What do people want?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I once thought about writing a novel. Later I thought about writing a script for a movie. At some point, I asked myself, “What would be a hit?” It is surprising how hard it is to come up with something both original and yet that would be almost certainly a hit. Sort of like a startup.

When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want, you’ll be fine, you may have noticed I didn’t mention anything about having the right business model. That’s not because making money is unimportant. I’m not suggesting that founders start companies with no chance of making money in the hope of unloading them before they tank. The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to make something people want. It seems like it should be straightforward. But you can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it.

Post external references

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    http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
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