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I would also add:

- don't do anything that is based on user-generated content(email, social network, ...)

- it cannot be anything the customer can make himself on his own(e-commerce website with woocommerce, payments with stripe, data storage with s3 ...)

- a NEW idea must be monetizable from the get-go to avoid big players coming in and taking over in shorter time than it takes you to get up and running and building a customer base

- it must be a new idea that has no market yet or existing players have insufficient offering

- if you cannot draw the idea on one A4 paper, the idea is too complicated

- if the price of switching providers is too low, you will lose customers when new players come in and vice versa if you are entering existing market

- if you cannot put out MVP in three months, the idea is too complex

- if the MVP(or even production version) software product/service cannot run on one single VPS or bare-metal server, it is way too complex

- if implementing gdpr and alike are too complicated, the idea is too complicated

- you should avoid storage of any user-generated sensitive information(invoices, payment/transaction details, passwords, keys...), sooner or later it will bite you in the ass

I have recently talked about the world of startups being done for since many large companies offer services for free, even if it is not their core business, they prevent new players form entering the market and pump up their stock by adding value to their name. If you have something new, the big players can take over the entire market whenever they want. Doing something simple worked in 2000s but nowadays a single developer cannot do what was passible back then and you need a team, and as mentioned above, massive financing to be fast to market. So essentially the world belogns to large corporations these days :(




I don't believe in listing advice. One advice is useful when used in a specific context and bad in other contexts. When you list advice, you make it sounds like this is a path to follow.

Well for any thing that you tell people to not do, you will have people who succeed by doing it, and vice versa.

List of advice are just random sentences that don't mean anything


Fantastic irony here ;)


"So essentially the world belogns to large corporations these days :("

This is not a change at all. Large companies buy smaller ones. Large companies buy markets. This is nothing new, and it creates a lot of startup opportunity. Feature purchases, mergers, roll-ups and even acquihires can create wealth for founders and investors. Not every company has the timing and resources to be a Facebook or Google, but their are so many other big success stories. Keep on trying, don't give up, and don't let arbitrary rule lists stop you.


> many large companies offer services for free

Yes, indeed - free on its own isn't always impossible to compete with, you can often compete on features and quality.

But a combination of free and at scale is formidable, because of the bundling with other services, branding and marketing that scale allows.


>oing something simple worked in 2000s but nowadays a single developer cannot do what was passible back then and you need a team, and as mentioned above, massive financing to be fast to market.

I would like to add to this that our tooling has also seen massive improvements, which in turn greatly boosts the leverage of each individual contributor. For e.g. A single person can throw together a rudimentary web-browser in a week by leveraging existing components/tools/etc. Not to mention other benefits like easy access to experts via online forums, automated testing frameworks, etc, etc.


You are contradicting yourself. First you argue ideas should be simple, and then argue simple ideas do not work anymore.

> if you cannot put out MVP in three months, the idea is too complex

> Doing something simple worked in 2000s but nowadays a single developer cannot do what was passible back then and you need a team




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