The contemporary idea in online business is that you need to build an audience, get to know their needs, and then build something they want.

It's focused a lot on who you serve. (Who are these people? Do they have money? Where do they hang out?)

But is this the best way? 👉

More from Startups

🔥 A lesson in pricing

THREAD ...

Peter Thiel spends 6 months writing down everything he knows about business. His book sells for $10.

Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger spend 6 months writing down everything they know about design. Their “book” sells for $79.

Believe it or not, both prices make perfect sense.

Thiel is selling to the masses and the masses are sensitive to price changes (price elastic).

If he raises the price to $30 they wouldn’t think twice before substituting his book for one of the many cheaper alternatives on Amazon.

Adam and Steve are selling to hardcore fans and hardcore fans are insensitive to price changes (price inelastic).

They've all been following the Twitter tips, watching the screencasts, reading the Medium posts.

In their minds, there are no substitute resources available.

When demand for your good is inelastic, you raise your price.

In the case of Adam and Steve, all the way up to $79.

As the diagram shows, a 8x price increase ($10 to $79) results in just a 2x drop in books sold (20k to 10k) and 4x more revenue (area of the rectangles).

Justin Jackson
@mijustin

If folks aren’t already buying what you’re thinking of selling, don’t start that business!

There should be be evidence that folks are already spending money in the space you’re thinking of entering.

Before AirBnB, folks paid money to stay at hotels, B&Bs, cottages, vacation homes, and hostels.

Annually, people spend $570 BILLION on travel accommodation.

Entrepreneurs need to follow the money:

“Where is it already being spent, and how can I get a piece of it?”

Don’t look for “problems that need solving.”

Look for categories where people/businesses are already spending money.

From an entrepreneur’s POV, if folks are willing to spend money on it, it’s a problem worth solving.

Apple has consistently followed this approach.

They didn’t make the first:

- PC
- Laptop
- MP3 player
- Smart phone

They saw the existing demand, and built on it.

GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg

10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone

Dayton
@daytonmills

What I learned from raising my first seed round.

This isn’t a how-to guide, that may come later. This is just a story and observations from my own experience.

See, I didn’t know what I was doing at all...

We had a built a prototype, people seemed to like it. Investors seemed to like it. Not because I showed it to them, I wouldn’t know how to do that.

But I got a lot of inbound asking about the product and found myself stumbling into meetings with people with no real goal.

We decided it was time to raise and I had to figure out how to do that.

I’m not from SF. I’m from small town Missouri. I didn’t have connections.

But I did spend a lot of time making internet friends. It’s what I’ve done my whole life. In particular friends in @genzmafia

It was here I had some help from @nhuebecker on the first pitch deck I ever made. It went a long way btw - Thanks nick!

And met a lot of connected people thanks to @ItzSuds. He also got me on clubhouse.

In there I started talking to people and met @YousifAstar

Yousif taught me the game. I cannot stress this enough he taught me everything. Pitching, materials, intros, down to the verbiage of my emails.

He taught me how to be intentional with raising instead of stumbling into meetings.

I blocked off two weeks and got started.

Trista Kempa
@tristajaye

For those of you asking me if I bought my wework equity—I did not. But, not because I didn’t choose to buy it. Despite joining the company very early on, I was not offered options. Here’s a thread about what happened and my feelings about it now. /1

I joined wework in 2011 as the ~17th employee when we had 4 buildings. I was 23, naive, and didn’t know what equity or options were—I certainly didn’t know how much it could impact my financial future. When I, and the first hundred or so joined the team, /2

equity options weren’t a part of the deal and I thought nothing of it. As the company grew and we brought in more funding, the executive team decided it was time to allocate equity to its employees. It was mid-2013, about 4 years after the company started. /3

We had ~120 employees and I had been there for ~2 years. I don’t know much about what went on behind the scenes to determine who would get equity and how much, or quite frankly, why they did it at all. /4

In the process, they did a couple of things: First, the way in which they chose to allocate equity, to whom, how much, etc. was… interesting. I’ll get into that more soon. Second, for the people who were given equity options, wework made the choice *not* to backdate. /5

Nobel prize winning scientist Luc Montagnier asserts that Sars-Cov-2 is man-made and originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Montagnier did extensive work with the Pasteur Institute in France which was partnered with the Wuhan P4.

Merieux Foundation & the Chinese government have worked together since 1965, and partnered to study emerging pathogens in Africa in 2015.

Their research included "PATHOGENS CARRIED BY BATS" that provoke respiratory diseases.

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https://t.co/gVwpT0ssqI