RETHINKDB founder teaches you how to find entrepreneurial ideas

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About the author

My name is Slava Akhmechet, I am one of Rethinkdb's founders, RETHINKDB is an open source, distributed database designed to help developers and operators to process unstructured data while building real-time applications

How to choose a creative

Feb 2015

On the macro level, according to my experience, I think one of the most important things that a start-up company needs to know is that the response of the innovation market is very efficient. If the market environment is suitable for a start-up, it is very likely that there are already many similar startups in the market. And vice versa-if there is no start-up in the market, it is very likely that the market is unfriendly, so startups don't come out.

On this level, startups are like an organic organism. As long as the ecological environment is suitable, there will be life existence. The difference is that startups are living in the economic environment rather than the real ecological environment.

This situation will greatly affect how you choose your ideas, because the technology business is often a king defeated the situation, win you will get all, lose you blow them out. So the first company to solve customer problems accounted for the market share is often more than the other later added up more. So if you already have a company like your idea that exists in that market, then you're unlikely to be able to replace it.

Traditional wisdom often tells us that startups need to go to the point of thinking about the problems they encounter, but it's always a bit too much to filter out which ideas are right for starting a business. Market reaction efficiency predicts that if a problem is really valuable and can be solved, then there is a good chance that the problem has been solved. Conversely, if the problem has not been resolved, then it is likely that the solution to the problem has a structural reason to solve it is not an impossible thing.

It is really a winning strategy for investors to encourage entrepreneurs to solve different problems, because the law of large numbers determines that the winning balance tends to be on the investor's side. Most of these startups are likely to fail, but it doesn't matter, as long as the net is big enough for the investors to invest enough, so long as one or two of them succeed, it will make a lot of money, because, as I said before, it's a game of kings and losers, The winner will win almost every share of the market.

However, this is a very bad strategy for entrepreneurs, because the law of large numbers determines that the winning side is not on their side. A single entrepreneur does not have enough money to try to solve a number of different seemingly valuable problems to achieve the desired results. So entrepreneurs need to be more careful to filter their ideas and find the ideas that are most likely to succeed.

If you cannot replace a technology company that already exists, and it is likely that the market environment does not allow those unresolved problems to be solved, would it be easy for you to build a successful startup in that market?

A seemingly absurd solution is that, in the bud of a startup, we don't think about finding our entrepreneurial ideas by solving the problems that exist, but rather to consider the changes in the economic environment and the opportunities that this change brings, and find our entrepreneurial ideas.

Like the ecological environment, the economic environment is also unstable. Society's moral compass often changes. The political environment will change according to social morals, and a country will change because it absorbs free and loose laws. People living in the developing world will slowly become wealthy. When a technology reaches a critical point, it requires only a few minor improvements, and the technology can lead to a leap from quantitative to qualitative.

Changes in the environment have freed up entrepreneurial opportunities. And because technology entrepreneurship is a battle of kings, so if you are first enough to be aware of market changes and then immediately enter the market and bring a workable solution to the market, this will greatly increase your chances of success in the long term occupation of the market.

So always ask yourself at the beginning of a startup-what's happening in the world today? And what can I do about these changes? Once you have determined that the environment has changed and that it is not too late to enter the market, you should be able to find your ideas to start your own business by following the idea of "solving unresolved problems" mentioned above.

Pioneer Advantage

It's a good start to incubate and evaluate your own entrepreneurial ideas based on changes in the environment, but that's not enough. When you find this kind of entrepreneurial environment change, many other people will also be aware of. For example, when a magazine reports on an article in which a trend is changing, the magazine often gets information from several companies that are emerging in the market.

If you are the first to push your product into a market, your customers will compare your product and current trends. You will get a first batch of early adopters-a wave of catching-up, if your product is excellent, and some conservative users will gradually put your arms into your embrace and make your camp more and more powerful.

