DISQUS

Irina Patterson · 3 months ago

Great discussion, Brian. Thanks for starting it up.. Here is what I am thinking..

Tweet-ups are great and Refresh is great for building community, it is very important but it is not enough.

For Miami to become Silicon Beach, developers would need to become more serious about what they are working on.

It is not enough to come up with an idea, developers need to validate their ideas before they spend countless hours working on them.

How do you validate an idea?

You start with answering questions. Such as, Who is your User? What is the User Experience you plan to offer? What is your Value Proposition to the User? I can go on and on, I have about 30 questions for you, if you are serious...

My point here is don't waste your time on developing something before you validating your idea. It will be sad experience for you and everyone else....

Once your validate your idea, you go and you ask your prospective buyers to write you a check. And, if they don't write you a check, your idea is not very good one. Buyers will always buy what they need or want. If you can't sell to at least 100 buyers, go back to *the idea drawing table.*

What I see is too many people working for months without having any buyers or talking to anyone about anything and that is really sad...

Another advice I have is to read on emerging trends, on business strategies, and, last but not least, case studies on how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs go from an idea to a business to exit strategy. Read at least 100 of those case studies and you'll get a solid how-to idea.

Funding will not be of much help here. Lots of well-funded companies went bankrupt. No government assistance will help you with this. If they could, they would help themselves.

I highly recommend to focus on yourself and how your spend your time. What you do, what you read, what you are working on is what really matters here, not funding, not government assistance or anything else...

I am always glad to give feedback to anyone who is serious.....But you are not going to hear from me how great you or your ideas are. Most likely, I will send you to do lots of reading, thinking and doing your idea validation work.... even if you are a genius... you still will have to communicate your brilliant idea well, execute it well, position it well and sell it to the world... so start thinking and talking to others... find someone to validate your work...