I’m seeing lots of startups these days. Startups at events, pitches in emails, even pitches over SMS at 00:15 on Friday night (yeah – not recommended).

There are good ones in there, always, but I’d like to air a personal opinion. Almost always the ideas are small. Even if there’s the ambition level to create a great product for the global masses, what I would really like to see are big ideas. Are you really making a difference?

It’s like we’ve moved from digitization to widgetization. There are wonderful platforms out there that you can easily build products on – phone apps, web apps, mashups – but that doesn’t mean that everything should be just an extension of a platform. You’re trading off flexibility and reach of the idea to speed and reach of users, which definitely feels like a fair balance. But in addition to shoehorning ideas into smaller molds, widgetization also drives a long-term risk. If you build on an existing stack of platforms and create something very useful for that platform, the next update of that platform may well kill off your idea. Updates to Twitter, Facebook and iOS for example kill startups every time. If you are so awesome, why wouldn’t the platform provider just build that functionality into the platform? Of course you can aim for being that functionality, but aiming at a specific exit from the start is easier said than done.

Think outside the platform. Don’t be a widget. What are the really big things you’d want to do? How do you want to change the world? How do you want to affect people’s lives? I think I’ll start asking those questions more.

This post was originally posted on Marketing Sense. Go there to stay on top of my marketing-related posts.

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