Actually the world probably does need "another way to connect with merchants." The way you can convince yourself of that is to ask: have all the ways of connecting with merchants been invented? "Connecting with merchants" is such a large category that the answer is surely no. In fact it takes some effort to find sentences of the form "All the ways of doing x have been invented" that one can feel certain are true.
It's certainly not true for photo-sharing applications, because that's not even a real category. Images are a fundamental medium, like text. We don't lump Twitter, email, and blogging together as "text-sharing applications." The only reason we do with photos is that it's only recently that smartphones have brought a lot of photos online. But a huge number of what we would now call "photo-sharing applications" remain to be invented. Ditto for text-sharing applications incidentally.
I think the point is more that "finding another way to connect with merchants" really isn't that important or useful in the scale of things. The problem has been artificially created so that it can be solved for profit.
Solving problems that humanity really faces with tangible innovations rather than inventing slightly different ways to top slice cash using virtual real estate is much more important.
A million shitty rails apps yet nothing which truly changes the human experience.
My father once said (whilst slaving over PDS7.1 writing yet another payroll system in the late 80s): "I feel guilty sitting here taking money from people for this. It genuinely doesn't improve their lives."
Believe me, I'm familiar with the idea that there are two kinds of ideas, big ones that change the world, and little ones that merely make money. But this distinction isn't borne out empirically. In fact the space of ideas is a very highly connected graph. You can get almost anywhere in a few hops. And that means it's almost impossible to tell at first where an idea could lead. Big things start as little things. And conversely starting with a "big idea" is often a mistake, because when people have such ideas they tend to be pretty blurry.
Empirically (unless you're a government) the way to do something big is to start with something small but definite, then keep pushing its scope.
If your goal is to get to big + definite, it's easier to start with definite and add big than to start with big and add definite.
I agree with this 100% but would add that once you understand this concept, it becomes possible to prune down the space of potential ideas to ones that you can most imagine could lead to a larger scope. I realize this is often hard to see up front, but it seems more like a way to rule out short-sighted ideas completely than to decide which ones are most likely to turn into world-changing things.
It is with this lens that I was finally able to come up with an idea for a company that was actually interesting to me. Before, everything I came up with was pretty one-dimensional. I couldn't get excited about building them because I couldn't ever come up with a satisfactory answer to "What else could/should this company do?" I found it hard to find the motivation to work on something that I didn't see growth potential in. Once I landed on an idea that had room for expansion, the code, designs and ideas just started to come.
> I'm familiar with the idea that there are two kinds of ideas, big ones that change the world, and little ones that merely make money.
I have a better dichotomy: striving to make a difference, vs striving to make money. Those who strive to make money often end up making a difference, but the consequences are often not pretty.
By the way, didn't you say yourself that the purpose of a startup should be to improve people's lives? That's good, even if the improvement you seek is small. From there, one "just" needs to know what one goals are, what one should do to achieve them, then do that.
The sales from your Father's payroll system paid the taxes which paid the salaries of rocket scientists and medical researchers.
There is all too often an indulgent strain of self flaggelating snobbery on hacker news about what matters and what doesn't. "what matters" is the subject for an entire branch of relativistic theses and not an absolute designed to hold aspiring entrepreneurs to.
> ""finding another way to connect with merchants" really isn't that important or useful in the scale of things"
No, it really is enormously important. See for example eBay, Amazon (with third party sellers), Yelp, and Craigslist, all of which have created enormous societal change by changing the way consumers find and engage merchants.
Imagine if we removed all of the above from existence today!
The problem is not that "connecting with merchants" is a relatively unimportant field (it is very important), but rather that most of the startups who claim to be in this space actually aren't really.
If I had a dollar for every time I've been introduced to a service that "connects consumers with merchants" and find out they're really just another daily deals site. Or worse, a daily deals site that doesn't even have their own deals, instead they just aggregate.
How much are they actually improving the "connecting with merchants" experience? Marginal at best, and their performance shows. They don't have a product, they have a feature nobody asked for, solves nobody's problem, and they're wondering why they're pivoting constantly.
And this is the problem I see with so many startups floating out there right now. Forget moral judgments on how "humanity-worthy" their fields are, I'll settle for startups that actually solve someone's problem and actually produce a compelling product.
If you find yourself saying "we're like X, but...", just stop.
