Day 29 - ?? Decoding Startup Success: Step 1 - The Idea! Join our #100DayStartup Journey with Valuable Insights and Project X Progress. #StartupGuide

Project X

Hey Guys,

So have been doing a little bit of thinking and I want to start adding a little bit of structure to these daily updates. Keeping it simple for now, I will start each post with a 'How to start a startup' guide followed by what we have been doing with Project X. The reason I wish to do this is -

1. I have been getting a fair few direct messages from folks (thank you for sending them across) asking me about different aspects of starting up and believe this could be a clean and organised way to answer them one step at a time.
2. I feel it could provide both value for those looking to start as the points I'm going to cover will not be affected by if you are following a no code or coded route.
3. Give Isha Chitnis 's wonderful update on #linkedinnews today that VC's have begun raising fresh capital, Im assuming that quite a few of you are going to have your minds racing with ideas quite soon.

Okay so let's start simple:

A. How to start your startup - Step 1: The Idea!

We all have a million a million ideas a day, so which one should we commit to?

The trick with step one is to defocus from the idea for a minute (I know its hard because you're excited) and think about the problem this idea is solving for.

When it comes to the problem there are a few key pillars you should focus on and ask yourself (think of this as a basic framework)

1. Is it really a problem worth solving for - What I mean by this is one should focus on making the distinction between an inconvenience and a genuine problem.
2. How urgent is the problem - Ask yourself whether the problem is debilitating enough that people are facing it regularly enough and would use a product (or better yet, pay for it) to solve this problem.
3. How many people face this problem - Ask yourself whether this issue is only being faced by a few folks or is the gap you have identified impact a large group of people (This is the basics of TAM or total addressable market) and will determine whether the company built on the back of trying to solve this problem is VC investable or not - Remember both options are okay, funding and success are not as correlated as one thinks, you should just know what you're getting into.
4. Who else is solving for this problem and how - Both extremes are bad signals, if too many people are solving for the problem you may be too late (unless you have a very unique way to address it), if too few are, your hypothesis may be a little off. Best at this point to ask a few other folks around you before making such a large commitment.

Okay that's its for today, I'd love if you all would just pick a few ideas from the top of your mind and run them through the above four points. Tomorrow, we will cover the idea itself and a couple of other fun stuff.

Please keep writing in to me in case you want me to cover something specific. I truly want this to be as valuable to folks as possible.

Now that we have that out of the way, what's been up at:

Project X

Success early on today. We got both upvoting and downvoting to work for users and were able to map who did what and for what item in our database. Super stoked!!

We have 2 primary pages made on the platform so before going any further we unfortunately now have to jump back into the hole of our Database as the internal pages require some richer information. Using Chat GPT to help us in both creating scripts to get this data and also in populating certain fields that feel a little naked and sparse.

Aside from this, worked a little bit on our Deck and basic collateral (all of which we will also cover in later editions)

Anyway, that's all for today folks. Look forward to seeing you tom.

#startup #indiehacking #20secondsofcourage #entreprenuership #litrendingtopics #problemstatement #howtostartabusiness #database #upvote