Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius? |
Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius? |
I completely missed the value of having decent moderator tools (which no site had back in the early 2000's), and a passionate group of moderators who cared very deeply about the integrity of the site.
Humanity is continuing to prove itself as capable of dealing with each other harmoniously and we are seeing great businesses emerge that are benefitting the masses as a result.
Interesting, now, in 2015, Facebook is a worse tool for me than it was in 2009. Any tool that my boss is on, my aunt is on, my old high school classmates is on, etc, has lost any coherence to it. I now have to obey standard internet security: anything posted on the internet or on Facebook in my real name has to be treated like it is on my resume. Because, de facto, it is.
His idea was to set up an online "home delivery" service for restaurants (including those that don't do home delivery but do take-away). He got a shitty mark because the lecturer thought the idea was "stupid".
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/deliveroo https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/just-eat https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hungryhouse-co-uk
https://www.menulog.com.au/ https://www.deliveryhero.com.au/
There's a bit of a story behind that one because my one time Canadian accountant came to me with this idea and I told him I thought it was crap but also (fortunately) told him to ignore me because nobody knows what will and will not work online.
He went through with it and does very well indeed.
I guess there's a market for anything.
Now I look back with regret.
I left the place right before Y2K, a flaming wreck of burnout, dead set on going to college for a CS degree. My friends and coworkers at the time were emphatic that I should take the system I had designed, reimplement it, and sell it. Of course, this was way before cloud and SaaS and all that stuff. I thought it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard; I couldn't imagine any other company needing and using the same (or a similar) system. And regardless, I was so burned out from it that I couldn't bear the thought of turning around and doing it all again. What can I say... I was young. :-)
Niku was founded in '97, which CA renamed Clarity in '05 after purchasing the company for $350M. Salesforce.com launched in late '99 and currently has a market cap of about $50B. If I were a little smarter (or more hardworking), or if I had met a few different people along the way... who knows? Or maybe I wasn't so unique in creating something like this, and the Niku, Salesforce.com, and others were the ones who simply saw the opportunity for what it was.
One other idea. Yo. I don't think anyone's really using it to its potential. Apart from the "Yo" feature, the idea of it as a notification broker is fantastic. I still carry bets that it won't hit "critical mass/momentum" in its current form. Way too clunky.
The concept still doesn't appeal to me as much as a lot of people (though I still use it), but I was clearly wrong about its potential for mass appeal.
Then I went on vacation to the US and was considering buying one... A few good YouTube videos showing how to use them creatively helped as well. These videos weren't made by the company itself, but by passioned YouTubers who didn't have a camera man.
I was in an Austin Ruby meetup when these guys came in who had a music startup (this was when everyone and his dog had a music startup). They were hiring for the startup, and they presented this side project they had. They described it as "basically your myspace status, only that's all there is".
Thought the music startup was dumb and Twitter made it look smart. They were hiring. I could have been a really early hire…
Back in 1995, it seemed obvious that any idiot with a text editor could write their own HTML page. Why would they want to pay someone else to do it?
I still cringe when I think that a friend interviewing with a web design agency asked my opinion and I told her that this HTML authoring business had no basis, and she turned down the job.
Secret, for example.
I do find it interesting how so many prominent companies grew out of ideas or founders that were deeply connected to the P2P boom of the early 2000s. Facebook (Mark Zuckerburg worked on a media player before Harvard and a filesharing network in parallel with Facebook, and its first COO Sean Parker co-founded Napster). Uber (Travis Kalanick ran a P2P company that was acquired by Akamai). Skype and Rdio, both by the founders of Kazaa. Y-Combinator (RTM's research at MIT was in distributed hash-tables). Bitcoin, which builds on P2P algorithms for exchanging transactions. Bittorrent is now widely used legitimately for distributing software updates.
Then, you already mentioned BitTorrent. P2P filesharing wasn't a terrible idea at all, and BitTorrent is evidence.
Same applies to the little-lamented Color, which was universally panned on here for more than just the excess represented by a $30m initial fundraise.
As for companies I thought could be huge and didn't really make it, a 4x return on Hunch was pretty unspectacular. I think there's a huge company waiting to happen in the [meta]event search space, but that's not borne out by the companies that have tried it.
