Also, it doesn't take much for a story to get to the top, if only briefly. 5-10 up votes on a story shortly after it was submitted can get it near the top of the front page. It takes many more votes to get to the front page of a site like reddit, so more likely one of those up-voters commented as well.
of course, this is remedied by some FF plug-ins, but i doubt most users have those installed.
content is king, etc..
Also, don't forget that it is the same fiddling around that leads young people to develop products that older folks could not come up with.
YC has a t-shirt that reads "Build something people want."
Build something people want. That's not good enough.
Build something people will pay for. That should imply enough want and will keep you around long enough to keep providing it.
A business can lose money and still remain a business, even a great one. Companies go public all the time while in the red.
And that $500M figure you have for YouTube is the epitome of fuzzy-math.
http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
that I decided what to put on the t-shirts.
The best serial entrepreneurs (multiple 7+ exits) I know all have a structured approach to picking a project, and it always starts with a statistics backed market test of an either fake product or hacked together prototype.
Their flagship product, Windows, has some poor design decisions in it, decisions that were dictated mostly by their customers ... you can read "The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows" by Raymond Chen for some insights on this.
But otherwise the Windows programming model is pretty solid and consistent (usually).
They make their products solid enough that there isn't a mass exodus. If Vista destroyed people's data at an unacceptable rate you better believe Apple would be even better today. But they made Windows well enough that the problems are only an inconvenience not a crisis.
Also a great quote on the need/want subject: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” [Henry Ford]
I am always amazed at how many things "regular people" want that I would never have thought of because I don't have insight into their jobs/hobbies/needs. Hang out on a few non-techie forums for a few weeks and you'll probably find tons of ideas.
From what I've read this wasn't the purpose at all - he (or perhaps more Woz) liked the technology and so wanted to find a way to make a living making great technology.
The brilliance of the man is astounding: http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
I learned a lot from this question, and ask it any time a newcomer pitches me a technology solution.
Some people just don't understand that a 'good idea' is only a very small fraction of what goes into making a good business. The real judge of an entrepreneur is NOT the ideas they come up with, but how they execute them, and also WHICH ideas they execute.
So far, i can say that, the only concern that i personally have with solving our own problem is, "is it just us that have the problem or other people got the same issue?" (a.k.a is this a big enough problem where we should spend our valuable time on? or should we move to another project).
From my own experience, 2 benefits that i personally have with solving our own problems are: you understand exactly on what is the 80% of the pains and when things get tough, you can encourage yourself that worst case scenario is you use it yourself.
Jeff Bezos coldly examined markets and decided books were the right entry point into ecommerce. However, these don't make the best pr stories, and so aren't told...or in some cases, the story is just fabricated after the fact, such as Pierre Omidyar building ebay to sell pez dispensers.
OP dances around the solution, but never gets there:
Find a customer.
They're everywhere. And they need everything (or so it seems sometimes). And they're not bashful.
Once you have a half dozen customers in any industry, identify something they would all love. Pretty good bet building a business around that, not what you love.
But I like your train of thought =))
People think their ideas are unique, but they're not. They think that their implementation of a pre-existing thing is different or better, but it's not. They think their service is worth paying for or acquiring, but it's usually not.
That's why there's so damn much me-tooism in the "startup" world (and everywhere else):
"If it feels special or new or exciting to me, it must be exciting or new or special."
We live out our entire lives looking out of our own skulls, mired in our own viewpoints, so everyone feels like he or she is the center of the universe (for better and for worse).
It's basic human nature, and therefore people who are not like that are a very rare item indeed. Overcoming it can make you an immensely powerful force.
