Ask HN: Small Ideas vs. Big Ideas?

There's a "Growing B2B SaaS" podcast that had a guest that made an impression on me. He said tech is the wrong industry to try to grow a lifestyle business. You can do it, but your business is substantially more likely to be disrupted than more brick and mortar industries.

You might've had a solid calendar scheduling app in 2015, but by 2024 everyone is eating your lunch from every angle, while the plumbers continue to plumb. And the major moats like network effects or marketing specialization usually only apply to larger businesses.

His advice was to always go big, grow quickly, and sell quickly. Even if you go smaller for a higher chance success, the income stream likely will crumble as soon as you stop actively pressing forward with the product because of the intense competition in the software space. The lower risk option of growing and selling quickly, in his estimation, was the best risk-adjusted return.

You can always go big after starting small. The most important thing is to start. There are 1000s of small things which are not visible unless you start.

The effort to do something small is definitely less than when you try something big. And my little experience even hitting small is exponentially difficult.

10k MRR no debt solo biz more or less means retirement in a high COL country. I would worry about maximizing your odds of success

There are risks, costs and benefits whichever path you take.

Have you ever built something small? I mean the whole thing, including the parts you know you're not good at and the parts you've never done before. If not, maybe start there.

A big idea can be aspirational: "I will make the biggest bestest X the world has ever seen." You can have that goal and still make the smallest most interesting part of X as your first iteration.

If you prefer a more rational approach, there are standard methods of business/product assessment that you can apply at the idea stage to rule things in and out. Success or failure is rarely guaranteed, but if the idea is big, unexamined blind spots can bite you years down the road.

Another factor is resources: do you have time/money/drive/attention-span/grit to see a big idea through to maturity. There are many steps in that process and each step has its own challenges and potential for failure.

By buildings small things, you will find ideas for bigger things that people actually need.

> My thinking around that is it's pretty much the same effort to build something small or something big

Your thinking have huge mistake, because you thinking about money, without considering market.

What I mean, market is not a single flat place where all 6 Billions walking and you will look at them from crystal tower.

But real market space is multi-dimensional, for simplicity I will tell analogy.

Imagine, Newton method of finding roots of equations. For simple case it could been considered rough 2D surface, like Moon surface projection, with indefinite number of holes, and some holes are huge, and others are tiny.

And height of edges of hole, which you research are important, because they are practically proportional to energy need to overcome edge of your hole, so it defines some tension, or budget to come to other hole, or it named enter barrier.

And hole width define, how many money could be here.

What important for business, as I said before, you are not only person on Earth, there are at least hundreds millions smart people (about 10%), who also want to make some money and making research of their environment, so your concurrents are aware about surface line of market, and where it have holes.

And typical human avoid small holes, prefer to enter large holes or even huge holes.

So, when you enter tiny hole, huge probability, you will not see any market concurrence there.

What also important, start small doesn't mean, you will not become big any time, as you could make some fat in small niche, and than you could make try to enter bigger niche, or few neighbor small niches, etc.

In reality, McDonalds and Walmart began in regional small niches, and enter mega-cities after make fat in niches (for mcdo way you could watch "the founder" cinema, for Walmart, read "made in America").

Sure, if you have few spare Billions, you could start already big, but I bet, you would not ask this question having Billions.

PS any way, you are not alone, ask if you consider cooperation.

It depends on what sort of life you want. I'm not a 'wheeler-dealer', so I'm keeping small. You need to go big to become a billionaire, but then it takes over your life.

You also need to think about what your product actually is, how many people want it, how much they want it, and how much they'll pay for it. Market size might make the big-or-small decision for you.

Finally, I think you need to consider what sort of problems your individual knowledge and experience gives you insight into. There are already thousands of PDF converters crowding search engine results. You need to find something that no one else has thought of (even if it's just a variation on someone else's product) so that there's something that makes your users want to give you money, rather than just using whichever competitor was top of the search results today.

Every single big thing started as a small thing. Every single one. Google was once just an algorithm and some math. Slack was a chat app some game devs built to talk to each other.

The Path Appears To Those Who Walk.

I've thought a lot about this, but there is so much critical context that has to fit into your thinking. And it depends on your goals. If you are super ambitious and want to change the world, only big ideas will do. If your goals are more about money or lifestyle, $50,000 / month is the same no matter how you get it. The older I have gotten, the less interested I am in the scope and risks of change-the-world ideas ;)

Getting that kind of money from a big corporate job, I would guess, is a lot more hassle-ridden than if you did it on your own. I also think the competative context is important to understand.

I actually have been experimenting with a tool[] I made to very quickly get an understanding of just how competative the marketplace is for a particular idea -- big or small. I have a million ideas, prefer the "smaller" ones, and prefer to enter where there is a real market opportunity.

https://already.dev

To go big you first have to dominate a small market. Every big success started as a niche. It's not so much that you can pick the size of the success ahead of time, but rather make sure to increase the odds that things will work at all.

My advice:

1) target a large TAM - is there a large enough market of people that are willing to pay for that type of solution?

