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Small business ideas for serving the gray tribe

Who is this for?

  • if you have a track record of making stuff happen
  • if you’re thinking about starting a nonprofit

Why build a small business? (instead of a nonprofit)

  • Much better feedback loops
    • Money ⇒ scaling up
    • Faster learning ⇒ career growth
  • More contact with reality
  • Concrete wins are good for diversifying the movement
  • Easy to go from company ⇒ nonprofit, harder the other way
    • Big examples obv are Dustin Moskovitz, Bill Gates
    • More “locally”, Lincoln Quirk of Wave
    • I haven’t really seen anyone go the opposite direction…

Aside: more nonprofits should see themselves as selling goods and services, rather than raising donations. Lighthaven’s doing a reasonable job of this.

Why serve the gray tribe?

“gray tribe” = rationalist, EA, Bay Area/London/NYC hubs. Reads blogs, drinks Soylent. AstralCodexTen, LessWrong, EA Forum, Marginal Revolution.

  • We have a lot of money
    • Tech money, crypto money, (soon) AI money
    • Good feature of a customer to have
      • Business value is roughly # customers x $ size of customer; if $ size goes up you can do less sales and marketing
    • Good for fundraising, investment
  • Early adopters: open to weird, novel ideas; willing to beta test stuff
  • You understand the customer profile, can dogfood
    • (tbh this post might be very selfish: “make more things for Austin, I can pay you”)
  • High degree of trust within gray tribe
    • Good for distribution! see Lantern,
  • Your customers are smart, like you. This is fun!

Meta ideas

  • Things that take risk more seriously (esp covid: masks, microcovid, UV)
  • Leans into cutting edge, innovation, tech (Lantern Bioworks)
  • Relies on analysis

Ideas

Todo: flesh out, send out draft

  • Products
    • Far UVC
    • Indoor air quality
    • Remote setup (h/t Ben Kuhn)
  • Services
    • UV installation (h/t Jefftk)
    • Surrogacy (h/t Ajeya Cotra)
    • Conference organizing

Caveats

  • Understand the differences between “oh that’s a cool idea” and “I needed this yesterday and can give you a down payment now”
  • Maybe focus less on a specific idea/solution and more on a problem area or customer profile.
    • I don’t know if “RFP lists” for startups like YC’s have done much
    • See Paul Graham on startup ideas
  • Some of the stuff might be kind of weird/path dependent/not especially robust (lighting…?)
  • Some of these might not scale to VC-backable startup, if that’s what you care about
    • Though: many could! And venture isn’t everything.
  • Don’t charge for everything
    • Some things have network effects, and you can figure out pricing later
      • it’s good that LessWrong started out free
    • famously, “free” means people feel some social obligation to reciprocate with favors; “cheap” discharges that
    • cf patio11: have two prices, free and very expensive
      • Handles the “transaction cost” problem
  • Many things started by good gray tribe folks have mysteriously failed
    • Metamed
    • Atlas
    • Cate Hall’s vaccine thing
    • Elena’s matchmaking; Manifold.love
    • cf where are the successful rationalists

Existing examples

Personal examples:

  • Manifold
  • Manifest
  • Manifund

Other examples:

  • Brighter
  • Constellation, Far AI
  • Lightcone
  • Lantern Bioworks
  • Chris Deneke: Gene Editing
  • Personal assistance seems very in demand
  • Chris Lakin, Ida Mayer: coaching, productivity, therapy
  • Beeminder
  • LEARN
  • Ricki’s Trading Bootcamp; Ross & Max’s Poker Camp
  • Asterisk Magazine

Appendix

  • Wave: Why you should start a startup serving developing countries
    • (this post is the inverse of that)
  • YC’s RFPs
  • Fin Moorhouse’s list of ideas