Ask YC: "I would pay for that"

2 points

18 years ago

I'm looking for ideas for a new startup. Venture Capital is pretty hard to get here in Europe, so I'm not counting on any serious backing. It looks like bootstrapping is the way to go. This means that the choices are limited to either a subscription-based service or pay-for-download software: I can't really afford to work on this otherwise.

So I've been thinking about what kind of product to build. However, I realized that most people I know don't really pay for software. People just use free software and when the free software is no good... then well, bittorrent is an easy alternative.

And all of the YC startups on wikipedia (Biographicon, Anywhere.FM, Appjet, Parakey, Virtualmin, Weebly, Xobni, Justin.tv, YouOS, Loopt, reddit, Scribd) don't charge for their service. Everything's free. I don't want to compete with free.

37signals is profitable with their subscription-based software... but they're the exception that proves the rule. Their marketing and branding puts them in a unique position.

DHH advocated (during some YC event) that a good audience is a subset of the fortune 5.000.000. Small businesses, unlike regular consumers, are willing to spend money on software. But it looks like there's a _lot_ of software for small companies already, be it for accounting or CRM... competition is going to be really tough. My brainstorming session didn't amount to much here.

So what should I do?

And as a question to you all: have you ever built a product that people liked, but were not willing to pay a dime for?

7 comments