How to think about new start-ups

Thinking of a journalism start-up

Adam Peruta, an associate professor in Ithaca College's Strategic Communications Program, made a visit to the Independent Media class on Thursday, to discuss the concept of start-ups, the Start-Up Bus, SXSW, Yank and other applications he and a team are developing. What I mainly took away from his presentation was that tens of thousands of start-up applications, websites, etc are designed everyday, which makes its quite challenging for an idea to not be a duplicate of another idea. That said, instead of focusing on trying to have the most unique idea, a better approach to developing a product is to think about it in terms of the perspective of the consumer, whereby you consider what jobs they want done. Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business professor, came up with this concept of jobs-to-be-done, whereas you think less about specific demographics and more about what jobs consumers want done. The example he describes is a person is waiting in line for coffee and they have five to ten minutes to spare, keep them entertained for that block of time. When I think about my blog idea, which would be a music blog that organizes content by genres that are up-to-date, I realize that there aren't that many people that would want to look at this blog, while waiting for coffee. If I were waiting on line, I might consider checking this blog, but it would be preceded by Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, etc. Now that I'm aware of this somewhat upsetting reality, I'm curious to know if this means that I should tweak my idea so that it'll be more desirable for someone trying to stay preoccupied, while waiting or if there is another 'job' that I'm not thinking of that my music blog would be more suitable for. I guess a potential 'job,' which might be a tad specific, is a person is struggling to navigate through all the new music that a certain blog they subscribe to posts daily and they want a blog that is better organized. While that is definitely more niche than the first 'job' I described, my blog idea would be the solution in a nut-shell, so it could be helpful to conduct some marketing research to determine if this is something music enthusiasts find irritating.