akrish

I’m very fortunate to be living in Silicon Valley. Both my parents work in highly technical areas so I can bounce ideas and implementations off of them. They give me really good feedback about anything, both technical and not. What’s more, many of their friends are equally technical and entrepreneurial, so I’m in a great place to bloom as an entrepreneur. Recently I met one of my friend’s uncles, and I started talking to him about entrepreneurship and all that good stuff. Turns out he’s a venture capitalist, so he gave me a lot of advice, and input from the point of view of a VC. I’ve only known him for about a month, but I think I’ve already learned quite a lot from him.

I had a chat with him earlier today; we talked first about school, work, and music, but I asked him for some feedback on an idea that my friend and I just started working on. I won’t go into detail on the idea, but both my friend and I were pretty excited to work on it; it seemed interesting and also pretty useful to the general public. Anyway, I explained the idea, and needless to say, he didn’t particularly like it. Yet, he didn’t just rag on it as most people do, he gave me really good reasons why he didn’t like it that I can apply to other ideas.

The first point he made was that any idea that you want to profit from needs to have some “hard problem” to it. Sounds pretty obvious, but in retrospect, most of my ideas have nothing really hard to them. They’re just a lot of mindless coding, with some tricky areas. His reasoning was that if there isn’t anything challenging to what you do, competitors will just imitate you, and no one wants more competition. You need something that really separates your product from everyone else’s, something that’s not easily reproduced. If you’re product solves a problem better than anyone else can, then you’ll probably be successful. Our idea, unfortunately isn’t that hard to implement.

I agree with this statement from a business standpoint, but not having a challenging problem doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t implement your idea. It’s always great to contribute to open source projects and build free services, just don’t expect to generate revenue from them. I still want to build this project that my friend and I are working on, because I think it’s a cool idea. Even if it’s not challenging, it’s still something fun to work on and it’ll be a good learning experience. I’m not at the stage in my life when I need to be making a lot of money (it’s always good of course), so I’ll still work on my ideas that I think are cool, regardless of a challenging they are. On the other hand, things that aren’t challenging aren’t nearly as fun, and stimulating as things that are. I think that should be the real deterrent from working on certain ideas: not that others can replicate, but that they aren’t as fun.

The second point he made was about building off of someone else’s (lets call them company A) infrastructure. If you’re doing this, you better add something really unique to it that makes it significantly challenging for the owner of the infrastructure to imitate. If you’re product is trivial here, as soon as you become remotely popular, company A will devote some resources to imitating you, and they’ll do things a lot better than you ever can. While you only have access to their API’s, they can configure everything about the base infrastructure to optimize for what you’re doing and probably beat you out. This goes along with the challenging problem bit, but it becomes even more important when you’re using someone else’s work.

In thinking about this, I’ve become even more turned off to using external infrastructures. With a lot of my projects, I like to do as much as possible by myself. Rather than rely on other people’s code and API’s, I prefer to build things myself, customizing them to suit my needs. I like this for two reasons: I build a more optimized application and I learn a lot more by designing everything. The lesson here is: don’t expect to make a lot of money off of mash-ups. Don’t get me wrong, many mash-ups are really cool, but they’re not going to generate a lot of revenue.

We also talked about generating revenue from an idea. He affirmed my belief that a lot of money can be made with advertisements, but advised me not to worry so much about income, and focus on building something good that attracts visitors or users. We started talking about this site, (it’s my only project with some hope of generating income right now) and he encouraged me to just keep writing and focus on publicizing and building subscriptions. What I took from this is that you shouldn’t worry about generating revenue at the onset, but instead concentrate on building something really good.

Since talking to him, I’ve been reassessing my current projects and deciding whether I should keep working on them or not. Some of them I’ll definitely scrap; they don’t sound like much fun and I don’t think they’ll make me any money. Others, I think I’ll continue. At this point, none of my ideas really have anything “challenging” about them, but I’m still a pretty young student with a lot to learn. I still have plenty of time.