A lickle reading material
Not much to say really today, but I have come across some interesting essays about startups and the initial ’idea’ for your product. Paul Graham made his dosh by creating a platform for creating online stores (in Lisp, yes he must be crazy) and selling it to Yahoo! in 1998 for nearly $50 million worth of stock (nice!).
He then started writing a number of essays about various subjects on his website. In 2005 he decided to start his own startup funding firm Y Combinator which provides seed-stage funding for startups, specifically run by young people.
Anyway, onto the essays. The first is called How to Start a Startup a gives a nice insight into what things need to be done and how to get there (it also gives a nice overview of the various types of funding available if you are not sure on those). The second is called Ideas for Startups and discusses how to come up with the initial idea. One thing I like (and what we are doing with Juvely) is that he points out that a completely new idea is not needed, but just to do better than what other people are doing.
If you are remotely interested in how startups work or interested in starting your own I suggest you give the essays a read. Unfortunately essay is the correct term rather than article as they are rather long, but they do provide a lot of interesting information.