If eBay, Amazon, Yelp, and Craigslist all disappeared today the only people who would be really affected are on the selling side of those services. That would have some ripple effects to be sure, but most consumers would, at most, be mildly inconvenienced.
When you divide the world into "selling side" and "buying side" in that way, you end up defining most of the world as passive consumers. Part of what people like us value about the Internet is the way it disintermediates people, (very) gradually leveling the playing field between institutional sellers and individuals.
To say that new ideas on connecting buyers and sellers are unimportant is to surrender commerce and thus much of modern life to Walmart. Good if you want to pay a lot less for mustard, ketchup, and low-quality lawnmowers. Bad if you ever thought of starting a business or selling something via Kickstarter.
I doubt the fall of Amazon would be as slight as you say it is, but for the others I agree that it might ruin your day/week, but it wouldn't end your life.
The loss of Craigslist and eBay would be deeply felt by normal people. But it sure would be good for huge companies that profit by locking up the retail channel and ensuring that most durable goods are seen as disposable.
I actually think that you're both missing the point. Marius isn't arguing that every startup needs to change the world. He's arguing that if you're going to be making something, you should be making something new. I think pg touched on this in his post.
The problem is that most of the time, startups who say that they're inventing a new way really aren't. Look at all the Facebook-like attempts at social networks. Or all the Farmville clones in the social games space. The vast majority of those products are basically "me too" attempts that really haven't invented anything.
Marius' point isn't that people should assume that all the ways of doing (insert thing here) have been invented. His point is that if you're going to challenge an already established space, you need to actually invent something new.
Look at Paypal, Square and Stripe. All three, at a very high level, solve the same problem: They allow people to pay other people. But each one had a very unique pitch at the beginning: Paypal was the first to allow people to pay each other over the internet. Square, through a rather nifty little hardware dongle, allows people to take payments on their smartphones. Stripe provides a full API for developers to integrate into their products(and cut out the middleman of Paypal or Google Checkout).
People idolize the breakthroughs but tend to discount the 99% of the work that comes afterwards to turn the initial breakthrough into something fantastic. The first versions of the internet, car and plane were pretty poor and unusable by today's standards, it took a considerable amount of time and effort to make them into what they are today.
Whether or not "finding another way to connect with merchants" or connect merchants with users is "important" is pretty subjective, wouldn't you agree? Considering that the most well known options out there have essentially degraded into yoga/spa coupon services, and have left both vendors and users pretty dissatisfied, I'd say there is plenty of room for improvement.
Also, have you considered that it may be a different class of problem solver with entirely different skill sets that should be solving these "real problems"? I think that trying to find a way to better connect vendors and customers is a problem that I could potentially solve. Getting people into outer space? Not so much.
Furthermore, I would argue that overall, something trivial like facebook has had a greater impact on "the human experience" thus far, than Space X or Tesla motors. Maybe not a popular opinion, but it's probably true.
This sort of selfishness is really not something you should expect people to applaud. We all do things to improve our lives, but thinking only of ourselves is nothing at all to be proud of.
He never claimed he was proud of his selfishness or expected people to applaud. What he's claiming is that others shouldn't look down upon it. There's a difference.
pg has a lot invested in the idea of startups. He doesn't have anything invested in what they create. That's the disconnect you're seeing here. That the startup world permits such a disconnect is another problem entirely.
To downvoters: how many times have you heard that startups are about people? Why does YC take people who don't have an idea yet? "What you create" isn't really relevant here. It's just a vector, it lacks standalone value.
>My father once said (whilst slaving over PDS7.1 writing yet another payroll system in the late 80s): "I feel guilty sitting here taking money from people for this. It genuinely doesn't improve their lives."
Your father did not see the big picture and your notions are wrong. If it did not improve someone's life (even if only by a small amount) - then they would not justify paying your father to write it.
Most of the time innovation is an evolutionary process. The software that your father worked on probably added some features that are still in use today. Each generation of software improves on the last (iteratively). Eventually things evolve and do change the human experience.
Let me give you an example. I am self employed and have several employees. I use payroll software but I am not an accountant or book keeper by any means. Without the advancements and features in this software, I would have to pay someone to do this for me. This may not seem like a big deal to do, but if payroll software did not have the features and automation level that it does today, I would have to pay MUCH more to have it done by an accountant. I work on a narrow margin and this may put me out of business altogether. So I certainly think that payroll software evolving over the decades has changed this humans experience and MAY even enable a leap in innovation that comes out of my business - partly thanks to your father.
