Startups the dream of every freshman cs student and somehow the success story of everyone s mom s friends kid. So today we re starting a startup and i l be taking you guys along with me so we can learn together today episode. So we re going to be answering the most important questions when starting a startup finding a co founder and then finding a million gajillion good dollar idea by the end of the video.

Idea you had in the shower to make an app that helped people meet up on friday night is a good idea but chances are that these ideas are just not that good or unique and nobody actually wants them so for our startup we re going to have to be answering the three most important questions when thinking about an idea which are why you why now and does anybody actually need this first for the question of why you peter theo states that startups are based off secrets these are things that you know and nobody else knows because of your current situation this can be like your background your hobbies or what your parents do for work so let s think about this for us. Right what do we know that other people don t. Well right now i work at a quant firm and what they do is make computer algorithms to trade on the stock market and make money off people like my mom who think that they can beat the market by looking at trends mom please stop day trading it does not work like that. And yeah there are some secrets and pain points i have seen in this industry that maybe we could do a startup. But honestly i would rather die than do a startup in just finance i can t say this personally but some would say that finance kind of sucks. Okay. So next thing we could potentially do is education and as you guys know last video we tried to make an ai generated textbook company but yc rejected it the problem with this i would say is that the total addressable market for textbooks in the public education sector is just not that big and also really hard to break into and i wouldn t say we have too many secrets in this space so we re going to have to move on ah i don. T know man we might be screwed but wait actually after p m every day i make youtube videos there s actually so many pain points and secrets i guess in the content creator space that i know personally and also all my friends in the space have to deal with so i actually think that this could be a pretty good idea. Okay. So i m sold and hopefully you guys are too and there s only one last thing for this yu part. And it s are you the right person to make this next why now if you couldn t tell in the recent years more and more attention has been going to social media like instagram tik tok youtube instead of traditional media like tv and then the barrier to entry to becoming a content creator gets lower and lower each year because of better technology like cameras and editing software and if we look at the numbers the influencer industry market size was about billion in billion today and projected to be over billion in years.

Co founder for finding a co founder i also think that we re good we probably can just ask a couple friends. Yeah. I m good. Hell. No bro. No sorry. No can do hell. No all. Right well nobody wanted to except for this guy named frying pan this guy is one of my best friends in new york and he s also a youtuber and a software engineer for the startup stuff in terms of finding a co founder we should consider a few things first are they smart and capable to transmit life. Don t you need to like absorb it first you know what i mean then do you like working with them you re so wrong on this listen to me n you need to listen dude you re so wrong on this no you re so wrong. And then how do they deal with stress and finally do you guys have complimentary skills i think we should go out no we should stay to eat cuz we re already here otherwise she l be mad more than her.

The last part which is trying to find a problem worth solving we can make the best most hightech solution there is out there. But if nobody actually wants to use this solution then it doesn t matter so we re going to have to do some research and who better to ask than our potential users who are other creators so what we did was went around and set up a bunch of user interviews with other creators and when doing user interviews of course we want to make the questions very open ended so some of the questions that we re asking are like tell me about how you do x today what is the hardest thing about doing x why is it hard how often do you do it. And why is it important for you to do x. And then once we find some problems or pain points in this space we should think about if the problem is actually worth solving this is if people are willing to pay for a solution currently or if we would pay for a solution as well so after doing a bunch of user interviews we also found that agencies are a big pain point for creators these agencies are the middlemen between the brand sponsors and the creators so essentially they help creators get brand sponsorships and then take of what the creator earns and of course the creators are thinking that is just too much and there s very little transparency on how good the agency is doing for the creator but in order to understand this problems space a bit better we also went to the agencies to do interviews with them as well pretty much for the ones that we talk to the biggest paino for them is that they have to use google spreadsheets to organize and manage their creators so maybe a crm or a customer relationship management platform would help this. All right. So at this point we have two ideas at the top of our list the first is transparency around brand deals or knowing how much you re worth as a creator so maybe something like levels fyi for creators could solve this next we found that creators don t really know how to do their taxes or get the tax benefit that a creator should get and the existing software solutions don t take into account the different flow of this growing industry. So maybe something like a genified turbo tax for creators would help essentially if we re going to work in the creator space we should have the mission of enabling creators to do what they love to do which is creating and i l would say these ideas do this. Pretty well. But we also realize that in order to be a venture backed company or to get funding we probably need to think bigger having creators be the end user is not that bad but what s even better is if we try to apply the growing creator economy to improve an entire different industry so we thought about it a bit more and this is what we came up with so we re going to help good local.

Businesses get more traffic using influencer marketing and we re going to do this by making a platform today social media has proven to have the power to turn a restaurant from a complete wasteland to the most popular restaurant in the city local businesses have noticed this and have seen the most return on investment with influencer marketing compared to all the other forms of advertising for example this could be a video that you see on instagram about a restaurant right now the process of managing these deals is really informal and just a pain for both the restaurants and the creators and then there s a gap between what the restaurant is hoping for like let s say views and what they actually get from the influencer marketing sometimes it s a lot higher sometimes it s a lot lower i was going to ask gary tan the ceo of yc on some ideas on how to solve this but unfortunately this time he was only free thursday nights which is when me and my friends played chinese girlfriend simulator love is all around. So. Yeah we re on our own but this is what i think our platform should do this platform would be offering attention as a service to these local businesses like restaurants so if a restaurant owner says that they want views we can give that to them and how it s done is totally taken care of for them using this platform anyone that genuinely likes this food can sign up and post about the food on an app like instagram then the views that they get will get added to a collective pool and once the quota of k views gets met then everyone gets paid out proportionally and the restaurant that s actually good gets more business. Hooray. Okay. So that s pretty much what s top of mind right now. And you might be thinking bro you re giving these ideas away to the competition and to that i would say that we should actually just be problem focused meaning that if somebody else comes along and solve this problem better then it s actually just net good if you zoom out a bit you l realize that there s actually just so many people in the world trying to solve similar stuff so honestly if you re part of the small percentage that clicked on this video then i l would say that we re more or less on the same team that is until a vc or a goth girl tells me that competition is actually a real thing also for all of these problems and solutions there s at least five other startups doing the same exact thing. So. Yeah we re really not that special. But i would say that competition probably indicates some kind of product market fits so if we can just solve the problem better then i think that it l work out i l talk a bit more at the end but now let s hear from a sponsor.

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Definitely check it out and thanks for listening also if you want to support the channel you can go to n shop com there s merch there. And. Yeah. I think it s really good all right that pretty much brings us to the end of this video thank you guys for watching please comment your thoughts on any part of the process or the idea again i feel like we re in this together. And. Yeah i l be posting more updates so subscribe for that next video we l be building an mvp and probably trying to get funding i also have an inspirational quote to end the video.