If you are the second batch to push your product into a certain market, your customers will compare your products with those of other companies that enter the market first. In this case, the difficulty of your (wanting to succeed) will be multiplied by the number of levels. It is far from enough to burn money to catch up with the current state. At this point you are going to find the difference between a bright eye and a company that first entered the market as a strong entry point to compete, and experience tells us that it is much more difficult to do this than the entrepreneur envisioned.

The "Forerunner advantage" in economics becomes more and more intense and obvious in the case that the growth of a technology company requires multiple compounding processes. Creating an organization takes time, setting up a business, fundraising, recruiting, research and development, breaking into the market, selling channels, shipping, and so on, will consume you for at least a few months. If you are not the first to enter the market, your competitors will probably already be working on how to occupy more users as you stumble over the shipment. In the process, they will get more resources to help them increase the number of users who have been at the index level before you, but you will be trapped in explaining to the user what is special about the product you provide. In most cases, this means your company is dead!

Insight into the trend of wind

Therefore, you should allow your product to enter the market without any competitors. Experience, you can't be a yimeimei in the market and want to catch up. This should not be done even in the rare case where most of the competitors are not very competitive, because even if only one capable competitor enters the market before you, it will greatly reduce your chances of success. You have to find a way to start a business before someone else is in the market, starting with a big open door.

There is no formula in the world that predicts a change in the direction of the trend, but you can develop your own unique insight to perceive it. For example, you can develop this insight based on your work content or your hobbies. Speech recognition researchers are likely to be able to gain insight into this technology more than I did in a few years, because I was aware of the existence of the technology when the voice-recognition product started hitting the market.

Sometimes your unique background knowledge will help you to realize the change of wind direction earlier than others. If you see a plausible description of why the world does not even know anything about a story, maybe it will bring you a reasonable opportunity to start a business. For example, perhaps you think that people living in some countries of the third World are not aware of the importance of remittances, and then the third-country countries have just enough network coverage, then you may be able to use electronic remittances as a starting point to expand your ideas to achieve success.

Some of the unique advantages that you have are also likely to put you in a good position to explore the changing direction of your business. There are changes in some areas where it is possible for everyone to get in, and some changes may require a deep background in expertise or a huge effort that even entrepreneurs are reluctant to devote. Driverless cars may be a good example here: Everyone is bragging about how they stand at the forefront of the development of driverless cars, but ultimately only Google has the means to integrate the required experts, capital and determination to go through the last mile.

There are other ways to get the best of you. For example, if you have the resources of a large company in your hands, you may be able to enter the market a step later than others, but you can still beat your competitors by using a huge market budget or on the basis of the company's existing distribution base. But the situation in the real world of VC after all is very few. Startups often don't win because they have huge resources-their success is often the result of an insight into the changing tide and first pushing the product to the market.

Weave your ideas into a good story

Thinking about the changes taking place in the world your startup will not only be a big success for your startup, it's a better way to think about technology innovation. In addition, it will bring you more surprises.

At the start of your startup you have to interact with a lot of people-potential users, consultants, investors, industry experts, early employees, even journalists. The first question these people ask you is often, "What do you do for a business?" “。 So how to tell people what you're building is going to be the first strategic question you need to solve.

If you describe a thing in a story-telling way, humans are often happy to give feedback. All stories tend to use the same basic framework. Here's a simple framework rule from the famous Pixas animation studio that tells us how to say the story:

In the past (). Every day (). One day (). So (). So (). Until the end ().

The first part is the layout. The former world runs in a peculiar way, meaning to describe to people what it means to people. The next part is to describe the changes that are taking place in the world. The things described in this section may not have a half-dime relationship with your startup-what is the objective fact of the changing environment you're describing, and how much does it matter to the audience if you're going to open a company? Remember before we talked about the market reaction is very efficient and agile, right? Even if you don't open a company to build the product to embrace change, there will be other people to do it. Your goal should be to be the first to bring your viable products to market, which will usually help you to successfully capture the market.

