Sometimes it's just surprising what people will pay for.

I remember talking to a guy ~10 years ago who had bought a bunch of public-access (but hard to find) government databases and set up a service doing people searches. Long-lost friends, loves, etc.

At first he thought he was extortionate charging $10/search. But every time he raised the price he got significantly more business. I think he settled out at ~$80/search.

Today that very same business could very well start as a VC-funded free service, when in fact people are more than willing to pay for it.

Hank Asher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Asher did something very similar, and his work ended up powering the searches for the Patriot Act.

Whats the business? Can you name it?

I honestly don't remember the exact name. I do know they guy I met had done his thing live on a number of day-time talk shows (Oprah-type), and had gotten quite a bit of publicity out of that.

"So perhaps before you try to be better than your competitor as a startup, you might try being just as good--because just as good can mean revenues and next gen can sometimes mean too early. What you'll likely find is that a focused startup's attempt to be just as good actually results in a much better product that people might even be willing to pay for."

I took this advice and it worked for me. Do things that people will pay for today. Choose something that makes money and try to scale it. The challenge and excitement is in scaling a proven business idea better than the competition. Google did not invent AdWords, but they did execute better than Overture. There will be plenty of time to be original in retirement.

We're doing exactly that with our biz model for NewsCred. And no, it has nothing to do with advertizing!

Instead of "Make something people want", how about "Make something people with money want".

Think twice about building something for someone that is either cheap or just flat out broke. It sounds like Meetup dropped a lot of users that were broke.