How to get business ideas – remove steps

http://ninjasandrobots.com/how-to-get-business-ideas-remove-steps/

by nate • 12 years ago

147 67 12 years ago

eduardordm3• 12 years ago

I would also like to add that you need make sure you really understand the whole context when improving something.

As someone who actually does the dishes, I cringed when I saw the OXO measuring cup, those small corners are hard to clean if flour gets stuck in there. Maybe the execution could use some work. If you consider washing part of the job, that measuring cup is worse than a common measuring cup.

functional_test• 12 years ago

Have you used an OXO measuring cup? They really are a lot easier to use when baking and cooking, and my sponges never have a problem getting in those corners.

eduardordm3• 12 years ago

Yes, I have one. They are really easier to use. I usually have problems cleaning that top corner, my hands are a bit large so I have trouble cleaning that part. Also, I find pouring a bit more tricky when using the cup. I just asked about it to my wife (she bought it) and she said pretty much the same thing.

dunham3• 12 years ago

My main issues with it: the handle broke off, it can be tricky to read the top-down markings when dealing with dairy (fats tend to stick to plastic), and it's hard to mix things in it, due to the shape of chamber. (E.g. an egg yolk or two into the cream I just measured.)

On the other hand, my "pyrex" measuring cup lost all of its markings to the dishwasher, which also makes it a bit difficult to measure anything in it (without a scale).

dave5104• 12 years ago

If you're using it to measure solids like flour, you're actually using it incorrectly. The OXO cup is really for measuring liquids. To measure out solids (flour, sugar, etc.) you should be using solid measuring cups.

Turing_Machine4• 12 years ago

I like to measure solids like flour and sugar by weight whenever possible. Especially with flour, the packing density introduces too much variation to get a good measurement by volume (or so my experience has indicated).

rahimnathwani• 12 years ago

To measure out solids, you should be using a kitchen scale, but Fannie Farmer's legacy lives on: http://roadside-attraction.com/why-i-hate-measuring-cups-and...

rmc3• 12 years ago

I will never understand the US idea of measuring solids by volume. If you recipes called for "200g of flour", then that's trivial to measure out on a scales.

analog31• 12 years ago

I have no problem using liquid measuring cups for solids. Just wiggle the cup a bit, and the flour will level itself. My main reason for segregating solids and liquids is to keep the solids from sticking in the cup. Nothing needs to be all that precise except for some kinds of sweets. At the end of the job, there's nothing to clean.

My dad, a chemist, insists on weighing the dry ingredients, and I agree in principle, but find volume to be quicker.

eduardordm3• 12 years ago

This actually makes my point even more poignant.

Where I live, the majority measuring cups can be used both for liquid and solids, they usually come with a bunch of scales for a variety of products, both with volume and weight[1].

Recipes are usually "200ml of milk and 1 cup of flour, eggs, mix it" I put the 200ml on the measure a cup and add the rest on top of it and mix on the same cup to avoid having yet another bowl to wash. I only use another bowl for making larger things, like cakes.

[1] http://www.sousanatal.com.br/gerenciador/app/webroot/images/...

danso• 12 years ago

Having worked in an incubator space and constantly overhearing aspiring entrepreneurs' wildly impractical proposals...I've always wondered why it isn't just common sense that you heed the advice mentioned in another article currently on HN's front page:

http://fridriksson.tumblr.com/post/86584610871/a-startup-pos...

But our biggest self realization was that we were not users of our own product. We didn’t obsess over it and we didn’t love it. We loved the idea of it. That hurt.

In a way, the OP is just another re-phrasing of this...if you know the steps of a process pretty well, it's because you're an active user. You know what steps are worth removing, and as an active user, you can maintain a tight feedback loop informing you whether the cost of removing those steps are worth it. And, as a cherry on top, you're actively making something you already do more enjoyable.

mareofnight• 12 years ago

I don't think this is necessarily the case. You do need to understand the idea's domain really well, but that doesn't have to be because it's something you do already. You could try to solve the problem of someone you know well, or have a cofounder who knows the problem domain better than you, or pick a market that seems underserved and learn about it until you get an idea and can make sure it's not a bad one.