2) try to maximise problem-founder fit - what are your unfair advantages and do you have access to early adopters who can give you feedback and spread the word?

Ideas are common. Execution is rare.

Execution is much easier on something small.

(Side note: Facebook wasn't big to start. Facebook started as "Stalker-R-Us on Harvard College Girls")

I don’t think it’s a binary thing that you can just pick. I think you need to have experience to know what the big ideas are for an industry - especially now that the low-hanging web 2.0 ideas seem to be pretty well picked through.

You mention Zuckerberg - even Facebook was made through having experience in the right market and taking an existing product to the next level, and probably a bunch of iteration along the way.

It's not the same effort to do something small and something big.

It may be at first, but if your goal is $30k MRR then at some point you could consider your task to be "done" (ideally, in reality its never like that). There are businesses that once set up it takes a lot less effort to keep afloat than to keep growing (and that's why they are attractive).

It is very, very hard to raise money for something small though. Maybe you can get a loan, but anything anywhere near the favorable terms that VCs give you is impossible. Games use publishers for equity funding and the terms are terrible.

So, if you are going for something big, you are better off going for pipe-dream-big. And know that once you start you will basically be on the growth-train until IPO/acquisition or exit with an empty handed. If you are going for something small, you will almost certainly have to bootstrap, which means it will take time.

Whatever it is you want to do though, just do it now. Time flies and it doesn't forgive.

You should probably not confidently believe that you can make a “small game” that is guaranteed to generate $10k (let alone $30k) MRR.

One thing about utility is it never ceases to exist as long as the conditions are perfect, something like PDF converter was a repercussion of Adobe acquiring the market of a new format via Windows and one day Windows decided not to include Adobe suite in Windows. That's what crashed the complete cycle, now there are millions of PDFs in circulation with gigabytes of information but latest version of Windows doesn't contain any stuff to edit, compress, convert them atleast not to a normal person who's the real consumer. Plus there comes the point of charge required just to convert information in same medium which some people don't agree on paying hence this type of tools will exist till the dawn of computer

From a business perspective, both small and big ideas have their pros and cons. Small ideas are easy to implement and iterate, which can quickly validate the market. You can accumulate experience and funds before aiming for big projects. Big ideas have great potential but come with high risks and large investments. Which do you think you're more suitable to start with, a small and steady project or a high - risk, high - return big one?

I think TAM is a relevant metric here.

Most people think of TAM as "how big could this be". But an equally important side is "how many people might be willing to buy this". Because that measures how easy sales will be.

Big ideas have larger TAM and therefore it's a little bit easier to land that first sale. Even with a very early stage product. With a large TAM you can pretty much throw infinite darts at the board and maybe on will land.

If you target too specific of a market (.dwg => .pdf converter for civil engineers). You'll have an easier time finding your market, but fewer chances to land the sale.

The 'big vs small' debate is not always about money.

The World Wide Web was a much 'bigger' invention than FaceBook; but Tim Berners-Lee's net worth is a tiny fraction of Zuckerberg's.

Is "Imaginary Situation A" better than "Imaginary Situation B"?

No idea. Just hit the market with what you have. Iterate until you find people willing to pay for your thing.

If you can make something small that generates 30k in MRR, you should definitely do that. I fear that you are being quite optimistic about the numbers here…

You're more likely to release a small idea than a big idea which means a small idea is more likely to make money than a big idea.

Small ideas will need less maintenance and constant development but you could spend more time on bespoke features for customers.

Small ideas win everytime for me.

You won’t find one true answer that fits all use cases and your lifestyle. What approach motivates you?

The general YC advice is to find a way to validate your idea and “fail quickly” with the least amount of time and effort.

That’s kind of orthogonal to the potential scope of the problem, but applies to how to get started.

A solo-developed game generating 10K-30K in MRR over more than a handful of months would already put you on the top 10% of all released games on Steam. It's not likely to happen unless you have experience in the space and possess strong artistic skills.

Hit a single first before trying for a home run.

You can build a $30k MRR business with 1% the effort you need to build a $30M MRR business. Once you escape a certain size/scale the day to day operations grow in scope. So do you want to deal with HR or payroll? Do you want to have to keep bringing in $100k worth of google ads traffic a month?

The question to think about is can the small idea potentially be big? Or is it a TAM limited scope? Don't forget there is horizontal vs vertical scaling to think about too.

Just do something that you can execute well

maybe you need to answer this question: Are big ideas just a collection of small ideas?

Look at reward to effort ratio. Big doesn't mean more money.

So much of this depends on the context, goals and personal situation.

The answer won't be the same for a multi millionaire looking to spend his time working on a cool project or for a low wage worker trying to make it and quit a boring job.

If you already have financial freedom, i guess you should aim for the stars, as in go for something big.

I you're trying to reach financial escape velocity and get rid of your 9 to 5 job, you might want to try small ideas first as it should be easier targets and you probably only need one successful project to be free. Then you can go for the big ideas.