3 Things I Wish I Knew About Selecting A Startup Idea

I’ve now been building products for a couple of years — of which 1 year has been alongside Harry. While we’ve built a lot of cool tools like Product Friends (a tool to engage with your Product Hunt upvoters), QWERKY (an iOS 8 Keyboard featured by Apple), and Wyre (a Bitcoin wallet which won a national enterprise competition), we felt none of them were sustainable as a business, and in hindsight we shouldn’t have sunk so many hours into building them.

Our most financially successful products have been a few iOS games I hacked together (which have paid my way for the last couple of years), and now JournoRequests.com, the latest project Harry and I are working on together.

There are a few things I wish I knew a couple of years ago about choosing a startup project to work on, and that’s what I’d like to share in this blog post.

1. “Build Something You’re Passionate About” is Generally Bad Advice

This isn’t to say that building something you’re passionate about is unimportant. I simply think this advice can be misleading.

Having heard this advice over and over, I felt as though lots of my projects were unsuitable for me to spend serious time on, since they weren’t my passion. It’s why I stopped making mobile games even though I enjoyed making them and they were financial successes! I merely saw them as a way of putting food in my mouth whilst I figured my passion out. In hindsight, I was onto something good and probably should have continued!

Take JournoRequests.com as another example. It would be a lie to say that Harry and I have always been passionate about media requests. The reason we decided to build JournoRequests.com was because we thought it was a good way to hit our target of $1000/mo (and we were right!)

However, the more we’ve spoken to our users and the better we’ve made our service, the more passionate we’ve become. Ultimately we’re driven by making our users happy, and I’m excited by the prospect of spending the next few years making JournoRequests.com even better.

So rather than building something you’re passionate about, my advice would instead be: notice problems. Passion can grow as you work on solving these problems.

2. Focus (On Revenue)

As a founder, you have the ultimate freedom to build whatever you want… but with that freedom, it’s easy to lose your sense of direction. To combat this, it’s generally good to focus on one thing — whether it’s revenue, engagement, or daily active users.

The problem with focusing on anything that’s not revenue is you won’t know for certain whether you’ll be able to monetise later… and this small niggle can cause you to lose focus after several months of grinding — “should I really carry on when I can’t see exactly how we’re going to become profitable? After all, I do have other good ideas…”

By contrast, if you’re focused on revenue, it will quickly become clear whether your venture will ultimately succeed, and I’ve found this has a big impact on motivation.

Again, taking JournoRequests.com as an example, we’re 2 months in and making over $1k per month. If Harry and I don’t hit at least $5-10k/mo in the next year, the only reason will be because we didn’t execute. We don’t have to worry about how to monetise, or fear that nobody will want to buy us out. All we have to do is grab the ball and run… and that’s incredibly motivating.

So, if you want more clarity in your direction, make the decision to focus on revenue — and use this to influence which startup idea you pursue.

3. Lifestyle Businesses are Under-Represented in the Media

The media doesn’t want to write about some hacker making money through affiliate car insurance sales. Their readers are interested in the high-growth exciting startup that’s just raised a huge Series A round.

A lot of founders mistakenly perceive running a lifestyle business to be the bland alternative to the exciting high-growth startup. However, I’d argue that every founder should be creating a lifestyle business — as it’s just a business that gives you the lifestyle you want.

For you, a lifestyle business might be hiring employees, living in SF, managing a fast-growing team, and reporting to investors. Or it could be running a fast-growing startup with a distributed team (Buffer springs to mind). Or perhaps it’s complete freedom to work with a handful of amazing people from anywhere in the world, and still get down and dirty with coding.

Whatever a lifestyle business looks like to you, just remember that what you read in TechCrunch is biased towards fast-growth startups raising huge rounds. Successful companies that are less newsworthy do exist as well and can be even more rewarding (in fact, I know more founders who are both happier and wealthier from this — and they want to avoid the news, to avoid competition!).

What are the things you wish you’d known about picking a startup idea? Harry and I would love to hear your thoughts!

You can find us on Twitter @edmoyse and @hyharryhuang.