Trevor Burnham

Just got back from Tech­Stars for a Day, a meetup of several Tech­Stars appli­cants, alums and mentors. The latter two groups gave talks to us aspiring tech entre­pre­neurs, of which the key recur­ring theme was: Your idea sucks. Or: No one actually does the idea they applied with. Or: Your team is what matters.

Now, this asser­tion is absurd on its face, so it took me a while to grok what these veteran founders and investors were talking about. If the idea doesn’t matter, why does the appli­ca­tion even ask for it? And even among the alums present, some (such as SendGrid) had suc­ceeded with essen­tially the same concept they’d applied with. Sure, obvi­ously the ability to execute—to write good (or, prefer­ably, amazing) software in a limited timeframe—is more impor­tant than the idea. As one speaker put it, “An A team with a B idea is way more likely to succeed than a B team with an A idea.” But what’s this about ideas sucking?

That glib pro­nounce­ment finally made sense as the founder alums spoke about their expe­ri­ences. As it turns out, most (like SocialTh­ing) applied with an idea in a certain space (they’d wanted to create a com­peti­tor to MySpace), realized during the summer that there was a better oppor­tu­nity in the same space (a utility that lets you sync infor­ma­tion across multiple social networks), and built that instead. Aha! Now I got it: “Your idea sucks” is just a pithy way of express­ing the following:

1. No matter how good your idea may be, do not regard it as sacred.
2. You need to spend time lis­ten­ing to (poten­tial) cus­tomers and mod­i­fy­ing your idea accordingly.
3. Having a good idea does matter, but only insofar as it a) shows that you are capable of gen­er­at­ing good ideas, and b) shows that you’re inter­ested in a market with potential.

As it happens, I read Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany on the flight over, on Dug Song’s rec­om­men­da­tion. Blank’s theme is similar to the above, saying that startups should center their efforts on “customer devel­op­ment” rather than “product devel­op­ment,” lest they develop a first-​​rate solution to a problem no one has. To cite one of his examples: The Segway had a great engi­neer­ing team, but they fell in love with their idea rather than getting feedback from the folks they were planning to sell the thing to.

So, how does this relate to The­o­ryville, the idea I’ve been fleshing out with my team­mates since November? Based on early feedback from poten­tial cus­tomers, I believe that our strategy should be to reseg­ment the sta­tis­ti­cal software market into “col­lab­o­ra­tive” and “non-​​collaborative” software by intro­duc­ing the first collaboration-​​oriented stats app for pro­fes­sional researchers and students. That’s the space we want to go into. But beyond that, our ears are open. We’ve designed a non-​​linear graph­i­cal workflow inter­face that we all think is quite clever, but we won’t really know if it solves a problem until we start showing it to people. We think our initial target market will be social sci­en­tists, but we’re also con­sid­er­ing class­rooms, and some of the folks we talked to at TS4AD sug­gested that finan­cial analysts and MBA students would love our easy-​​to-​​use inter­face. We need to test those assump­tions, and we can’t wait until the end of the summer to do so. We have to do so con­stantly.

I have to admit that Paul Graham com­pressed all of the above down to just seven words in What Startups Are Really Like, #10: Fast iter­a­tion is the key to success.

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