

Ask HN: What pain point did Twitter solve? - rajacombinator

Entrepreneurs are often asked what pain point their product solves. (I think it is even on YC apps.) I think that&#x27;s a great question that can help clarify what a business is doing. But it got me wondering ... if you were pitching Twitter to a seed stage investor and they asked you what pain point it solved, what would you tell them?
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tptacek
It's valuable to broadcast a message to large numbers of people, but hard to
get people to tune in.

One way to mitigate that problem is to make messages cheaper to listen to, and
broadcasters cheaper to find and follow. In a medium more carefully optimized
for listeners, audience sizes will be sufficiently improved to make it worth
the extra effort demanded of broadcasters.

The result is a new kind of broadcast channel: one in which broadcasters don't
need to invest millions of dollars into to overcome the cost of acquiring
listeners (like television, or even news websites), so many many more
broadcasters can profitably use it; a virtuous cycle ensues where more
listeners are attracted, attracting more broadcasters, and on and on.

I don't think that was the original thesis of the site (original thesis:
"users will enjoy a site that lets them tell their friends what they're doing
right now"), but I do think that's where the value turns out to be.

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mindcrime
I'm going to go against the grain here and ask people to consider this: Maybe
Twitter doesn't "solve" _any_ "pain point" at all. IOW, maybe this whole
analogy with painkillers is flawed and not the best model for looking at the
world.

OK, yes, you can pretty much always twist and manipulate semantics and express
anything in terms of a "pain", but is something getting lost in translation? I
don't have the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about.

"What problem does your startup solve"? Important question, no doubt. But if
you go back to the "vitamin or painkiller" analogy, sometimes it's OK to be
the vitamin. And sometimes something becomes popular just because it's fun and
novel.

All of that said, what made Twitter so interesting? I think originally it was
the idea of a "near real time" way of distributing messages to a group,
coupled with the knowledge that A. the messages you _receive_ would be short,
so you could parse them quickly, and B. the messages you would be _composing_
would be limited, which meant that tweeting couldn't turn into too much work,
the way writing a blog post might.

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andretti1977
Twitter allows public mass-messaging better than any other media, but this was
just a feature before being a pain solution. Now it is also a pain solved for
some kind of people (politician for example need public mass-messaging so now
it is a pain it solves too but now, not at its beginning). I think maybe
twitter didn't solve any pain. That's it: you don't always have to solve
problems to get "success". Really, sometimes it's just because it's something
cool or amusing or new or becomes a fashion for some strange reasons.

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lmm
People enjoy that feeling of achievement when they've written a blog post. But
writing is hard. By limiting posts to 160 characters, we make blogging easier
but just as fulfilling.

(Though if you're asking about the historical pitch, I believe it was
originally about having a blog that people could follow on a dumbphone)

~~~
taprun
As someone that has not used Twitter much and often made fun of it, your
response was very close to my initial answer.

Thinking about it more though, I would say that Twitter should not be compared
to blogs. I think Twitter is more like IRC. Twitter is a simpler version of
IRC for the masses that can be used via dumb phones. Add in hash tags, search
and an easy to use filtering system, and Twitter actually seems pretty good.

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flavmartins
Twitter allows you to interact anyone in the world (that is on Twitter, of
course).

I'm going to NYC for the first time this week. I want to eat at places where
the locals eat, not what's trendy on the Web or TV. How did I get
recommendations?

Twitter.

I reached out to NY food bloggers and they happily responded with tips.

I don't need to get introduced by someone else. I don't need to personally
know them or "friend them". I don't need to pay for 3rd party services to hunt
down a phone number or an email address.

People often miss on what I think is one of the most fantastic features of
Twitter.

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palidanx
Reading Hatching Twitter ([http://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-
Friendship-Betr...](http://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-
Betrayal/dp/1591846013)) will give you a more historical and give a bit of
context of how they evolved to where they are now.

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benologist
Twitter solved phone-to-internet and one-to-many communication when text
message communication was expensive, internet access from a phone was limited
and expensive, and free public wifi was rare.

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kappaloris
A high throughput (via length limit) communication method where you don't have
to specify the recipient(s).

It's a good way of broadcasting news in realtime.

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firebones
1) ESP with anyone you care to follow. 2) As someone tweeted today
(paraphrased): a venue to directly scream at famous and important people.

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gregcohn
Twitter made it easy to post in broadcast mode, as well as fun and easy to
consume the broadcasts of others.