There are benefits to picking something you don't already do - or rather, something that most people who start startups don't do. People naturally think the most about optimizing things they do often, and when most of them are being told to "scratch your own itch", they do even more of that. So most software startups will be about things that people who write software and found startups do a lot of, and those markets will be the most competitive. If you solve your grandmother's problems instead of your own, there's a lot less competition.

digikata• 12 years ago

The flip side is also sometimes true. When you know the steps of some process well, it means you've internalized all the existing assumptions. That can make it difficult to clearly realize where removing steps is possible.

Terr_• 12 years ago

Sort of like why sometimes experts in a field make the worst teachers. They've forgotten the important transitional steps.

maj0rhn9• 12 years ago

The unstated assumption in this blog post is that any [ethical] idea that makes money is worthy.

I would hope that persons of talent aspire to higher goals. A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity. A new dessert is actually a detractor.

If all you can do is make new measuring cups and new desserts then, by all means, do it and support your family. But if you think you bring something special to the world, try to improve it in a significant way. If that means investing a few years of your life to go to nursing school (for example) and learn a profession of value, then make the investment. You will then find ample opportunities to innovate, and bring benefit to your fellow man.

JacobJans• 12 years ago

I find this post incredibly off.

You are basically saying that it is pointless to be a pastry chef, and that joy in food is not significant.

I would be very, very, careful about judging what is significant to humanity and what is not.

maj0rhn9• 12 years ago

You be the judge, but be fair about it. Does the world need more pastry chefs, or does it need more nurses? Does it need more people trying to improve on fresh strawberries, or does it need more water engineers to keep millions of people from dying of water-borne diarrheal diseases every year?

It's an easy calculation if you think big (which is what people of talent should do). If you think small, then, indeed, you can get whatever answer you want.

Turing_Machine4• 12 years ago

"A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity. A new dessert is actually a detractor."

Disagree in both cases. A "better" measuring cup would be one that either saved time (freeing it for other productive uses) or provided more accurate measurements (reducing the number of ruined recipes and food waste).

A new dessert provides pleasure. And no, pleasure is not bad. Gluttony can be.

waps2• 12 years ago

This perfectly illustrates the difference in worldview between a capitalist and a socialist, and you so clearly see the problems with both.

The capitalist argument is essentially that anything that saves time/money/... is worth it, if people pay for it and it's self-sustaining. But the criticism of this position is valid too : what if caring for people is not worth it ? Will we simply not care for people ? How will this affect you ?

The socialist argument is that certain things are to be constant at any price, like nursing. Problem here of course is that the price has risen quite considerably, and people aren't willing to pay. So it's not self-sustaining, and therefore wouldn't normally be done. But the socialist would simply use (some form of) force to get it done anyway. From forcing people into professions, to shaming, ... Of course having a nurse that was denied what (s)he saw as a better career caring for me is unlikely to result in a good relationship.

But you see the problem too, right. I don't want to be subject to that socialism thing, but I do agree it sure would be nice if we cared for people better. And when I'm older, I'm sure I'll agree even more.

Here's what it comes down to : who determines what society's resources get spent on : people themselves (but of course they'll be forced to admit that there's no nursing because they haven't paid for it), or the "intellectuals" who want to protect people from themselves, make sure they don't die uncared for ?

mseebach2• 12 years ago

A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity

Oh, so it is of benefit, is it? What, exactly, is the minimal amount of positive benefit to humanity I must exert in my work to be deemed worthy in your optics?

What, exactly, is it about nursing, as a whole, that makes the field universally superior to the measuring cup industry? Is all of nursing equally deserving? What if you, as a nurse, spend your entire career caring for the morbidly obese, extending their lives so then can eat more smores? Is it OK to care for the obese, but not to feed them better desserts?

Human development is a long, hard trudge of incremental improvements, with a few leaps here and there. If you insist on sitting around waiting to be part of a leap, resisting the temptation to incrementally bringing benefit to your fellow man, you're missing the forest for all the trees.

PS:

A new dessert is actually a detractor

Bullshit.

EDIT: Try not to be provocative.

maj0rhn9• 12 years ago

What, exactly, is it about nursing, as a whole, that makes the field universally superior to the measuring cup industry?

You lose credibility when you ask a question like this.

dang• 12 years ago

I'm guessing you're a lot of fun at parties.