Why does every startup have to be something innovative? I say that even if it is a copycat - it will probably have some new ideas to throw into the pool. Things that have not been thought of before. Lessons will be learned from their successes and mistakes. Lessons that those who follow them can build on. Even if the business fails, the ideas it contributed will live on and help with the evolution.
It is not conceivable that more than 5% or people will have a groundbreaking innovative idea. This has been the same throughout time. That does not mean that we should not try though.
BTW - I find that people with attitudes like the author and you are usually the ones who sit around and do nothing. Nothing that is but criticize and find fault with others ideas and efforts. Do you know where the human race would be if everyone was like you and not like those you are criticizing?
I think there is a good question in here somewhere:
Is it better for startups to monte carlo (and/or) genetic algorithm style variations on a theme to find the best way, or is it better try find something truly different to create and push the state of the art into a new area?
And of course, that brings up the meta-question: did I just propose a false dilemma, are the two things really different?
I read and re-read this article but couldn't detect that it actually gave any insight at all. All the article distilled down to was "make a startup that is successful and not one that fails". This is not something that I believe is opaque to those involved.
The author finishes with the statement "The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants" which I think sums up exactly why this article is reactive rant. Speak to any merchant and they will tell you that there is one thing they care above above all else and that is customers. Those customers are hard and expensive to find and merchants desperately require scalable and efficient ways to find them.
Eric Reis used to have a great piece in one of his talks in which he compared Ali G pitching his Ice Cream Glove (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs) to an advert for a blanket with sleeves. As Eric said, one of the two of those is a $50M/year company and the other is Ali G. Pitch them though and it's not immediately clear which would be which.
Discovery comes from exploration and most lucrative discoveries tend to come from the most risky experimentation.
(I remember it well. It was one of the articles I used to test on of the iterations of our book generator when we were first producing http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned. I must have read this 100 times :).
I think it's useful to think of ideas you could pursue in kind of a 2x2 matrix. You have revolutionary ideas and evolutionary ideas. You have high-capital ideas and low-capital ideas.
If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing revolutionary, high-capital ideas.
That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market, or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of potential acquirers in the existing market participants.
I love to rip on 'social startups' as much as any good hacker, and I basically start my day with a cup of coffee and the 'startup guys' video.
reading this article, though, something clicked for me. why does it matter that there are startups out there that are constantly pivoting or not producing real products? what is the loss?
one statement I've seen put forward is that the startup energy would capture smart people who could be our next Feynman or Shannon and instead of having them do real science, we figure out how to get them to click on ads. I can appreciate this fear, however, I've spent a lot of time on university campuses lately and I've met a very large number of very smart and very motivated young people who are getting educated in real science and have a passion to go into the world and change it. They won't go figure out how to get people to click ads.
is the fear that these little pivoting media startups will seriously suck all of the spare cash out of the economy and we will wind up doing nothing but producing Twitter clones? if you produce this analysis, in my opinion, you should step back and consider that maybe you're too close to the bubble.
so what's the harm with having the brogrammers produce products that no one wants to use? do you have a backlog of awesome work that you wish was being done, could be done by these constantly pivoting wunderkinds, but isn't? maybe you should start a company!
Well it depends a bit when you pivot. I'm guessing most people pivot before actually coming out with their product, simply because they don't know what they really want and they have no idea how to do it either.
Pivoting is good when you're already out there with your idea and then understand that you need to adjust to your customers needs. It is not when you don't really know what to do and just experiment with other peoples money to find out what YOU want.
So, how do these two statements jibe and form part of an sort of coherent argument?
Some other guys had an idea, received validation from two potential clients, raised funding, hired a lot of people, built a product and discovered nobody really wants to pay for it.
Why does it feel like the lean startup movement has given a lot of people the license to produce crap?
The lean startup principles are pretty much specifically against going out, raising funding, hiring a lot of people, and then building something nobody wants. The whole point of Customer Development is to not do all of that until you've validated the market for whatever it is you are proposing to build.
And then you have this statement:
On the other side you have teams producing amazing products. Take for example the Pebble smart watch, the DoubleRobotics telepresence robots, Appfog free PaaS hosting, SmugMug photo hosting, SixthSense or any random project on Kickstarter.
Where the author seems infatuated with a list of products with no commentary whatsoever on whether or not they are successful in the market. You can produce a great product and still fail to have a successful business. So what point is this article really trying to make?
