Launch Party 5: What are the ideas that will catch on?

I hung out with Jordan and the Launch Party gang last night to check out some of Vancouver’s newest and most promising startups. Tagga was there, I hope they weren’t up too late since they are flying to Vegas today, and since I already think they are pretty cool, I can gloss cover them.

One startup that caught my eye was ClarityAccounting, basic web-based accounting for small businesses. Okay, maybe not so basic. Sheila got the full pitch, I was taking pics as usual, but she was really impressed. For $10/month she can manage her side work, teaching, jewelry sales, and other gigs all together. PDF invoices, receipts, access for your accountant. It’s all there. Simply, easily. Sure I’ve tried to use QuickBooks, but wow, it is a royal pain. Not even considering the cost there are the updates (not free btw) and just using it.

And so, I think ClarityAccounting is going to have some legs.

There are two ways to succeed in Web 2.0, etc one is to come up with something brand new and amazing the other is to just make something we need better. Coming up with something mind-blowing amazing, and new, is a rare thing. Doesn’t happen often. The “something better” happens more often, isn’t as sexy, but I think something that can succeed.

The problem with the “something better” is that if your competition is so entrenched (say eBay) that a competitor has to overcome a huge amount of user inertia to get people to switch. Like for me and photos. On Flickr I have over 11,000 pics and I’m not an edge case either. Can you imagine me moving everything to a new service? Yeah no. You’d have to have a way to use the Flickr API to move not only the pictures, but the sets, collections, and tags. Oh and tell folks that I’ve moved my pic. Oh, yeah all the posts where I’ve embedded an image from there …. yeah those would break huh?

See? Huge amount of inertia. I am thinking of doing more with SmugMug for my professional portfolio, but make it my primary photo location? Yeah not likely.

ClarityAccounting, if it has a nice QuickBooks import function, can make it painless. Amount of inertia? Low. If your account weeps tears of joy at what it does, even better. For a new user, they can be sending out an invoice in a few minutes and Sheila said it would take a day or two for her to bring it all up to date. Granted she might not have a lot to enter, that’s still pretty good.

Learning curve? Looked like less than nil.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Make a better wheel. Not in a rainbow of new colours, but something new, smoother, easier, faster, better.

Innovation can be as simple as just being better.