How To Decide What To Build
So before you launch, and definitely before you raise money, figure out whether you think you can create scale economies, switching costs, maybe network effects, or mayyybe cornered resources before your uncertainty window closes.
Packy McCormick • In Defense of Strategy
What should we build and for whom? What market could we enter and dominate? How could we build durable value that would not be subject to erosion by competition?1
Eric Ries • The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
It’s all an incremental process. You start with what you can handle given the time and resources available to you, and you slowly grow, develop and evolve. The startups that succeed begin by serving one small group of people and then working out their next valuable move. It’s true for niche businesses that service a delighted, core audience, but it
... See moreKatie Lewis • Find Your 9others
The answer is to test the waters with an MVP. Take your product idea and shave it down until it is just one dedicated tool that you can build in a few weeks – a tool that solves a specific problem. Build just that product, promote it, and gather feedback. Then you’ll have real data to decide on your next course of action. This is the same path that
... See moreWill Schmidt • The 30 Day Startup: How to Create a Successful Tech Startup in 6 Weeks for Less than $50K
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built... See more
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.