The idea route for a startup is to employ a small skeleton crew to focus on mining for the insights on human behavior that will support a viable business model before raising money and scaling up the operations.
Big organizations tend to forget the insights that original lead to the founding of the company
If there is a company out there that is solving a problem you are trying to find a solution for but you cannot think of it off the top of your head, they might as well have been dead.
What you think might work usually is not so. It is only when you land up in a promising domain and start mining for insights in that domain do you start finding ones that are useful for building a company from.
Humans are motivated beyond pain and pleasure
No one has considered links themselves as important data elements.
It is usually the simplest actions backed by the most fundamental insights that drives the largest consumer adoption.
People feel that sense of accomplishment when they gather stuff thanks to our hunter gathering roots . They might not even need it at the end of the day.
Social book marking just died when most of their operators pivoted away from the central idea in 2005
- Stumble upon
- Digg
- Pintrest
- Trello
The mass adoption of Slack and Quip might be a great channel for growing such an idea again but for the enterprise space.
The success of YouTube can be speculated to be due to:
- In baked flash media code into browsers
- Increase in bandwidth
- Delaying the payment of royalty fees and taking down of copyrighted contents
- They got sold for 1.2billion but paid of 750million in terms of royalties
Mark Cuban is a fake billionaire for selling Real networks to AOL which eventually got shut down after six months.
Related readings
- Tory Higgins, “Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works”
- Tory Higgins, “Shared Reality”
