There is a popular Venn diagram that is often quoted in VC conversations on early stage investing.
"Good ideas that seem like bad ideas" is a mantra introduced by Peter Thiel that A16z team (Chris Dixon) made more popular which I discovered through the reference in Scott Kupor's book 'Secrets of Sandhill Road'.
Below is an interesting video that expands on this topic. The broad argument is that - "a secret that an entrepreneur has picked up (preferably through personal experience) when combined with deep capabilities on tools (needed to build a venture around the secret) can be a winner". The challenge for the VCs is to appreciate the 'secret' and the ability of the founder to build on the secret.
While this resonates really well with me and my journey with Onemyle, I have often felt that there is a variant Venn diagram that can capture the engineering challenges of building a product.
Onemyle - to me - appeared as a simple product that is hard to build.
As we started building Onemyle, we realised that it is a layered opportunity and over the last few years, different people have built different products addressing different layers of the opportunity.
Building for local communities is hard - since we will never know the needs of a local community in its entirety.
Should Onemyle be a 'Conversation' platform for local communities? Should it be a commerce platform? Maybe a discovery or content platform? What about deals or coupons? What about all of the above - since a local community has a need across all of these?
The "Simple product that is hard to build" representation feels like a great fit to describe the journey so far with all the above questions. As you iterate and expand on various possibilities the product gets messier on paper but as you find common threads and connections between these questions the product starts feeling simpler. The sweet spot in my view is the overlap between a product that feels simple but is actually somewhat hard to build. A certain moat gets built into the product because of the difficulty in build but it does not affect the user experience because at its core - it is a simple product.
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