[DanielBMarkham]

Sounds like you are looking at startups as if your job is to come up with some new idea.

Don't do this.

Your job is to provide something people want that you can scale. 99.99% of the time somebody will be able to point at what you are doing and say "That's already been done!"

People who say this have no idea what they are talking about.

A business is about a hell of a lot more than some unique, creative idea. In fact, I think it's almost a reliable metric to reverse this thinking: what's been done to death that other hackers wouldn't like? To me if you want some kind of system for ideas, that's where I'd go.

But the big-picture ideas are almost always worthless because the devil is in the details. The "why the hell would anyone use my service" is spot on. The answer will never be something like "I have a unique idea" -- it'll be a lot more complicated than that.

I consume a lot of things, and I never make consumption or purchase choices based on who actually came up with the business concept or how many other folks are doing it.

[timruffles]

I think that's a fantastic way of thinking about it. Businesses don't win custom by doing totally unique things, but by doing common things in a way that is local/prettier/cheaper/easier/in a language you speak/on a device you own.

I think you've changed the way I'll look for "the idea". Not something new, but a problem I can solve, that people have and that scales, that other people like me don't want to touch.

One of the best comments I've read on HN, especially for stressing the complexity of why a product works. Thanks Daniel.