(Without the fallacy of the genius idea, this thread would be "Ask HN: What's the worst startup idea you've heard, which someone executed amazingly well?")
I couldn't have been more wrong.
But Instagram's value proposition is subtler than Facebook's...I remember that Hipstamatic and its filters was all the rage among my amateur cameraphotographer friends...it was so dominant that Pulitzer Prize-winner Damon Winter of the New York Times used it in his war photography [1].
But IIRC, Hipstamatic did not at all care about the concept of social networking...although perhaps what made it lose to Instagram was the fact that it cost money. I was very slow to take up Instagram because I keep an active Flickr (pro/paid) account...but now I see that Instagram's main value is not attractive photos, but its minimalist, sleek social features. The appeal of phone photography in general is that it constrains the amount of thinking/editing you can do...Instagram's filters ease the tradeoff of quality/ease and its networking features reduce even further the friction of showing the world what you just saw. And you have few options to elaborate on the photo, other than a caption and some tagging...I still like using Facebook, but Instagram works very well on its own because it's not just a filtered visual view, but its constraints limit the kind of things that piss people off about Facebook...for example, it's considerably more difficult to get into political arguments on Instagram.
[1] http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...
Facebook is just too full of garbage that is irrelevant to my interests as well as stupid ads. Instagram, on the other hand, is still basically ad free, and has interesting content I care about, easily consumed without having to dig through tons of cruft that I don't care about.
http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-...
Formerly respected news outlets reproducing others' 140 character comments as a substitute for actually asking subject experts specific questions.
I understand the rationale for reproducing Twitter comments when they come from someone directly connected with the story. I can even see how comments from people claiming to be involved or particularly pithy statements might make it into a "breaking news" feed. What I don't understand is why news outlets with loftier ambitions than Buzzfeed think tweets like these: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33656579 is substantial enough to constitute a commentary piece.
(Or worse still, the obituary complete with "@randomdave said 'RIP U were a legend'")
Sadder? Or anger inducing? I'm convinced the reason twitter succeeded is that it wound up being an echo chamber for the outraged. A perfect platform for trolls. You can't explain anything sufficiently in 140 characters, so dialectic is out. The fallback is usually rhetoric (appeals to emotion), with anger being the most effective.
The end result is you have an internet shouting match where everybody is trying to piss off everyone else and nobody can clarify anything. It's the digital embodiment of CGP Grey's video "This video will make you angry[0]".
Well, at least it's a step up from bumper stickers.
Of course, more often they're boiling political agendas down to 140 characters, or worse, splitting a page-length message up into 17 chunks tagged (1/17). C'est la vie.
Wikipedia is more successful than most people could have imagined in generating quantity, and better than most would have thought in suppressing outright vandalism, but quality is far behind what people are lead to believe from rather superficial studies comparing heavily-trafficked pages against only slightly better-written and more outdated conventional encyclopedias. But there was a time when encyclopedias were expected to be authoritative, as opposed to where Wikipedia has excelled, which is regularly being the first remotely useful result in Google.
Unless you want to suggest there is literally no other way on a device capable of running the YO app to send a message to a group of people (which would be an absurd thing to assert), then I will stand by my statement. If it's useful, it's useful in spite of its own stupidity, not because of its own brilliance.
The original was http://waitersonwheels.com, which I used in the 1990's. It started as a catalog-based service, which waiter.com knocked off and improved.
It's not a defensible business model unless there's some exclusivity agreements with restaurants on the menu. (too tasty to resist.)
EDIT: It may be too late. It has already had major drops in the last quarter, and is down almost 50% off its highs from 2014.
I think it is a great way to stay up-to date on what happens in startup-land and in open source, the granularity with which you can follow people still fascinates me. Seeing that 95% of what active human accounts post is pretty useless, I don't see justification of a $20bn+ market cap, especially without growth.
PS: They've recently cranked up ads, next earnings report could surprise ...
Current profitability is irrelevant. What matters is net future (discounted) profitability. People who malign companies for not currently being profitable apparently don't understand this, but investors do, and the market certainly does.
Many great companies are massively unprofitable while in their early growth stage, then become massively profitable in their later years, and are valued accordingly. If you can exchange $1B in profits this year for (say) $2B in profits next year, you'd be a fool (assuming current discount rates) not to make the trade.
Thanks, man. It was a brilliant call.