My startup journey over the last few weeks

Lot’s of CustDev but not many pain points

I’m currently excited about several potential ventures and have done some CustDev for most of them. They are in no particular order:

AngelList for the startup acquisitions: I really love AngelList and think it’s amazing how they have evolved. I'm wondering about the startup to, let’s call it, ‘acquiring company’ marketplace. It is certainly based a lot on existing personal relationships and more secretive than the market for startups looking for funding. I’d be intrigued to find out if the AngelList concept would also work for connecting startups with big companies to find acquisition partners. I've spoken with 2 investors so far about this one and neither one found it particularly painful. A friend mentioned exitround.com. I don’t really like their concept of offering it to startups that are about to go bust but maybe their very own CustDev let them on this path. A different twist to the same idea is for this platform to focus more on connecting corporations with startups. On one hand, startups can use the distribution network of bigger companies; on the other hand, established firms value the innovation and the talent pool of startups. It’s a win win situation. @Reson8e is currently looking into this.

Sharing/renting economy: I really love the airbnb concept and think this can be applied to other industries as well. I quickly found out that there are already several websites doing it for boats. Over the last few weeks I've validated the rent by owner concept for videography and photography equipment. Whereas renters are intrigued by this concept most owners are not interested at all in renting out their equipment. I spoke with 20+ photographers and received some very direct feedback! Owners are just too worried handing our their own equipment even if I would offer insurance. I've done some further research into several other markets such as construction and heavy equipment, farming vehicles and HGVs but it was even worse. I built a simple unbounce based prototype for the construction vehicle and photo equipment one and drove some traffic to it using LinkedIn groups and messaging equipment sellers on Gumtree. The bounce created was close to 100% and the conversion rate close to 0%. I’m convinced by now that the rent by the owner concept won’t work in any of these areas. I sometimes wonder how airbnb got all these landlords to rent out their places. I know that the founders initially spent a tremendous amount of time on talking to landlords and understanding their situation but I'm not exactly sure how they did it. The key take away here is that using unbounce is a great way to build a simple page to test user activation. It cannot replacing talking to end users though. Gumtree and Linkedin groups are a good place to find and contact potential users (i.e. owners) for free.

Back office as a service: This one probably excites me most these days. The idea is to provide a back office as a service to startups or at least a hosted & outsourced finance department. What I tried with MyCater was actually going in a similar direction. The idea is to outsource non-core services to an expert. With MyCater it was outsourcing the process of placing a lunch order which includes researching a restaurant and making sure that the delivery is taken care of. With a back office service it would be a lot more than food. I’m currently doing some CustDev on this one.

Accounting and finance service exchange: The idea is to build a marketplace where companies can post their requirements and find chartered accountants, bookkeepers, and CFOs. I like this concept because it’s a marketplace. Marketplaces are intriguing but at the same time extremely difficult. Somebody once said that a double sided market is like running 2 startups in parallel and at the same rate of growth! The good thing about the last 2 is that problem validation is identical. Both are a potential solution to very similar problems. So far I haven’t found a lot of pain points when it comes to finding and hiring accountants. A lot of people use Xero and are very happy with it. People are not very price-sensitive as accounting is generally perceived as something you don’t want to skimp on.

You may ask yourself why this list is so random. There is no obvious golden thread. This is because I try to objectively find a good niche and not do something because it’s my hobby or a particular area of interest. A lot of people recommend to focus on an area that you are interested it. I don’t fully agree with that as there is a danger that you are trying to desperately start something which is not viable. Personally any area, even taxes, can excite me if I feel I'm solving a true problem that customers have.