The next big thing could be a small idea

I love movies. Action movies, funny movies, good movies, bad movies. As long as there aren’t talking animals — we all have our pet peeves — I’m in. I don’t watch every movie in the theatre, but I hate missing a great one, especially if it’s an old movie I might never get the chance to see on the big screen again.

For a long time, I bookmarked multiple web sites and checked them every week to make sure no screening fell under my radar. The big chain theatres, the little theatres that play old movies, the art house theatres that, to be honest, I seldom attend. I had a pretty good system and probably always knew every movie playing within 50 km of wherever I was standing.

When I discovered Flixster, an app that compiles the listing from area theatres into one place, I didn’t scroll past it since I’ve already got a handle on tracking current movies. I downloaded it immediately, and I’ve used it several times a week for a long time. It’s a productivity tool if ever a productivity tools there was.

Yet sometimes a person will tell me they’ve abandoned a business idea because it turns out they’re just reinventing the wheel — all of the potential customers they’ve talked to have already figured out how to solve their own problem (though not all of them are as life-or-death important as my need to know when Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is playing).

Well, if you’d asked me pre-Flixster whether I struggled to find local movie listings, I’d have told you that I’ve got it covered. It’s not really a problem for me; I’ve got my bookmarks. But I don’t love Flixster because I can’t do it my way; I love Flixster because my way, though it gets me the same end result, sucks.

A person who cares enough about a problem they have or something they’re doing that they’ve hacked together their own tedious solution is not a portend of your ultimate entrepreneurial doom — they’re your most likely first customer. Of course there’s a catch: your solution has to be better than theirs. Reinventing the wheel truthfully isn’t a waste of time, as long as your wheel is better.

If you can make even a simple task faster, easier, or more efficient, people doing it every day will see the value in your product much more readily than they’ll see the value in a product that adds something brand new to their life. People generally like subtractions from their workflow and demands on their time far more than they like additions to them.

We give a lot of airtime to startups that created a market for themselves. Take Facebook, for example. Before it existed, people didn’t even realize they desperately needed to see pictures of former friends’ cats. And it’s great work if you can’t get it.

But don’t shy away from ideas that make incremental changes. There’s a lot to be said — and a lot of money to be had — for a business that makes a positive tweak to a normal life. If you can take five minutes out of my schedule, or eliminate the boring parts of my daily routine, that counts for a lot to me. I mean, all that time I spend on Facebook now has to come from somewhere.

Originally published February 24, 2016 in Amanda’s Startup City column in Our London.