Developers’ first startup ideas are terrible
This is a little rant, out of frustration for developers wasting years of their life while we’re going through the highest opportunity period in a decade.
In my process of knowledge gathering to improve product ideas and insights, I always stumble upon the following developer startup ideas. And I always bluntly call them out and tell them to do better. So here I am going public about it.
When a developer plans to build a product, the majority of them will fall on one of these ideas initially - especially if they do a stunt at trying to build several products before they quit:
To do app
Journaling app
Travel app
Note taking app
Calendar app
These are the top 5 ideas they get, because that’s the environment of tools they’re working with. Then they convince themselves it’s a good idea and waste a few months, or years, building them. And eventually get zero users and go back to working for other people’s ideas. So it’s apps around list management.
I believe there’s a good segment of these people who are also taking a step further after the app is ready and start looking for “a marketing cofounder”. Not a product person, not a product manager, not a product designer - but someone to help get them out of the hole they dug themselves into by starting with the wrong idea. It’s hilarious that they look for “a marketing” person, as it shows their lack of understanding of a product lifecycle and it explains in the first place how they stumbled upon one of the terrible ideas I mentioned. And how terrible their idea of going out of the hole equally is.
Another thing this shows is how little time developers spend on gathering product knowledge, ideating and researching problems to solve. And it shows that having the skills to build, doesn’t matter. People will just build the wrong thing.
For product success, ideas are important, and not execution. A terrible idea with a good execution won’t work. A terrible execution with a great idea will keep you up at night until you fix the execution by high customer demand. And especially in the age of AI where execution is automated, technical skills are of less importance. And this trend is accelerating.
So I guess moving forward I’ll just share a link to this post when I stumble upon developers engaged in a journey of lost opportunity cost. How to come up with amazing ideas is a full time job in itself, so I won’t go into detail here. But at least you can validate if your idea is any good by making sure it’s AI First, improves as AI improves, and it’s in a multi billion dollar market.