How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
I can't believe how many people are belittling this idea or strawmanning it as a couple of dollars or $5. What the page is getting at is if you can get a few customers to actually commit real money, then you've got an actionable idea on your hands. This is so much better than any wishy-washy "that's a good idea" or "I'd buy that". This is a full fledged, "Here's my money, I am buying this right now." sort of decision.
Want to be 100% sure your startup idea is good? Wait until somebody else succeeds with it.
Hey Andrew! I hope you work on this more, but it's not ready for general consumption yet. Specifics:
Social proof is a big part of why kickstarter works. The startup pages should prominently display something like "X people have committed $Y".
Discoverability is also key. It should be easy to find your users, but I can only find you.
If you haven't implemented the above because you don't have any content, that's also a big problem. If you don't seed a site like this with content (from friends, family, cold calls, whatever) it causes all kinds of problems. For one, it makes it harder to see what the site does, because content is what happens when the site is doing things. It's also really unappealing at a basic human level, like an empty room. There's not much to look at, and you want to leave.
Your users' potential users don't want to "Validate this startup!". Your copy and design should align more with their needs.
The "Pledge" buttons are broken.
Your branding must be much weaker on pages like http://upstartly.com/startups/view/1. I would move all upstartly-specific content to the footer.
Hope that helps!
I think "100% sure" might be overselling it... Interesting how many meta-startups are emerging, though.
It's funny/interesting how trends emerge on HN. I feel like I've seen at least 5 of what I'd call "meta" projects/startups on the front page over the last week - sites that help a minor piece of the puzzle for a startup.
The danger with this approach is that you'll restrict yourself to products that people know that they want to buy before you even build it. It would be great you could validate every product this way, but sadly many products have to be used before people are willing to pay.
(Warning: outsider perspective coming) Why do all of these startup ideas always have similar web layouts? It may be "cool" in YC-land but that's no way to stand out. The idea is intriguing though.
How to be 90% sure your startup idea is good: ask a woman.
I've had lots of "brilliant" ideas, and my wife pooh-poohed them all except one. Guess which one really took off?
I think women are less likely to be impressed by the cool tech, and see the actual need (or lack of it!).
Anybody see the inherent irony in this?
This doesn't prove anything about the quality of a 'startup idea' It just proves that you are able to convince a small number of people to drop five bucks. I don't see how that has a correlation to the future success of a business.
This would be much more interesting if it were pitched as a way to build a group of active early adopters. Pledging to an idea should give the user some perks from the start, and you should make it easy for the companies collecting pledges to incentivize these users.
Could this be a funding hack? It creates an economic incentive for the founder of the startup to give each of his friends $5 (say give 20 friends), to 'prove' that he has traction.
For $100, he can secure an angel/seed round of $100K.
Wouldn't be surprised if that is one of those unintended consequences that further inflates, what honestly looks like is becoming, the resurgence of a new bubble.
Good idea though, just wondering about the macro implications.
Very funny idea (not sure if it is meant to be) but I do agree with nckpark in that getting 5 people to drop a couple bucks doesn't mean much for the quality of the idea. Especially when knowing that most people aren't successful entrepreneurs that know what will work, and even if they are, 5 people doesn't give you a majority. Also I feel a big thing VCs preach is being "contrarian" so having mass belief in an idea would be contrarian to contrarian (Upstartly likes recursion right?).
Either way, really fun idea and Goodluck!
I'm trying to set up Amazon with my account... I can't seem to change from the United States?
Wouldn't it be interesting if people could comment on the startup page and give feedback on the general idea... exactly like we are doing for upstartly.com in this thread.
Interesting idea. Although compare this to a survey (most commonly used idea research tool): even with a survey with hundreds of responses, there is the question of the sample's representativeness. Here the sample base is so small that the results (positive or negative) just cannot be regarded as statistically significant. It may be used as a complementary tool to measure the "virality", but cannot give me a 100% confidence level within 0% margin of error.
It would be helpful to know how many others believe its a good idea. I might be on the cusp of thinking an idea is good, but I don't want to back a dead horse.
Provocative idea. Agree (and upvoted swombat) that 100% is inaccurate. Here's the thing: how many applications do you use today that if they used the model upstartly.com is providing YOU would have invested in. I spend a huge amount of time in Clicky (web analytics) today and am a paying customer, but I wouldn't have given them $5 to build it. I needed to see it working—and try it—before I made that commitment.
Interesting idea for sure. On a side note, I'd implore you to use SSL for your signup form/login area.
Tell me I'm wrong, but my concern would be floating my idea out there where someone faster, I'm working on it as a side project, would beat me to the punch and launch before me.
Valid concern or no?
This works for some startups, but not all.
More importantly, WHO those five are is very important. I could get five best friends to give me five dollars. That's meaningless in evaluating your idea.
I put my startup on the service. One thing I have a problem with is that it exposes my personal email by default. I think you should make it private by default.
undefined
Or, to simplify:
Does it solve a relevant problem for people who have money? If so, you're probably in the clear.
undefined
So I guess Google, Facebook and Wikipedia wouldn't work?
isn't kickstarter the kickerstarter for startups?
This is like sampling. You think than a few people paying implies a lot of people are going to pay for your application. So this is a statistical problem about inference, perhaps some model of customer is required to get better estimates for the confidence interval of success.
Great idea. Simple and elegant. Which are also usually the hallmarks of a great idea. :)