If you’re in a startup looking forward to your next pivot, please just stop. The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants or an app that adds double rainbows to blurry pictures.
And again, we have to sentences that have absolutely no connection to one another.
This article comes off as a mish-mash of interesting thoughts, jumbled together, when the author's point seems to reduce to "work on big, world changing ideas. Where's my flying car?" And that's not a bad sentiment, but this article just seems to ramble all over the place to get there.
It's also important to note that SpaceX was not Elon Musk's first venture. I'm sure success with PayPal gave him the confidence, clout, and partial financing to take on such an ambitious endeavor.
Producing something meaningful or awesome doesn't solve any of the problems the author describes. Plenty of people build outstanding things that nobody will pay for or care about. Building something "great" doesn't guarantee anything.
Sounds like the author is advocating "if you build it they will come", which only works in Iowa if you are hallucinating about dead baseball players and abducting James Earl Jones.
I think I'm going to write a counter-opinion post sometime called "Everyone poops" about how the advice given here scores an 11/10 on my trite-meter.
Readers have by now heard their start-up isn't solving an important problem by now - that doesn't help them start something that does. "Advice" of this nature is just the author procrastinating from solving the same ambitious problems he seems so enthusiastic about. If your going to change the world, you need to stop giving a shit about the inevitable dogdating sites of others and just do it yourself.
Start-ups are the new grad school, which was the new peace core. It's what you do when you don't know what else to do. That in between stage, where you don't have a next step planned but are anxious and need to do something. Back in the day, you'd join the peace core. It was something productive to do, noble and at least you weren't sitting on the couch collecting dust. Then when the peace core wasn't pleasing, people would go to grad school upon graduation from undergrad. You got your shiny new bachelors degree and no path, maybe no opportunities. So, you'd saddle up for grad school because it bought you more time.
Now, all those would be peace core grad students are starting start-ups because it buys you time. They disguise it as 'wanting to change the world' but it's really just buying time until you figure stuff out. This is why there is abundance of shit in the start up world. Too many folks just buying themselves time.
It seems like a lot of people are building a product just because it's cool to build a product and they somehow forget to actually provide value. Then they're surprised when it fails. I don't get it.
I've gotten to the point that any article that decries people making startups because they don't copy Elon Musk is an instant bozo-bit flip for me. It is not possible for some guy on the street to start a rocketry startup. Only an idiot would hand some guy on the street the requisite billions. There's some bite in the "photo sharing" accusations, but that doesn't generalize to all low-capital network-based startups, and trying to imply otherwise is definitely weak thinking. You have to start somewhere if you want to accrue capital to take on those sorts of challenges.
Sorry, that was my point, but upon re-reading I agree I was not clear. There are many little computer/network/internet startup niches where one can build good businesses still out there.
This is terrible advice. When you decide to create something, the first thing....it's probably going to be crap. It's only by creating, and shipping, over and over again that you begin to learn how to create products. Often times, in fact most of the time, people are going to create a bunch of crap before they finally make the gem that's going to be awesome.
That's not the tldr I got from this at all. The solution to having bad ideas is to stop and ask yourself if an idea is bad before you pour months or years with of work into it. Everybody has bad ideas, and everybody has a few good ones. Filter your ideas, instead of jumping on the first idea you come up with just because you want to found a startup, any startup. Don't waste your time.
No. They work on ideas they never really tried to think through sufficiently to know if those ideas are good or not.
And this is very, very common, at least in people I happen to know. It's hard to look at yourself objectively, we all know that - do you think that looking at your ideas objectively is easier?
Everyone out there needs some kind of cult, with which they can associate. This happens in every sphere of life. After the information revolution, everyone is exposed to the major success stories in the current times. So it becomes really easy to fall in a cult associated with those success stories. This is not a weakness nor it is bad. It is just how we are.
When you add above phenomena with easy access to development tools and free tutorials that can teach you how to make a simplistic app in a matter of days, then what follows is adaptation/modulation of currently successful ideas on a grand scale. This is what we're a seeing right now. Everyone thinks they can make a social app and make it big, because since the success of Facebook, even when many startups have failed to get going on the social front, there a still a few who've made it big and that is just enough to strengthen the cult. So as long as we don't see a real disruption, kind of a wake up call from the sleep, the prevalent cult of the time would sustain and keep sucking in a fraction of the intellectual talent on Earth at any given time.
