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Peer reviewed startups

11 points by apollo ↗ HN
In academia, when you submit your paper to a journal, it usually goes through peer review.

It would be cool to have a site where you submit a business plan (along with web prototype, if it's a web business) and the plan is given to 3 random people from a pool of entrepreneurs, who write a formal review of your business (and perhaps sign a digital nda).

Maybe Ycombinator can sponsor something like this.

21 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] thread
keefe
This seems incredibly dangerous, a bunch of smart, tech-savvy people are exactly the last people I want seeing my site.
LogicHoleFlaw
The line between potential customers and potential competition is razor-thin in this case.

Still, as soon as you go live you'll be hanging out in the wind for all to see anyway.

babul
Peer-review works in academia as generally the goal is not monetisation but the pursuit and quality of knowledge.

Don't think it translates well to startup culture (people with good ideas tend to just do them) and besides, when you look for funding you often get peer-review of sorts from angels/VCs/Banks.

apollo
It's true that there are potentially dangerous incentives, and it won't work for startups with significant trade secrets. However, there are a large range of startups, and some people are even willing to share their idea in public! This would be sort of a middle-way. If you have a business idea that you'd prefer to not post publicly on Hacker News but you're not afraid of it being stolen by experience entrepreneurs, then this would be the way to go.

Lastly, although VCs are a good source of feedback, usually going and pitching your idea means a significant commitment (quit your job already, developing the idea). Furthermore, this form of feedback doesn't work for bootstrapped startups and startups in small markets.

pchristensen
I disagree. I assume you're afraid they're going to steal you're idea? The only way that would matter is if they care about it enough to do as good a job as you're going to do. I could hear a thousand ideas and probably none of them would be so compelling that I would drop my own projects to work on it.
kirubakaran
May be he is afraid of the Mark Zuckerbergs
keefe
The issue is more along the lines of other startups attacking the same problem with more funding, particularly those still in stealth mode.
babul
Startups often start in "stealth mode" for a reason.
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apollo
Well startups that start in stealth mode might want to get feedback. They can post their business plan in public, go to VCs, ask whatever contacts they have in person. The problems are posting in public defeats the purpose of stealth mode, going to VCs doesn't make sense if you're not ready or are bootstrapped, and you may not have many contacts with sufficient experience in entrepreneurship.
comatose_kid
I thought that posting here for feedback on your startup already accomplished this?
apollo
Yes, that is probably the best alternative. However, the main problems are

1) rigor; comments have a tendency to be whatever pops into a person's head rather than a rigorous assessment of a business model. I think rigorous feedback would provide an opinion on each component of a successful business.

2) reputation; I know people here are very smart, but if you have a selected pool of entrepreneurs you can guarantee a certain level of reputation for your feedback. On ycombinator, you can still get a scathing review from a 17 year old startup wannabe and then sit there wondering whether they really know what they're talking about.

3) non-disclosure; when you post on ycombinator, your business plan reaches a public audience and gets indexed on google. With a random selection of 3 reviewers from a selected pool of advisors, this narrows the audience down, and furthermore you can get NDAs from them. Also, if your business magically appears the next day, you have some legal recourse if it's one of the reviewer's best friends.

SingAlong
You talked about getting indexed in Google. Actually, it was possible a few days back to post it on the web and not get indexed by Google or any other search engine. The solution was to make an embedded flash slide show on the webpage and post the link here, but now since they are going to start indexing flash files too, the idea loses hand-down. :)

But surely there must be some sort of solution to post it on the web and not get indexed. Google will surely not index flash videos. Or why create a locked page and then specify the password here. Google then cannot index your file :)

sfg
I think people choosing to invest or not invest in you is probably the best form of peer review in business. The fact they are committing their own money forces honesty and helps to ensure that the quality of insight is high (mainly as bad investors will,eventually, stop investing, while good ones will invest more).

I hope I am wrong and what your looking for can be developed. It really would be an excellent service.

biohacker42
In academia the paper is the product. In startups the idea for the startup is not the product, but the execution is. And how good the execution is, well that's determined by how successful the startup is. Life is the ultimate peer review.
pg
If you already have a version 1, why not just submit it to the market for judgement? That's who ultimately judges it anyway.
sh1mmer
I think this could be really valuable, although I wouldn't really restrict it to 3 random people.

Flickr for example, have groups that require you to comment on the previous 2 photos to post in that group. That doesn't mean all photos in the group have only 2 comments, many have much more because it creates a culture of critique.

As much there has been talk about "Not going dark" for programmers I think this is equally true of businesses. If you believe in what you do enough to tell other people about it then they can help keep you going in the right direction. If you stay in stealth mode forever you could be digging your own grave without knowing it.

anateus
So... you're suggesting what's currently called Closed Alpha.

I guess the innovation here is creating a randomized pool of alpha-testers.

raghus
Unless you are doing something truly unusual or something that requires a lot of investment in time and capital, you should just tell as many people as you know about it and see what happens and reiterate based on feedback.

Consider some YC companies that are still fine-tuning their product. They've been reviewed by the likes of pg and co and had the benefit of their advice for 3 months as well as the benefit of experience from the large pool of YC alumni. But even they need to fine tune based on what the larger market thinks.