A Start-Up Bubble?

If you are a budding entrepreneur or businessman, You will really feel how the word “Start Up” is being casually thrown around like Christmas candy. Here’s a little peak into the Dark Side of the “entrepreneurial wave”.

The culture that is coming up around us somehow, is the one where people don’t think before they try and build start-ups. The way people feel they should solve real world problems is by just making an app about something that is pretty evident and common, and doesn’t serve a need gap in society. Need Gap is something you need to focus on as an entrepreneur. If there is no deep enough need gap (if people don’t seem that desperate for what your idea has to offer) You will not make it. No matter how much you fake it.

It isn’t what Im saying, I’m just a novice too. And Im just sharing what I learned. There was a great book by Peter Thiel called Zero to One. In the book he explains how people get caught up in a start-up wave and build something that doesn’t make sense, or is too common to have any individual market value of its own. In short, when you build something , make sure that its unique and valuable enough for people to be willing to pay for it.

So in order to be a really good entrepreneur, you must make sure what you are pushing out is valuable. If you are doing just what others are doing, you might as well not do it, because in a practical world there is no way the existing corporations are going to share their profits with you. The only thing left to do in the situation would be to drop your prices to such an extent, that the over-all competition dies, and so does your company.

Take Juicero for example. This Start-up was hyped up from the day its owner created it, marketing ting the sleek machine designed with the principles of used by Steve Jobs while designing the apple. It puts tonnes of pressure on packets of chopped vegetables to get juice out of it. The loophole in this brilliant plan being, The costly juice press can be replaced by two human hands. You can squeeze the juice out of these juice bags with your bare hands, rendering the expensive juice press machine pointless. The company is now closing down and it is one of the most mocked Start-Ups in the Silicon Valley today.

It doesn’t mean that the owner of the company has no future as an entrepreneur, it just means that a lot of thought needs to go into what you want to achieve before you actually push out to the consumer.

Now I’m not saying that all upcoming start-ups are pointless, its just that most teens and young adults who are swept away by the start up world glamour, even me for a short amount of time, until I saw something dreadful happen to a friend of mine who is ten times smarter and has a better business sense than I do, but still has 0 clue of how his start up crashed and burned. You don’t just want something or the other to show for yourself, in the form of a start-up , in order to get acceptance from the community. If fail to put much thought into it, you might end up worse than when you started out. This is how bubbles are created. Over-hyping new technology and predicting that some app or some new form of techno gizmos is the future has not really worked for the majority of cases. Which gives rise to the very statistic that says,

99% of Businesses fail within a span of 2 years.

I have thought of a several Ideas for a start up. But I have also understood that it takes a lot of thought and research that goes into actually getting to a stage where you can say, “Now this is something that will give value to people”.

We can all be entrepreneurs. All it takes is will-power and sheer hard work. Because beyond all the glamour and the million-dollar start up posts on Instagram, it takes sweat and hard work over a period of months and sometimes even years, to get somewhere.