Only when you describe the changes that are taking place in the world can you begin to describe your product and your company. The change of the world is not stopped by your actions, you just need to know that this change is enough to "happen" beforehand.

The last part shows how your company will change people's lives. When your company is thriving enough to have a large portion of its market share, you will be able to be the driving force behind the next change in the environment. In this way your start-ups will complete a cycle of technological innovation.

Here's an example of how a first-class company should describe their story in the template above: In the past, people bought cars that were driven by internal combustion engines. But one day, with battery technology has become more and more cheap. Therefore, we can consider using batteries to build an electric vehicle. But perhaps this time is relatively expensive, then we can first out luxury luxury version to occupy the high-end market. As battery technology becomes cheap enough, we start thinking about breaking into the low-end market. Until the end, we can subvert the entire auto industry so that every car in the world is electric.

This way of describing your ideas in a story-telling way can be very effective in moving your startups forward. Early adopters, employees and consultants will be more likely to be attracted because you are inviting them to come together on a journey to realize the idea. Investors are also more likely to throw olive branches because they are in line with how they behave. When it comes to reporters, they have no reason not to report to help you promote, because you have written a story to help them do their own work to do their own.

A good story can give you a great description of the power to express to different backgrounds and groups exactly what you're doing. In addition, a good story has another more important benefit: creative normalization-a good story will tell you whether your decision is correct and force you to make some principled choices. If you're going to make a decision that's not the same as the story you're talking about, you need to be very specific about whether you want to reassess the decision or re-adjust the story you're going to tell. Early-stage startups tend to be involved in countless swirls of choices that need to be made in different directions, and these companies often die more because of the tradeoffs they make to these decisions than because they choose a wrong path. A good story will tell you to be honest with yourself and everyone, to stop you from being a nice fellow and to ruin your creative ideas so that you can keep your mind moving forward in a clear and specific direction.

Exception-there is no absolute

The two viewpoints that the first market-entry company could not be shaken by the innovative market's high-efficiency feedback and starters ' advantages have been controversial because it is easy to find a counter-example of what is real and does not fully conform to these two rules.

For example, the Beats headset, which Apple bought for $3 billion over the past year, has actually broken all the rules described in this article and is still successful because the trend-playing industry is inherently fickle and fraught with instability. Looking at Microsoft's Surface tablet, Microsoft's later offer of surface tablets is not much different from what the market already has, but it can still achieve a certain degree of success in this already mature market because Microsoft has enough market budget money. In fact, a market is often dormant for many years without being discovered, many deep technical problems until someone suddenly resolved, the problem may have existed for decades. Even seemingly unstoppable, fast-growing companies sometimes commit such deadly errors that they do not find potential opportunities in time, and eventually send themselves to the point of no return.

In the entrepreneurial world, these examples can be classified as an exception rather than a normal follow-up to the entrepreneurial rules. Most founders can't actually help themselves by working with a hip-hop singer like Beats, and they can't be effective at minimizing the cost of a 1 billion-dollar market competition (but unfortunately they often feel they can). Entrepreneurs often feel that they are an exception to the success shown above when they walk pifo, but in fact it is not as special as you think in the entrepreneurial world.

If you are sure you have found the exception, then you have to be careful. Many start-ups have meant finding a shortcut in the beginning, and then it took years to find the wrong one, because the founders did not understand that the two rules of the market's efficient response and starters were the right way. So, please think about these rules and understand them well. Exceptions do exist, but make sure you really know what you are doing. You need to learn the Orthodox rules before you can create your own rules.

Self-deception – don't weave creative stories into fiction

One of the side-effects of finding startups ' ideas in a way that brings opportunities to environmental change is that because this is so effective, you can easily be blinded by your early, effortless success. Smart and determined entrepreneurs can find evidence for almost all entrepreneurial ideas to support the fact that the environment has changed. If you're sure you're going to be involved in building a food delivery service, you can usually invent a hypothesis and then weave a story about your product around that hypothesis, and then add some credible data that supports your assumptions, and gradually polished your story high enough so that a large number of users began to believe it. Unfortunately, you will be creating an extravagant fiction.

