onion startups

I've thought and talked a lot about startups—this shouldn't be that surprising giving my field.  In doing so, I've crafted a theory for making startups successful, though I have no practical experience in testing it.

We know that every startup has its core: the minimal viable product that can start getting the attention of investors or consumers.  But after this core, they need to grow, or add another layer of product that builds on the core.  And then they need another layer, and another...like an onion.

The idea is that startups need a road map for progress.  The minimum viable product is essential, but they also need to know each stage of production.  As in, what comes immediately after the MVP?  And what about after that?  Do we waste time floundering around looking at our motley of ideas?  Does each developer work on a different improvement until one takes?

If your idea doesn't have multiple stages beyond the MVP, it might not have long-term value.  On the other hand, the final product should be substantial, but not bloated.  Make sure each layer depends on the previous one so that it's not a branching of random ideas.  We are not a broccoli.

In the end the goal should be to solve a single problem well, and each layer hones expands and generalizes the solution.  I think that people in the startup world already know this—it's the people who are toying with the idea of doing a startup for the first time that need this perspective.

harnessing the power of educated stay-at-home moms

A few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with a colleague whose wife is extremely well-educated but stays at home with their two kids.  This is a quite common story, with many stay-at-home moms having bachelors from prestigious colleges all the way to moms with PhDs.  I'm sure it happens with blokes too, but it is much more common route for women.

We then talked about how hard it is to find part-time work.  In 2010, I was pre-grad school doing research part time (so my schedule was super flexible), and I couldn't find a second part-time gig that worked and was worth it.  It's just hard.

So we came up with a startup idea: basically a high-end Amazon Mechanical Turk for connecting people with part-time work.  It would have to be less sketchy than craigslist jobs, and on a per-task basis.  The idea is that employers could break tasks down into small chunks--1 hour, 15 minutes, etc., have a deadline, and a minimum skill level in certain areas.  Individuals could accomplish tasks, "level up," and make money.  In addition to skills, you could have an optional review process to accept a task or request a redo/edits before payment.  There could bonuses for doing N tasks for a company, or doing a certain number of variations on the same task, accomplishing a task early, or for doing an excellent job.

This would require re-imaging how tasks are assigned and reviewed in the work environment, but I'd like to hope that it wouldn't be too hard.  What would be good candidates for this?  There'd be many boring tasks, certainly.  Data entry, ugh.  But writing summaries could be fun, as could be tagging photos and participating in user studies. If I were a user of this system, I could write web-scraping scripts for folks, do web development, or accomplish other small programming tasks.

There could be a competition component for some things, like the various logo/website design sites out there.  For example, a company could judge from the first three submissions and accept one or none.

Regardless of the details, there should be a web service like this, that pays more and has harder, more skilled-based tasks than AMT.  This wouldn't help just SAHMs, but it would be good for the unemployed or partially-employed, in general.  As for the companies?  I don't think they'd mind getting more work done.

how (and when) to start a startup?

Over the past year or so, I've had about five startup ideas, with lots of spinoff and sub-ideas. I dutifully log them, mentally putting them in an "ideas for later" bin.  I want to finish my graduate program, since several of the ideas are related to my research, and my advisor has said that founding a startup wouldn't be totally incompatible with graduate school.  I'm lucky that I have that kind of flexibility.  At the same time, though, that seems like a tricky line to walk, and my program is destined to take about another four years.

So it becomes a game of risk evaluation.  What are the best ways to go about founding startups?  What are the greatest risks and most common mistakes?  How do you find good, dedicated, and trustworthy teammates?  How do you evaluate your ideas?  (I love you Mom, but you think that almost everything I come up with is a good idea.)  How likely is it for a given idea to succeed?  How do you decide when the time is right?  How far do you jump in?