“Is your startup idea taken?” — and why we love X for Y startups

#News(Startup) [ via IoTGroup ]

☝️Above: Michelle Rial (follow her at @TheRialMichelle), then working at Buzzfeed, posted this hilarious infographic with all the “X for Y” ideas.
What are “X for Y” companies and why do they sound compelling?
Are “X for Y” companies actually a good idea?
.. and finally, what happens when my “X for Y” startup idea is taken?
People love describing startups as “X for Y” — why?
Unless it’s intended as an insult (ha!), no one ever describes their startup as the”[Failed startup] for X.” Second, it both conveys a lot of information and also doesn’t — when someone who hears the idea, it’s like a short puzzle to solve to try and understand what it might mean.
But the real question is, do “X for Y” companies actually work?
The “X for Y” companies that have worked
So which “X for Y” companies will work in the future?
In broad strokes, all the “X for Y” ideas end up falling on a spectrum of:
An example of the former might be something like, “YouTube for Kids” — which is a segment of the existing product.
On the other hand, something like “YouTube for Amazon Echo” sounds kind of weird and foreign, since it doesn’t yet exist — yet it could still possibly make sense as an idea.
And so these “X for Y” concepts, once they worked, had a higher ceiling since it wasn’t constrained by a giant competitor running them down quickly.
I’ve written in the past on why almost all of the “Uber for X” startups failed — you can read that here — and ultimately, even if the idea sounds cool to your and your startup friends/investors, the value proposition must still be really strong to all the customers and users involved.
Something like “Uber for cleaning” sounds great until you ask if the cleaners actually want to work this way, if consistent/high-quality service can be delivered, and if the unit economics make sense?
Broken metaphors happen when something that’s meant for an investor pitch becomes ingrained in the product itself.

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