Please don't address other users this way on Hacker News. (It's a bad way to respond to provocation because it degrades the discourse further and invites worse.)

nate• 12 years ago

Hello. Thanks for the feedback on the post! I definitely wasn't assuming that when I wrote it. In fact, what I was trying to show was a simple framework for looking at processes in the world and improving them. And if some folks can come up with innovative ideas for things already as simple and "old" as measuring cups and S'mores recipes, imagine what you can come up with when you look at more complicated processes in this world. This framework could very well inspire someone to trace out the steps of the job someone has of retrieving water or building wells in Africa and try to figure out which of those steps can be removed. That being said, I really try not to judge if people want to make a better dessert. Dessert makes people incredible happy.

cheese17562• 12 years ago

It is this experimentation, however, that creates large improvements in the world. Creating a hobby operating system, for example, may seem like a waste of time. Why would CS students spend time creating something only for themselves, when they could be creating software to change the world? Aren't they wasting their talents by building something that they don't intend for anyone to use?

Of course, one of those hobby operating system grows into Linux, and suddenly that experimentation doesn't seem pointless anymore.

A contractor at CERN wants a faster way to share research papers. Isn't this outside the scope of his work, though? Isn't he wasting CERN's money with this project? People can just share papers via Usenet anyway. Who even needs the World Wide Web?

Most people don't set out to "bring benefit to your fellow man." Most people fool around with side projects or new ideas. These projects, which seemingly offer "trivial benefit to humanity," are the ones which make a difference in the world.

Experimentation or invention for any reason (including profit) is valuable, precisely because we don't know where this experimentation will go.

maj0rhn9• 12 years ago

The reasonable upper bound of benefit when designing a new OS or a new information-sharing medium is, a priori, much higher than the upper bound of a new measuring cup or a new dessert. So, this means someone entering those quests can reasonably state that they are tackling something big, i.e. worthwhile.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Nurses use measuring cups too.

wazoox2• 12 years ago

Then you have the problem of selling it. Some people I know made a piece of software that literally destroys half (or more) the jobs among broadcast TV operators. They regularly got shown the door harshly because they presented the solution to the wrong person: either someone who'd lose his job in the process, or someone who'd lose half the team under her orders and therefore her power in the company.

michaelbuddy• 12 years ago

what is the software? please share a link? Something a small media company could use?

wazoox2• 12 years ago

Definitely what a small media company should use. It combines traffic management, ads insertions, media asset management in a very easy to use, full drag-and-drop web UI, completely customizable and an impressively complete API with full documentation.

Really a fantastic product that puts everything from the big names to shame. It's available as both a standalone or cloud-hosted solution. It's so simple that usually only one journalist of graphic artist can manage a set of channels all by him/herself.

http://www.chyro.fr/en/

ilaksh• 12 years ago

It is not difficult to come up with new business ideas or ways to improve on businesses that already exist.

(As a side point, you don't really need to come up with new ideas or even make an improvement, you can just enter an existing market and be successful at selling.)

I come up with new business ideas probably once a week. Maybe several in a day.

It is orders of magnitude more difficult to actually effectively execute a business idea. And also often extremely difficult to successfully market it.

The reason it is relatively easy to come up with a new idea: you just need to make a loose identification of a product or solution. To actually implement it, you have to fill in all of the details and refine them. A simple concept can encapsulate a huge amount of complexity and engineering work. For example, the OXO cup. Once you have that idea, you need to work out exactly what design to use and where to place the measurement labels. Then you need some kind of manufacturing. Manufacturing a product can be very complex. You need distribution.

And then you need marketing. There are many reasons that marketing hard. For one thing, people are bombarded with products. There are so many new options that people have built up a tolerance for amazingness. Even if your product is absolutely incredible it may not break through into someone's consciousness for more than a moment. Also, people are busy and they have a limited capacity for learning new things. Even if your product makes things much easier, it is still a new thing for that person to learn, so they have to make an investment of their time and effort. And unfortunately with status quo bias there is a tendency for everyone to undervalue innovative ideas. And for your product to really become popular then you need to access network effects, i.e. move the entire herd.

How to get business ideas – remove steps

Related Stories