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by rtpg
4231 days ago
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The best advice I've heard for "shoot first" people is to sell your product before it exists. If you can't convince anybody to give you money on the pitch, then chances are that you won't be able to sell it after it's built either. Unfortunately this advice doesn't apply well to a lot of consumer, ad-supported startups , but it would apply well to this guy's "modest"(nobody's ever given me $250k for anything) success (GroupScript). More of argument against consumer startups than against this principle. |
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I have done it on the enterprise side, though, and the experience wasn't all bad. I built a face recognition system to spot TV reporters on the air and auto-tweet. It was a "neat"-enough idea that I was able to get 3 TV stations to run pilot programs. In the end, even though it doubled traffic to the TV stations' live streams, it turns out they barely make any money that way and unflattering screen shots irritated the reporters. You can argue that I should have researched harder up front, but if 3 different top-15 TV groups representing 125+ stations were willing to try it out, it wasn't far off. It was close enough to a big score and took so little time (1 year) to iterate, it was worth the try.