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Ira Glass on killing your startup idea

I’ve been thinking a lot about Braintrust lately and whether this thing is truly going to fly or whether this is just a bad idea that I should kill.

There are a ton of different ways to think about it, some scientific (looking at customers, market, trajectory) and some more based on the gut (am I still excited by the idea and the space, does it look like I’m starting to build a tribe of followers, etc).

Interestingly enough, the greatest wisdom I came across on this subject came from an unconventional source. It was from this series of videos by one of my favorite journalists of all time, Ira Glass.

In the second part of this four part video where Ira talks about the art of storytelling, without even realizing it, he gives some amazing advice to entrepreneurs on how to think about their startup idea, how to curate it so it becomes something amazing, and also, of course, how to ruthlessly kill it if it doesn’t meet your expectations.

Here’s the video.

3 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship.

By Tawheed
— May 31, 2010 at 12:00 am
  • http://www.stronico.com Steve French

    I think you’re onto something, I do think it needs more visuals though.

  • http://www.startbreakingfree.com Brian Armstrong

    Hey TK – I debated whether to post this cuz it might come across as negative, but as someone who wants to see you succeed I figure you’d appreciate the honesty: I don’t think BrainTrust will take off. It’s kind of disappointing actually because from using it (and as a fellow rails programmer) I can tell that you REALLY know what you are doing code wise and design wise. I’m being 100% sincere about that, you have serious talent dude. And I work with a bunch of top notch rails engineers.

    But the main reason I say that is it just doesn’t have enough advantages over an incumbent like Google Groups or plain old email which accomplishes many of the same things. Yur platform is actually better, but I just don’t think it’s enough better to take down bigger players with major market share.

    I was watching this Mark Andreessen video today and he talks about how your solution has to be like a 10x improvement on existing solutions before people take notice – because they are lazy and comfortable with current solutions that basically get the job done. A 10% or 20% improvement just won’t be enough in most cases.
    http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2459

    Also, I can’t envision a business model for BrainTrust especially when Google Groups is free. So if it’s unlikely to make money that makes it less appealing.

    Anyway, it’s been a while since we talked – we should chat again maybe this weekend or something. Some of my sites need to killed too I think, so yur not alone and this post was helpful. You are on to some cool stuff so I say keep iterating with new ideas. Also, it’s just one dudes opinion you barely know so feel free to ignore it :) But just wanted to put it out there.

    Best of luck,
    Brian

  • http://www.tawheedkader.com Tawheed

    @Brian – thanks for the candid thoughts man. At this point, I have two options — just stop, or keep aiming for achieving that 10% or 20% improvement.

    Let’s definitely talk soon :)