Because you are so superstitious about your assumptions that you unwittingly begin to turn a blind eye to unfavorable factors and evidence, the process is tantamount to undermining the correct scientific approach with the scientific "certainty of sexual prejudice". The belief that sexual prejudice is deadly in the scientific community is also deadly in the business community.

In this way, your company can easily attract a staggering amount of money, a large number of elites will be involved, and the media will be very interested in your company, which in this case will instead push your company to the edge of the cliff. I've seen people throw people in. Tens of thousands of dollars of money burned out, and the process took hundreds of people-years on the project, because they unknowingly weave a very fascinating fictional fiction, and then by some of the early successes of the success of the brain so that even their own the Unreal novel convinced.

So, your creative story needs more than just fascinating, and more importantly, the story needs to be the right story, not an unreal novel.

How to evaluate the correctness of a creative story is an exceptionally challenging art, and making this assessment involves a number of different sciences-economics, science fiction, history, anthropology, and sociology. You need to have a deep understanding of the world and devote many years of effort to creating your own sensitive intuition about the future. Even so, you can only guarantee that you make the right decisions in a part of the time. But that's a lot better than the random choices you've had before.

Intuitive sensitivity

Here are some of the things I've seen that help me think about and grasp future changes. I use them to learn how to weave my creative stories and sharpen my intuition of whether these creative stories are correct.

• Read a few months The Economist's article is a good way to keep pace with traditional wisdom. The authors on The Economist's website are good at thinking about the future (but remember that these authors are not pressured to make sure that their point of view is correct).
• Peter Thiel's "from scratch" is a great book. Some of the other business books are rubbish, but the book is truly outstanding.
• The rationality of Harry Potter and the method is instructive. The things Harry described in the first 11 chapters of the book are exactly what you need to learn. "The rules are very different and there is magic in this world. So now what? Can I get rich from the gold galleons/west of the wizarding bank?
• Also, I would go to the TV tropes Wiki from time to time to prevent me from weaving a fictional creative novel.
• William Gibson's essays don't believe that the so-called signature flavors help me to think deeply about technological innovation in the real world.
• Similarly, the five things that Neil postman wrote about the change in technology trends that we need to know are unique to technology considerations. He is not optimistic about technological innovation, but still, he holds a unique and useful way of thinking about how technology works.

Once you have finished reading the above-mentioned Link's class capacity, please continue digging deeper.

Learn as much as you can about micro-economics to give you a better understanding of how the world works. Don't just learn the basic supply and demand, but also learn more advanced such as supplies, substitutes, elasticity, marginal effects and so on.

To learn history. But don't just remember that time lives these things, but need to ask advanced questions. Why did the Ottoman Empire never set up a feudal system, despite having similar economic and technological development levels to other European nations? Why did the inventor of the steam engine not derive the greatest return from their inventions? Why did Chinese civilization not conquer Europe at its heyday? At that time, China was far more developed than Europe.

Have a basic understanding of anthropology and ethnology. To understand the theme-Class theory to evaluate the cultural habits of humanity, and to try to learn from the cultural habits of the changes to make judgments.

Lay the groundwork and then create your own point of view. If you look closely, you will find that there is something that can be learned everywhere. Once you have a deeper understanding of the world, you should take immediate action. The best way to get a good sense of intuition is to make a real decision and then watch the results. So don't let yourself be stuck in the analysis of numbness, be good at and dare to analyze. Start your own company and begin to learn and grow yourself in the mistakes you make.

Finally, thank Michael Lucy for his help with this review and the contribution made.

——— finished ———-

Quoted English original: http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html
Make/Translator: Slava akhmechet/Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder
Knowledge sharing public Number:Techgogogo
Csdn:http://blog.csdn.net/zhubaitian

RETHINKDB founder teaches you how to find entrepreneurial ideas