I've been reading Founders at Work and I've been thinking about this. It seems that there's basically two main paradigms when it comes to tech startups:
1) Start out building a product/service that you think people will pay for (Viaweb, Excite, VisiCorp) and evolve the idea where appropriate
2) Start out building a product/service that you want to use, and its immense popularity makes it become a company (Facebook, Delicious, Yahoo, Google)
A lot of people (myself included) have thought "the way to make it big is by doing #2: making a neat website, and hoping it takes off incredibly". But perhaps a more statistically sound approach is to do #1. Has anyone done a study of this kind of thing and looked at expected value?
Either way, you have to make something people want. I'm reading Four Steps to the Epiphany now...hopefully it will successfully explain how to figure it out what it is that people want.
1) Start out building a product/service that you think people will pay for (Viaweb, Excite, VisiCorp) and evolve the idea where appropriate
2) Start out building a product/service that you want to use, and its immense popularity makes it become a company (Facebook, Delicious, Yahoo, Google)
A lot of people (myself included) have thought "the way to make it big is by doing #2: making a neat website, and hoping it takes off incredibly". But perhaps a more statistically sound approach is to do #1. Has anyone done a study of this kind of thing and looked at expected value?