea that the tools would turn out to be the better product. Who knew? An infinite number of monkeys, maybe.
Thanks OP for the enlightening thoughts. Now go build something someone wants.
Maybe we do pay too much attention to TechCrunch, but can you imagine the articles you'd read there when they start reporting on the Simian Start-ups? (simianstartups.com and simian-startups.com are both available ... let the gold rush begin).
Can we please make something different? Please.