The important thing is to have a valid reason to think different. There are too many people who stubbornly press on because they drank the kool aid of their own uniqueness. They think being different is a value in itself.<p>As somebody who has been different their whole live, being different can happen when you don't take things as granted, because you will land on other conclusion as people who take things as granted.<p>But sometimes you will land at the same conclusion, for the obvious reason that a certain way of doing certain things is indeed very reasonable.<p>In my youth there were many people that tried to rebell against something, but in my eyes they defined themselves ex negativo: they acted a certain way because it was the opposite of the thing they didn't like. This is not free, because you are tightly coupled to the thing you want to differenciate yourself from. I always tried to instead <i>decouple</i> from those things and figure out which conventions are bullshit, which are in principle reasonable (but communicated or lived badly) and which are just prefect the way they are.<p>The key step however is not to take existing structure, culture and technology for granted and try to come up with your own ways of doing things. Realizing once in a while that you (badly) solved a problem that has been solved for decades can be humbling as well.
This is something that I don’t think can be commoditized or created with any kind of predictable process. Outfits like YC aren’t really in the business of <i>creating</i> startups. They are in the business of <i>finding</i> startups.<p>Prospecting, as opposed to farming. They find promising ideas, and try to transplant them into fertile soil. Match “idea people” with “make it happen people.”<p>Good prospectors can get quite wealthy. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it isn’t creating startups from whole cloth; it’s finding them “in the rough.”<p>It’s just that, for every Google and Facebook “unicorn,” prancing around SV, there’s a charnel pit, somewhere in the California desert, filled with 10,000 rotting corpses.<p>So, “thinking different” is one step, out of thousands, that is required to come up with a “disruptive” startup.<p>But I think that there’s also a great deal to be said for refining and optimizing the same stuff that everyone knows about.<p>Ford didn’t invent the automobile. He just figured out how to scale it. That involved some new thought, but also a lot of observation and refinement.<p>But I totally agree that a focus on the user is a really big deal. Jeff Bezos did that with Amazon, and it seems to have worked.
Favorite quote:<p>“What it should feel like in an early stage startup is that you're having a little party with your users, and it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, because you're having such a great time.”<p>I feel like this is still underappreciated.
I think almost all users would like easily swappable iPhone batteries. All users would have liked Fords with multiple colours rather than black. Many users would have asked for text messages over 160 characters in 1990 or Facebook with their own themes on the page. Tradeoffs abound.<p>Sometimes what users want will get you to a billion. Sometimes it’ll kill you. What’s the difference?
I've read a lot around this subject but this articles sums it up best. The notion that great ideas may sound crazy but are grounded in the reality of diehard users.<p>That's how you distinguish between tilting at windmills and true gamechangers.
I think it's interesting to see Apple's old slogan mentioned since Apple, and most big tech companies, are fairly user-hostile these days. They can spy on the user, roll out buggy software, lock down what the user can do, use vendor lock-in, have poor tech support, etc. And this is all because they're big enough that users don't have sufficient choice.<p>I sure hope some of these startups will take this to heart and serve the users.