Ask HN: Where did your startup come from? Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161522, I think lots of people would love to hear more about startups' early stories. How did you decide what to work on? How confident were you in the opportunity? What else was interesting about your very early days? |
Short version: Somebody asked me how to create bingo cards for class. I said "I'm sure there is a program that will do that for you if you Google for it." She said: "I Googled, nothing works." That was my first indication there might be a market for this. My second, which convinced me, was that when I made something to tide her over (hacked together in 4 hours and possibly the worst software in my life I ever inflicted on other people), I got fifteen thank you letters and fifteen "I really want to use this but I can't because it is broken!" letters from a mailing list with 60 people on it. That was my first, very unplanned, exposure to the Minimum Viable Product.
I estimated the world market for my product at 2,000 teachers and thought, with a bit of work, I might eventually sell as much as $200 a month. Turns out I suck at math.
I don't know what you consider interesting about the early days of the startup. Let's see. At the time I was starting I was on a severe frugality kick and had a rigid budget every month, the better for retiring my student loans early. My budget had $60 a month allocated for video games. So I skipped the game and gave the business a $60 lease on life: it had to pay its own way after that. It has.
The music analysis stuff was really time consuming and expensive and of course wasn't nearly as good as Pandora, so I canned it, but had this left over code that crawled the web looking for music.
I did a few quick changes to the code so that it grabbed concerts instead of music, and voila, http://HearWhere.com