I get an average of 3-4 students a week pitching me their startup ideas every week.  I've found some common themes among the folks that send me their ideas. Selling to Google/Microsoft/Facebook is not a revenue stream. This might be a possible exit strategy, but it is not a source of income.  If this is how you intend to make money.... don't bother sending me your pitch.  If I see that anywhere in your email, I will stop reading. Selling ads is not a revenue stream. Sure, there are lots of websites that make money doing this.  There's also a plethora that don't.  Find a way to monetize by adding value.  If you're going to sell job postings, you'd better have the traffic to charge for them.  Alternately your app/service should attract a certain niche that will make those job postings more valuable.  This is the 37Signals model.  Here's where they sell their products.  And here is where they sell their job postings.  They're able to charge $300 for 30 days because they attract a certain kind of job seeker.  If you want to hire someone that's interested in Ruby on Rails, this is one of the places you go.  Make something cool, and then charge people for it. It's a lot easier than you think to sell one subscription for $30/month than to sell ads and hope that they can get shown to 100,000 people or hope that they get clicked on by 100 people every month. Focus. Don't try and solve every problem at first.  You'll get distracted and you will lose focus.  When you first start out, focus on one problem and solve it.  And solve it really really well.  Don't worry if you've got competition, if someone's already doing it.  Just do it better.  You don't just have to believe you're better, you have to actually be better.  Facebook didn't just believe they were better than MySpace.  They were actually better.  Hulu and TiVo didn't just believe they were better than cable or satellite.  They were actually better.  Find that one thing or those two things, and become actually better. It's best to be an expert at one thing, no matter how small, than to be average at lots of things.