The Magic of a Small, Focused Idea

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well." – Unix Philosophy

This golden nugget applies to building products even today.

I think hardly anyone would say it's a bad thing. But once you slip into brainstorming mode or pitch your idea to a couple of people, someone will inevitably say something along the lines of: "It's a really small market, how will you build a billion-dollar business?"

And then you start questioning yourself, prematurely generalizing the idea or leaving it altogether to seek a more plausible business idea. That's where the tragedy starts.

Why am I saying this?

I've realized that people around me, including myself, are overly focused on problem size as a criterion for good startup ideas. Lately, I've become more and more convinced that this is the wrong way to look at things, for multiple reasons:

• If the problem is big, there will always be a lot of competition. It's hard to build a truly differentiating offering with limited resources that delights users. And users have to love your product if your startup is to be successful.
• It's not interesting to VCs if you're the 10th player in the race.

Another way to put it: it's possible to satisfy some of the people some of the time. We can't build a product that a large segment will love right away. That would be an extremely competitive space and hard to succeed in.

But are ideas even that important?

Ideas aren't everything, but they do matter when building a product. They excite people to join, help you get that first meeting, and attract attention. They can't compensate for bad execution, but they play an important role.

Here is a great talk from Sam Altman on the importance of ideas and the role it plays in building a successful startup.

Lecture 1 - How to Start a Startup (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)

The same concepts are also covered by Paul Graham and Peter Thiel.

There are a lot of helpful pointers in these talks:

• Doing things that don't scale early on
• Build a monopoly in small, niche segments
• The best startups often start as projects and doesn't sound like a business
• A good startup idea is at the intersection of bad sound idea and being an actually good idea

Overall, I do think this is an important topic to discuss with your team before building a product: do you believe in the power of small, focused problems?

One common counterargument is that some things will never scale and will always remain small. I think it's a valid criticism, but it ignores some critical points:

• Intelligent founders will always find ways to expand the scope and size of the market—tackling adjacent problems, leveraging market growth, etc. Consider the builders of Pydantic, a popular Python framework for type validation. Monetizing Pydantic directly would have been tough (as the traditional approach of offering a hosted solution might not have been valuable to customers), so they decided to build a logging solution and raised funding for it.
• It's better to have a small, early win than to chase a large battle with no victory in sight.

I also like the framework Sam Altman puts forward for pitching your idea:

"I know it sounds like a bad idea, but here is specifically why it's actually a great one. You want to sound crazy (that's why most people won't get it), but you want to be right."

Why do we still not get it?

If these concepts are well-understood and in the public domain, with legends like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel talking about them, why do we still not get it?

I think the quote from Sam Altman nicely captures the problem: "Truly great ideas don't sound like they're worth stealing." That means we often fall prey to our own skepticism or that of others, and end up coming up with ideas that sound good on the surface. Now we're are back to a terrible idea.

So next time you're brainstorming, try very, very hard to stick to a small, focused problem.