But we don't need to worry. As Scott Adams says, the advance of human civilization has always been due to a minority and not because of the majority.
The majority will keep going through the motions of our current times. While a select few would lead us to new directions.
How to: Stop producing shit
1. Produce 10 shit ideas each day
2. Throw them away
3. ???
4. Profit!
TBH I actually agree with these 4 steps, but they're exactly the reason people should continue producing shit. It may not make you rich this time around (it could have the opposite effect) and may not have a huge impact, but there's a basis to the 10,000 hours rule, and you're working off some of those hours (or, in oldschool parlance: you're learning from your mistakes).
The value is in producing ordinary work, but being able to recognize why it's ordinary, and to improve upon your mistakes (in the idea, in the implementation and in the execution) the next time around. Usually, the first time painters pick up a brush, their work is shit; the first time musicians pick up an instrument, their work is shit; same goes for developers. It's not a reason to not pick up the brush - to tell someone to stop sucking and start being awesome isn't really advice. I think that this advice is better:
Practice, practice, practice.
It's much better to be constantly producing shit (and learning) than just to sit around and consume it, and it's not a case of deciding "oh, hey, maybe this time I'll make something good, just for the sake of it".
I appreciate the sentiment but I don't think it is quite as simple as imploring people to focus on solving actual problems. The creative spirit isn't quite as straightforward as that nor is everyone capable of that 'Eureka!' moment.
Also many people will focus on building clones of existing websites because it will help them to improve and develop their skills.
Also, on a related note, would you say that cherry.ee is solving a real problem?
While I understand the creative spirit isn't always normal, I'd guess the OP is saying if you can't think of a real problem to solve then don't put your (valuable) energy and time into crap.
True - although this does rather increase the irony of the OP being involved as co-founder of what appears on first glance to be a daily deals website. I'm not saying it's crap but I'm not sure it's solving a 'real problem' of the type alluded to in the OP's post.
thank you, thank you, I've been wanting to write something similar for a while now, but have been advised not to, because of my tone.
I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not.
There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie, i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three simple questions they all fail to answer:
1. where is the value?
2. what's your competitive advantage?
3. who's your target and how are you planning to make money.
just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really care, as i just need to build up some funds."
let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential to make a shitload of money.
But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones.
But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.
It's kind of hard to cite Elon Musk in an argument against building ways for merchants to connect to customers. How do you think Elon got the capital to make SpaceX and Tesla possible? Those are his second act.
True, but just the act of forcing yourself to come up with 10 new ideas, seems like something that could be valuable. In fact, that's probably the most useful part of this article.
I might just give it a try, to see how it goes. I'll start a list of ideas, and try to add 10 new (unique) ones to it every day. I'm guessing after about day 2, it'll be hard to come up with 10 new unique ideas, that aren't just ridiculous.
By day 3, it'll probably look like:
1) Start a service to let people launch the remains of their deceased pets into orbit.
2) an Android app that makes Farting noises (probably already exists)
3) a YCombinator clone
4) Something that combines the best elements of Slashdot, XKCD, 4chan, and Ebay.
5) An AS/400 compatible RPG environment, to let businesses move off of (expensive) iSeries hardware and onto commodity Linux boxes without expensive porting costs.
2. internet forum designed for convenient arguing. Looking different from traditional boards. There would be one huge (potentialy infinite) 2d plane, and people can place their opinions somewhere in a rectangle, others can place their counterarguments nearby and connect it with arrows, there are other kinds of relations like "supports", "contradicts", "example of", "counterexample", "implies", etc. People can only vote on arrows, not on nodes.
I think there needs to be a differentiation between "stop producing sht and being happy with it as the final products" and "stop producing sht in general."
The first is a cancer on all startups/businesses/etc.
The second is a necessary step in evolving as a business, company and person. If you don't create something you're embarrassed about first, you'll probably never start at all. Very few people hit a grand slam their first day in the majors.
I agree with pg, all possible ways of "connecting with merchants" have not been invented and will forever be evolving. That said, what new kinds of e-commerce problems could be solved for merchants from photos uploaded with smartphones?
It's certainly not true for photo-sharing applications, because that's not even a real category. Images are a fundamental medium, like text. We don't lump Twitter, email, and blogging together as "text-sharing applications." The only reason we do with photos is that it's only recently that smartphones have brought a lot of photos online. But a huge number of what we would now call "photo-sharing applications" remain to be invented. Ditto for text-sharing applications incidentally.