Obvious Ideas

Evaluating early-stage ideas is a favourite pastime for anyone who breathes startups — some try to evaluate product-market fit quantitatively, others just back the right team. I was lucky to study PM fit from the person who coined the term, Andy Rachleff, and one heuristic from his class stuck with me: good ideas are obvious, after they're done. Airbnb sounded ridiculous until it wasn't. Uber sounded impossible until it wasn't.

That 'obvious' filter is my lazy way of spotting exciting ideas. Over the past 12 months I've only found three that cleared the bar. Pallet matches hiring managers with talent inside small, concentrated communities rather than large horizontal ones like LinkedIn — it's obvious to me because it solves two desperate customers at once, bets correctly on a real macro trend, and has winner-take-all network effects.

Macro teaches experienced web2 developers to code in Solidity, with talent, audit, and venture arms built on top of the school. It's obvious because the market demand is huge, the persona is tightly focused, and each business line strengthens the next in a flywheel — school leads to talent, to audit, to fund.

Fairstreet builds software for Medicare brokers, who today rely on inefficient mom-and-pop distributors. It's obvious because the technology lets Fairstreet undercut existing distributors on cost while delivering a far better product, and the market size is enormous — they'd only need 3,000 of the 700,000 US brokers to become a $100M ARR business.