Business pivot # 3: Follow your heart

About 4 months ago I met David who was looking for a technical co-founder. He already had a business idea he was working on for ~6 months.
I'm a software engineer and I've been interested in building my own startup for a long time so David's idea took my attention.

# Startup idea #1:
We live in Latin America and we've faced a huge economic downturn in the past years with no hope of getting better. Thus, we came up with the idea to allow people in LATAM to invest in Real Estate in the USA. This way they could protect their money against currency devaluation.

This idea got a very good reception from people around us, although we didn't actually validate it. We started working on an MVP without thinking too much about the business model or how we'd make any profit. There were a lot of moving pieces ranging from meeting real estate brokers in another country (USA) to finding how to receive money legally from users who want to invest (we wanted to avoid any money laundry issues in the future). Not to tell the technicalities of building a web app.

While we building the MVP and trying to get everything ready from a legal perspective but we started to think more about our business model. We soon realized the profit margin wasn't good enough and all the work needed to bring the idea to life was not worth it.

We then decided to move to a new idea with one big learning in mind:
It should have a clear and simple business model.

# Startup idea #2:

Allow people in LATAM to create USD saving accounts. Nowadays if someone in LATAM wants to open a USD saving account it should have at least $ 5000 USD. This is way above the average minimum wage in the region which is around ~$412 USD/month. If people were interested and we were able to offer a cheaper option we could build a business around it.

We determined that we wouldn't build an MVP but a landing page. It would state the problem and offer our solution. We'd charge 5 $USD/month. There wasn't a specific reason to pick this pricing model, we just wanted to create a consistent revenue stream. We still had some legal stuff we needed to figure out but we wanted to prove the market existed first. The legal aspects would be a problem we'll care about in the future.

After some time we found ourselves working on an idea from an industry we didn't know, with a business model, we didn't think thoroughly, offering what we were feeling as a "meh" solution.

The reason we got here is that we fell in love with the solution from Startup idea #1 because we were thinking with a user mindset. Then, we tried to move to another idea in the same industry, related to the same problem, with a better business model but it wasn't feeling as exciting as the first one. Sounds like a cliché but it's true... at least for us. You should fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.

# Startup idea 3:
We are starting over from scratch. We want to do things differently. We choose a totally different industry. There is a nerdy hacker inside of me who always wanted to build something my peers could use. I've identified a couple of problems related to collaborative work we want to explore. We'll be working on an industry we know, trying to solve a problem we care about, and we'll rely on the SaaS model to create a viable business. That is what my heart says is correct.

We'll be focusing on the problem and the business model in the next couple of weeks. Let's see how that goes...