Startup Whirlwind
Enough please! enough low-hanging fruit projects!
Every time I browse through the usual suspect websites to find interesting projects: hackernews, indiehackers, reddit, producthunt, I see there is always a swathe of startups that just reinvent the wheel, they usually fall within some concrete categories:
- Another time tracking app.
- Another habits tracking app.
- Another Social Media Engagement & Analytics app.
- Another convoluted way of creating a website/blog, through parsing markdown, using notion, or just another blogging engine.
- Another project management tool. Why don't we have enough with Trello, Asana, Jira, Gitlab, Notion, Basecamp, etc... every time I blink or cough there's another one! and taking a brief look at their crunchbase or producthunt pages they keep receiving loads of funding.
Is this the result of a VC funding-bikeshedding phenomenon where people just throw money at the fades of the moment in fear of missing out were they to spend too long analyzing the industry? Is it a consequence of savage short-termism in the investment industry? Is it the result of VCs and BAs fear of believing in a project that they don't fully understand but has the potential of really disrupting the world? It seems to me that the disruption word has been heavily corrupted and money still goes wherever it has gone: to somewhat proven ideas that are still easy to understand with a small tech twist to justify them being a tech company.
Come on there are amazing projects out there with people taking real risks with potentially revolutionary stuff and we keep pouring money into another payments gateway app!
I know I'm generalizing and there is a lot of cool projects being funded, but I've been taking a look at multiple VC's portfolio pages and I don't see much of a revolutionary idea beehive there.