Some of the best advice I have ever read and thought about with regards to Startup Ideas is look for a big incumbant company that has gotten lazy… and create a similar product that addresses the SAME problem but do it BETTER.

Some industries are dominated by slow to react lazy giants, and its your job to be the david to the goliath in this case. start thinking about what industries have a stogy old competitor or have and “old boys club” mentality.

Gemvara is doing it in the engagement ring / custom jewelry industry.

Someone needs to make a better Loopnet.

The Out of Home Advertising Industry is ripe for the picking.

Think about some industries that just are not embracing the internet and software, as software is pretty much eating all the world and companies and jobs.

Find a company in a big market and make a much Simpler product. Apple has seen phenominal success by Keeping it Simple Stupid. Simple product lines with only a few choices. Simple Operating System. Simple designs that many people Love, the minimalist industrial look is IN and will be here for the long term people!

Go forth and challenge the Lazy Giants!

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Everywhere I turn we are getting screwed harder and faster.

Gen Y is a struggle. We are incredibelly lucky to have grown up with the internet, but at the same time, a culmination of factors is setting us up for either a major struggle or failure.

Back in a time in America that many consider the Golden Age from late 1940′s to the late 70s early 80s, Young adults were not “forced” to attend college. Many good quality jobs did not require it like they do now. Young students would graduate High School, go out and find a good job that paid them a great wage with great benefits, many times the family would be well off with just one person in the household working.

Fast forward to today, and the system is set up to totally screw young adults. Now many jobs that would be considered below average back in the golden age, take a full 4 year degree, increasingly with NO benefits, and the employed are counting their blessings to have a job, barely making enough to get by, let alone pay back their loans.

If you want to add up the enormous financial black hole that the average Gen Y person is dealing with here it is:

5 years lost wages (average bachelor degree takes 5 years to complete) at $40,000 per year = $200,000

5 Years of Bubble Tuition to get a College Degree (requirements for even crappy jobs) at $20,000 year = $100,000

Bascially our generation is starting out $300,000 in the HOLE!!! compared to the generation from the Golden Age.

This ridiculous financial strain is hitting the economy and as consumers are so strapped for cash, paying of student loan debt and trying to get by in a world where wages have FALLEN, you see the terrible situation that our parents and their generation has saddled us with.

Shame on the Baby Boomers and their parents generation. Shame on Gen X, shame on the government for having policies in place that have lead us to this breaking point.

And we’re faring much better than some other european nations, thats the really sad point.

To all the people out there that can honestly look themselves in the mirror and spout out about how we are better off than we were in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s, are you kidding me? How pathetic you all are, the sooner we ALL realize our decisions as a nation have been horribly wrong, and the way we are slowly killing the middle class, the sooner we might possibly be able to correct the wrongs.

The real question that needs research and debate is: How did we get here? How did we allow our nation to destroy most of the prosperity we had? Thats an essay for another day…

The post Talkin Bout my Generation – How Gen Y is Taking it in the Rear appeared first on adamVrobinson.

Keep it Simple Stupid, such an interesting saying, and in the tech world, such an oxymoron…

The Instagram founders had a more full featured product called Burbn, a somewhat foursquare clone, and as Mr. Systrom analyzed usage patterns with his little app, he realized by far the most popular feature was the photo sharing capability.

BINGO, the 2 founders took a step back at that point and decided to scrap EVERYTHING but the Photo aspect and create a new app that would be Dead Simple, with only a few carefully selected options.

As I observe good products and design, they seem to all strip away the clutter, and only have a few functions. Instagram hit the nail on the head, and the founders were smart enough to kill off any uneeded items.

Congrats Instagram, your product and story is a great inspiration in Keeping it Stupidly Simple.

Adam

The post Startups: KISS of Death, the Instagram Story appeared first on adamVrobinson.

The actual design and construction of the sales page is of the utmost importance for conversions, it is a place where you need to spend a great deal of time and resources once you are at the point where you have validated your startup idea.

Great design and a strong push towards a desired action = better sales.

I know I’ll be incorporating a lot of AppSumo’s clever tactics for all my sales pages.

Adam

The post Sales Pages are Cool appeared first on adamVrobinson.

If you want to maximise your chances of running a successful startup, where success is defined as achieving at least the “survival” level outlined in this article, and ideally the “comfort” level, it makes a lot more sense to invest your time in many ideas at the same time, test all of them (in parallel or one after the other) and then pursue the one or ones that are most promising.

I think we all should strive to be an ARMY OF ONE Entrepreneur and test multiple ideas in parrallel. Being a Solopreneur and being able to handle most every aspect of building a business yourself will greatly benefit you now and in the future.

Lets face it, the end goal is to get a business off the ground to cover your living expenses and save up enough to be financially independent. Testing several of your best ideas and seeing which ones have the most promise is better than trying pick just one that will make or break you.

The post Test Multiple Startup Ideas in Parallel! appeared first on adamVrobinson.

Now if you want the startup to have a chance at being successful I recommend reading the lean Startup by Eric Reis. This book really pinpoints the essential steps you should take to test your startup idea.

Basically the Lean Startup can be “cliff-noted” as: take a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) = your idea as a bare bones product / site / app, then putting it in front of as many customers as you can, and then actually meeting face to face with them, document the feedback, make them pay for the product / service from day one, then iterate based on that feedback, to achieve product market fit. then scale. done. IPO, Billionaire..

The post Lots of Startup Ideas? First Learn to Code appeared first on adamVrobinson.

There are some brilliant observers out there that have questioned who really benefits with a unilateral free trade policy like the U.S. has had for several decades now.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner for 30+ years with Berkshire Hathaway brings up perhaps the best point of discussion regarding Free Trade that the typical short sighted “economist” might easily discard:

Everybody in economics understands that comparative advantage is a big deal, when one considers first-order advantages in trade from the Ricardo effect. But suppose you’ve got a very talented ethnic group, like the Chinese, and they’re very poor and backward, and you’re an advanced nation, and you create free trade with China, and it goes on for a long time.

Now let’s follow and second- and third-order consequences: You are more prosperous than you would have been if you hadn’t traded with China in terms of average well-being in the U.S., right? Ricardo proved it. But which nation is going to be growing faster in economic terms? It’s obviously China. They’re
absorbing all the modern technology of the world through this great facilitator in free trade and, like the Asian Tigers have proved, they will get ahead fast. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan. Look at early Japan. So, you start in a place where
you’ve got a weak nation of backward peasants, a billion and a quarter of them, and in the end they’re going to be a much bigger, stronger nation than you are, maybe even having more and better atomic bombs. Well, Ricardo did not prove
that that’s a wonderful outcome for the former leading nation. He didn’t try to determine second-order and higher-order effects.

If you try and talk like this to an economics professor, and I’ve done this three times, they shrink in horror and offense because they don’t like this kind of talk. It really gums up this nice discipline of theirs, which is so much simpler when you
ignore second- and third-order consequences.

Does America really benefit in the long run when we bring all the technology to a place such as Japan after World War II, or China in the last 2 decades?

Almost unanimously economists agree that a strong flourishing middle class is the secret to a stable, thriving nation. Yet it can easily be seen that Free Trade has been a major cause in a lot of jobs leaving America, thus more people unemployed, and thus wages stagnating and reaching a situation like America is dealing with now, Killing the Middle Class?

Are we really better off with a nation with 1.3 Billion People having far superior factory output and soon military strength as Munger eludes to above? Is free trade accelerating the decline of America’s Quality of life?

The old adage of everyone else in a society benefits by lower prices for goods, well tell that to the guy that lost his job due to overseas competition, with no job, how do they get these great savings?

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