Raffi's Blog <3

I’m writing this in response to a thread on Hacker News.  I thought it would be a good fit for this blog.  The question presented: How do I find a new idea for a startup?  The answer is in the question itself.  Read on.

When I started on this startup journey, I wanted a new idea.  It turns out, I had lots of ideas but I found myself afraid to chase them.  I wanted to cut risk as much as possible at the idea stage.  It turns out there are ways to do this.  Go after a problem that is safe and boring, and find the customer before building.  So I should caveat this, I wanted an idea that made me feel passion and safety.

I eventually decided I was asking too much and took the plunge into doing.  Here is what I did and what I learned.

PolishMyWriting.com – A Style Checker for Writing

My first idea was PolishMyWriting.com.  This was nothing more than a web-based style checker for written text.   I decided to pursue this idea because I had need for such a thing and didn’t want to pay $130 for Style Writer (a Windows program).  This idea followed the advice of: take something someone else is doing, do it, and give it away for free.

Of course, polishmywriting.com went nowhere.  I announced it to the world and initially, no one took interest.  *sigh* I continued to use PolishMyWriting.com to check emails and comments, but I decided it was a failure overall.

Kindling – Find Your Audience

My second idea was Kindling.  Kindling was a tool to help find social communities with an interest in your website.  The idea was simple.  The software subscribed to several RSS feeds and built up a big database of social websites and the content on them.  Anyone could visit kindling, paste in their press release or blog post, and through the magic of Pearson’s correlation coefficient, I’d tell them the top 25 communities their text fit with.

I was so excited when I came up with this idea.  I called friends and said “oh my God, I found it! I found it!”  I then went to my home lab and hacked away.  The technology worked reasonably well.  Unfortunately when I announced it, I saw no reaction and decided to quit moving forward with the project.

[Note: I think there is great synergy with Slinkset.com should someone choose to pursue this idea]

Feedback Army – A Website Review Service

Two failed efforts, you can imagine my confidence was sky high at this point.  One night I was reading Hacker News and I came across a post where someone asked for a website feedback service.  Another person replied “hey, I use Mechanical Turk” and others jumped into that thread asking him to reveal the secrets of the Mechanical Turk.  Being the code hacker that I am, I saw an opportunity.  “Wow, Mechanical Turk is a pain to use, but people want this ability… maybe…. just maybe” and I set to work.  I decided to stop studying for my exams and focus on prototyping Feedback Army.  I had the initial concept working in four hours and I tweaked and tested for about a week.

I launched Feedback Army Thanksgiving week.  It made the front page of Delicious, people were buying, and several bloggers tried it out and all of them gave it very positive reviews.  Of course Feedback Army marches on to this day.

How to Find a New Idea

So what did I learn about finding new startup ideas?  It pays to find ideas and not have them.  The first two ideas were my own ideas.  I was proud of them and excited about them.  The last idea, Feedback Army was an idea I found.

I learned that listening and looking is key to finding an idea.  If someone is complaining and asking for a solution, you’re halfway there.  For the website review service, someone else had a partial solution.  The solution couldn’t work for everyone because it was difficult to use.  I made Feedback Army to solve this problem in an easy to use way.  Keep listening and you’ll find your idea too.

Until then, it can’t hurt to execute on something.  My failure PolishMyWriting.com became my next failure great invention AfterTheDeadline.com.  The evolution of PolishMyWriting.com is a story for another time.

Dashnine Media