Last Updated on March 8, 2016 by Tim
Startups vary in models, just as their visions differ from one another. These differences may stem from the way they want to break into the business world. Yes, there are so many ideas for businesses, but not all of them may work in favor of the user.
New startups will come in one of three varieties:
- the easy and obvious
- the hard and obvious, and
- the non-obvious and hard
Let’s take a look at these three buckets to see where your next startup idea may come from!
Easy and Obvious ideas
Startups normally come up with the easy and obvious ideas like a photo-sharing app, subscription service, or recipe aggregators. It’s not about laziness at all; it’s a process we call parallelism. This means, users and consumers usually dwell on what others like—some sort of copycat mentality we have in there!
It is a fact that reasoning using analogy saves time. But for most startups—it is never enough. There are venture capital providers that finance companies choosing to stick on businesses that have much competition. For them, early returns are greater than the long term. However, things may go sour either in the middle or near exit where money has thinned down and companies end their existence. This is due to too many competitors in this category and originality just isn’t there.
To be systematic, you have to start looking at basic principles. It’s like science where a scientific approach should be based on facts and not by copying from another model.
Obvious and hard ideas
Obvious and hard ideas are the ones that are useful; nevertheless, people seem to turn a blind eye on them. Startups may think of clean technology, nuclear fission rockets or solar-powered vehicle investments are not so viable when starting up a business mainly because the difficulty level is hard. Little do they know that some investment companies think are even worth spending on.
These huge businesses are not on the menu of the majority as they think that these types take a lifetime to invest in and take a lot of effort on their part most especially if they are not knowledgeable in the field (and opting of early returns). However, this category means a lot to those who think of long-term and big ROI.
Non-obvious and hard ideas
These are ideas which some startups are not really bent on to invest in. They think that these are shrouded with doubts as, just like them, these ideas are products of innovation and technology and have to be tested by many in order for them to fully understand or trust. Robotics or a visual search engine are two examples.
Another perfect example is PayPal, a platform where you can pay for your online shopping, pay your airline tickets or send a payment request. Introducing PayPal was not as easy as you thought it was. First, there was a huge question on its reliability and then the number of users was not enormous, there’s security issues to work through, compliance, risk management and the list goes on. Eventually, doubts were erased as more and more people started using it and satisfaction in its performance became widely acclaimed. But it wasn’t always thought of that way.
Summing Up
Sometimes it takes sheer gut-feel in choosing where to start and which ideas are really viable for a particular business venture. For the wiser lot, disregarding what is called the Schlep blindness works better as this enables more powerful earning capacity due to lesser competition.
Sources:
