
Why Starting Justin.tv Was A Really Bad Idea, But I’m Glad We Did It Anyway - icey
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/starting-justin-tv/
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cfinke
That was the first guest post I've ever read on Techcrunch that was genuinely
interesting and didn't read like droning self promotion. Thanks, Justin!

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benologist
I'd go one further .... it was the first post on TC in a very long time that
was genuinely interesting full stop.

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staunch
The trolls on TC said one reason for the new brand is because VCs own almost
all of Justin.tv. Is Socialcam owned by Justin.tv Inc?

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justin
The trolls are rampant and ill-informed. Socialcam is a Justin.tv project
under a new brand and all of the founders are still with the company.

Only someone without a functional understanding of basic math could look at
our funding history and believe that the founders own less than 10% of the
company.

~~~
staunch
To be fair to the trolls it's fairly common for companies to do funding rounds
that are not publicly announced.

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phil
Justin captures the main thing I remember from seeing these guys early on. It
wasn't entirely clear what they were doing, but they were just having so much
fun, you knew they would figure it out.

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benologist
I really liked that. All the uncertainty / lack of specific and detailed plans
is something I can definitely relate to, it's nice to see someone as
successful as you guys never knew exactly where you were going till you got
there.

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justin
We still might not know what we are doing... you never know.

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zach
There's no provable answer anyhow, because it's an inherently subjective
matter.

Since circumstance can make a fool or a hero of any of us anyway, as you say,
you never know.

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sage_joch
I remember the sale of Kiko being a frontpage story in Reddit's early days.
I'm still a huge Reddit fan but it's amazing how much the community has
changed since then.

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badkins
A really good read. More proof that a great team is worth more than a great
idea.

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vaksel
isn't the whole lets make a platform kinda obvious...is that really what you
were thinking(or not thinking) at the time or is it just a PR spun story to
get coverage.

it's like the Goog guys designing Google just so they could better find their
own stuff, only to realize that other people might like to use it too

I mean, even in the story you are talking about mass producing the hardware,
when you were supposedly just doing the show

~~~
justin
Yeah, I think it was pretty obvious, which is why in retrospect it seems
stupid that we weren't pursuing it in the beginning. But I distinctly remember
that after launch we debated which direction we should go (options included
becoming a live (or not live) video cdn, the live platform, or trying to spin
off multiple shows that we produced ourselves).

We were talking about mass hardware production to support shows that we
directly produced or contracted.

To be honest, I wish that I was able to go back and tweak our execution: if
the Justin.tv show was just a stunt, I would have had a platform ready to go
when we launched it instead of waiting six months to build it!!

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jeromec
It didn't look like there was no vision from an external perspective. It
looked just as described, like Justin.tv was launched to build out a huge live
video platform.

~~~
justin
We tried hard to make it seem like we knew what we were doing :)

It was a challenge.

~~~
jeromec
You guys did a great job. I remember watching the GoDaddy advertisement banner
going up in the "startup apartment headquarters", and at one point you
following a reporter who was covering you out to her news van, then talking
shop about video broadcasting. I remember thinking wow these guys totally
raised the bar on what it means to create technology for a web startup. And it
looked like everyone was having so much fun too. Fantastic.

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vannevar
There's another reason why justin.tv was a bad idea and that is, far from
being a new form of entertainment, lifecasting had already been done to death
by the time it came on the scene. There were even two major Hollywood movies
built around the idea. And predictably, justin.tv in its original form did
fail, but in the process opened up a new opportunity based more on a 'long
tail' strategy.

This is a great example of how funding and connections are more important than
a good idea. It gives you the luxury of changing direction if something
doesn't work. And ultimately, the proximate cause of every business failure is
running out of money. The lesson here is to gain the trust of wealthy patrons
who are willing to give you a $50K check just to see how you fail.

~~~
justin
I disagree that our idea was bad because lifecasting had been done before.
First of all, you are calling it "lifecasting" because we thought of and
popularized that term, and the fact that we were similar to two movies didn't
prevent the idea from getting a massive amount of attention because it
captured the interest of people and the media. Almost every idea has been
"done before", but winners often emerge by innovating in an existing space
(Google, Dropbox, Facebook, the list continues to infinity).

I said this earlier today to a friend: the most important things are team and
perseverance. While it is true that we had the luxury of great advisors and
investors who believed in the team from the beginning, many of my friends
(Airbnb comes to mind) have gone from a great idea that NO ONE believed in,
stuck with it, and got the funding later.

Connections and funding cannot save a team that isn't strong, and often times
just set up a larger failure.

~~~
vannevar
It wasn't just the two movies, it was Jenny and everyone who came after her.
You're right that it got attention, but there was frankly no reason to expect
it to given it was a trend that had already played out once.

I agree with you that funding and connections are not sufficient. But it is
the limiting factor in the sense that there are more strong perserverant teams
out there than there is money to service them all. And a team's strength is
not a constant: most teams are only as strong as the list of mistakes they've
made. Having funding gives you the luxury of making the mistakes and getting
strong.

Perseverance is important but what it means depends on the context. A trust
fund baby who keeps trying new businesses doesn't have much to lose, while a
guy with a family to support who uses all his free time to work on his startup
is making a huge sacrifice. And while I believe that perseverance is generally
rewarded in many ways, the likelihood of it being rewarded with massive wealth
is greatly overestimated.

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alexophile
I guess this was the answer to my question:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2149968>

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trustfundbaby
mixergy interview in the works?

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Aegean
why does he say they failed?

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dkokelley
The original idea (a form of entertainment by 'lifecasting' Justin) wasn't
sustainable on several levels. Of course, the company Justin.tv is alive and
well, but with a different game plan than when they started out.

