Everyone wants a successful startup.

It's insanely hard to get one. For a lot of people, the main barrier to entry could be a lack of funding. Even for those with the necessary capital, there's the problem of coming up with what exactly the business does. I've observed a lot of startups that have similar business models, and each one has its own undesirable traits.

SaaS

I've seen software as a service everywhere in recently. Notion-like second brain apps, screen time limiters, MacOS quality of life features, and so many more. These work by hosting features in the cloud and making users pay monthly subscriptions to use them.

Confession: I have tried to start one of these before. It was called Hermien, and it was going to be an economic simulator platform where users would get their own country and they could negotiate trade deals with each other. The pricing plan was to make it subscription based, and the better your country did, the more money you'd get. If your country wasn't doing so well, at least you wouldn't be losing more than the subscription.

Clearly, I didn't get very far with this idea. I spent hours one weekend designing a UI and then abandoned the project.

It's unexpectedly hard to make a usable software product. I've got about a year of Next.js and React experience now, but I can pretty much only make frontend stuff. This website right here used to have a backend implementation with Supabase where these journal entries would be fetched from a database, and authors could have accounts. It was non functional, but at least it taught me about API routes and data fetching.

If you pay a developer to make it, you don't get granular control of exactly how it's going to turn out. Also it would be incredibly expensive. A few thousand, at least. That's how long it takes.

Clothing Brands

I've been seeing these over Instagram recently. Me and a friend just planned to start one. The barrier for entry here isn't going to be as extreme as making a SaaS dashboard, but it's not easy to design a good product.

I've found inspirations for silhouttes, textures and colors. The plan is to target this clothing line towards young Silicon Valley tech professionals. We've got a lot of starting capital to work with, but we aren't fashion designers. Hopefully though, we'll be able to create an appealing product. I've found pain points in my own clothing.

This entry was basically just a brain dump of potential business ventures. I'm writing a book on business competitions, by the way. It's called Naturals, and it's about Benjamin Carter, a 10th grader who goes to a college prep school in Connecticut and finds out that it's hiding something.

Yeah, that's it. Until next time, I am out.