I’m saying that those 3 things are the most likely bad things to happen. Other than that...
A competitor comes a long and outdoes me. Maybe by getting more reliable information by doing research instead of just asking students.
The government passes laws that sway you to just go to your state university, which would decrease the demand for a service that provides information about schools all over the country.
One of the big names sees what I’m doing and copies me.
Something happens that hurts internet advertising (that’s how I plan to make money).
I can’t raise my seed round because I can’t get over the chicken-egg hump of finding an investor.
Students don’t do a good job answering questions (they’ve done a good job for my 3 pilot schools, but maybe those were outliers, and the 297 other schools will have worse quality).
I violate some law unknowingly, get sued, and have to declare bankruptcy.
My site gets hacked because I’m a newb at web development, and I have some security flaw and this leads to my database of answers getting deleted (doubtful because I’m using Disqus to have people answer questions, and Rails to build the site).
Those are obviously only a fraction of the things that could possibly go wrong. However, I’ve disregarded most of them as so unlikely that they aren’t worth thinking about. Are there any in particular that you think I should be paying more attention to (other than the 3 I listed in my first comment)?
Without commenting on the larger article (I feel like a decent fraction of the negative comments to this post are just regurgitating cached thoughts about start-ups), the thing that worries me about your above comment is that a lot of the things you listed are pretty implausible. This doesn’t seem like the sort of list that would be generated if I was trying to generate the most plausible set of reasons something would fail. Instead, I would have listed:
lack of buy-in to the website (just because the people you asked say they would be interested doesn’t mean that people will actually use your website; the overall user experience is pretty crucial to determining that)
failure to convert a user base into revenue flow
lack of perceived legitimacy of the reviews (e.g. due to the small number of responses per question), possibly caused by push-back from more established places like the U.S. News & World Report rankings
I wasn’t sure what he meant by premortem. I listed before the 3 plausible things that could go wrong, and he said that that wasn’t a premortem, so I figured he was thinking more along the lines of “think of anything and everything that can go wrong”.
To your points...
lack of buy-in to the website (just because the people you asked say they would be interested doesn’t mean that people will actually use your website; the overall user experience is pretty crucial to determining that)
I’m highly confident that this will be something people want. I have a strong intuitive belief in this, and I actually have talked to lots (hundreds?) of people who say that this is something they do/would want. Still though, I should have mentioned this as a risk.
failure to convert a user base into revenue flow
I don’t see this as a problem. If I my website becomes the go-to place for college applicants (or at least one of the go-to places), it’ll get a lot of traffic, and the traffic will allow advertisers to target a particular audience (college applicants). From what I understand, on the web, traffic pays.
lack of perceived legitimacy of the reviews (e.g. due to the small number of responses per question), possibly caused by push-back from more established places like the U.S. News & World Report rankings
That’s definitely a worry, and is one of the main things I want to address. Once I get rolling and get resources, I want to invest heavily into getting the most reliable information as possible. Still though, all the other student review websites have the same issue of perceived legitimacy, and they’ve been around getting users for years.
people who say that this is something they do/would want
Why aren’t these people using the sites that already exist? You could just say “that’s because the questions/answers aren’t good enough,” but my guess is most of these people who say they would want it never got as far as looking at these other sites in order to see their quality of questions and answers.
They do, but they aren’t satisfied. I’ve had a lot of people say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, implying that they want something beyond what they already had. A lot of these people are people that I know looked through the questions (because a lot of them answered them, and because a lot of them were in the context of conversations where we either looked at the site, or I explained and gave examples of the questions).
I don’t think this addresses jkaufman’s comment. He asked:
Why aren’t these people using the sites that already exist?
These sites already existed when your friends were applying to college. So if they say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, the key question to answer is why didn’t they use any of the competing sites, which did exist when they were applying to college? Your response that “these people looked through your own website’s questions” does not address this question.
(As an aside, I would humbly suggest that you read through jkaufman’s—and a few other people’s—advice somewhat more carefully, as your responses indicate that you’ve misunderstood some of the key points, see also my earlier explanation of a premortem, which had already been explained to you once earlier in the thread.)
Apparently you suffer from poor reading comprehension (I explained the term) and are unable to google (it’s the top two hits). Given the way you react and the critique others give, I estimate that you have less than 1% chance of success. Much less. I wouldn’t take a bet on it, though, since the uncertainty is too high. After all, Facebook started as “Hot or not”. But you do not come across as Mark Zuckerberg.
I suspect that your time and money would likely be better spent attending one of the CFAR workshops.
You have to spend more on avertising to get a student to visit your website than that student makes for you in on-site adverts.
It turns out that the existing competition is better because having a large number of reviews in a dozen or so categories turns out to be better than having a small number of answers for a larger number of questions.
I think you’ve misunderstood what a premortem is. It is “assuming your startup fails, what is the most likely reason”? That is the context of Khoth’s comment.
I’m saying that those 3 things are the most likely bad things to happen. Other than that...
A competitor comes a long and outdoes me. Maybe by getting more reliable information by doing research instead of just asking students.
The government passes laws that sway you to just go to your state university, which would decrease the demand for a service that provides information about schools all over the country.
One of the big names sees what I’m doing and copies me.
Something happens that hurts internet advertising (that’s how I plan to make money).
I can’t raise my seed round because I can’t get over the chicken-egg hump of finding an investor.
Students don’t do a good job answering questions (they’ve done a good job for my 3 pilot schools, but maybe those were outliers, and the 297 other schools will have worse quality).
I violate some law unknowingly, get sued, and have to declare bankruptcy.
My site gets hacked because I’m a newb at web development, and I have some security flaw and this leads to my database of answers getting deleted (doubtful because I’m using Disqus to have people answer questions, and Rails to build the site).
Those are obviously only a fraction of the things that could possibly go wrong. However, I’ve disregarded most of them as so unlikely that they aren’t worth thinking about. Are there any in particular that you think I should be paying more attention to (other than the 3 I listed in my first comment)?
Without commenting on the larger article (I feel like a decent fraction of the negative comments to this post are just regurgitating cached thoughts about start-ups), the thing that worries me about your above comment is that a lot of the things you listed are pretty implausible. This doesn’t seem like the sort of list that would be generated if I was trying to generate the most plausible set of reasons something would fail. Instead, I would have listed:
lack of buy-in to the website (just because the people you asked say they would be interested doesn’t mean that people will actually use your website; the overall user experience is pretty crucial to determining that)
failure to convert a user base into revenue flow
lack of perceived legitimacy of the reviews (e.g. due to the small number of responses per question), possibly caused by push-back from more established places like the U.S. News & World Report rankings
I wasn’t sure what he meant by premortem. I listed before the 3 plausible things that could go wrong, and he said that that wasn’t a premortem, so I figured he was thinking more along the lines of “think of anything and everything that can go wrong”.
To your points...
I’m highly confident that this will be something people want. I have a strong intuitive belief in this, and I actually have talked to lots (hundreds?) of people who say that this is something they do/would want. Still though, I should have mentioned this as a risk.
I don’t see this as a problem. If I my website becomes the go-to place for college applicants (or at least one of the go-to places), it’ll get a lot of traffic, and the traffic will allow advertisers to target a particular audience (college applicants). From what I understand, on the web, traffic pays.
That’s definitely a worry, and is one of the main things I want to address. Once I get rolling and get resources, I want to invest heavily into getting the most reliable information as possible. Still though, all the other student review websites have the same issue of perceived legitimacy, and they’ve been around getting users for years.
Why aren’t these people using the sites that already exist? You could just say “that’s because the questions/answers aren’t good enough,” but my guess is most of these people who say they would want it never got as far as looking at these other sites in order to see their quality of questions and answers.
They do, but they aren’t satisfied. I’ve had a lot of people say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, implying that they want something beyond what they already had. A lot of these people are people that I know looked through the questions (because a lot of them answered them, and because a lot of them were in the context of conversations where we either looked at the site, or I explained and gave examples of the questions).
I don’t think this addresses jkaufman’s comment. He asked:
These sites already existed when your friends were applying to college. So if they say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, the key question to answer is why didn’t they use any of the competing sites, which did exist when they were applying to college? Your response that “these people looked through your own website’s questions” does not address this question.
(As an aside, I would humbly suggest that you read through jkaufman’s—and a few other people’s—advice somewhat more carefully, as your responses indicate that you’ve misunderstood some of the key points, see also my earlier explanation of a premortem, which had already been explained to you once earlier in the thread.)
Apparently you suffer from poor reading comprehension (I explained the term) and are unable to google (it’s the top two hits). Given the way you react and the critique others give, I estimate that you have less than 1% chance of success. Much less. I wouldn’t take a bet on it, though, since the uncertainty is too high. After all, Facebook started as “Hot or not”. But you do not come across as Mark Zuckerberg.
I suspect that your time and money would likely be better spent attending one of the CFAR workshops.
I’d want to add at least:
You have to spend more on avertising to get a student to visit your website than that student makes for you in on-site adverts.
It turns out that the existing competition is better because having a large number of reviews in a dozen or so categories turns out to be better than having a small number of answers for a larger number of questions.
Well both of those things are yet to be seen. Why do you believe each of those things are true?
I think you’ve misunderstood what a premortem is. It is “assuming your startup fails, what is the most likely reason”? That is the context of Khoth’s comment.
Oh ok, thanks for clarifying. That was stupid of me.