
Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before? - eladgil
http://blog.eladgil.com/2013/04/who-cares-if-its-been-tried-before.html
======
obviouslygreen
If it's been tried before, you should absolutely care. The successes or
failures of those that have tried or done it before should be your first
lessons and they should inform your decisions (probably not define, but
definitely inform).

No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But
if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about _why_ it didn't work is
your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.

~~~
chacham15
Its not just about working or not. E.g. yahoo vs google. They both work, just
google works better. Myspace worked too, just facebook worked better. Even in
the cases where things have failed in the past, it can be difficult to figure
out why. Do you think that the iPhone was the first smartphone?

~~~
kristopolous
Reminds me of Youtube. On-demand video was the "flying car" of Silicon Valley
before them.

And what about Skype? The notion of a usable video-phone was pure fantasy for
years prior to them.

And now, Tesla is doing this again.

I can walk into my grocery store, use their smart-phone app to get discounts
on things I want to buy and then wave my phone at the self-checkout station to
pay for it all. What a nice future.

Reminds me of these commercials: <http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will>
. They seem so quaint now.

~~~
chacham15
I dont understand what point you are trying to make and how that may relate to
what I said. Are you trying to state that new things are invented? If so, I
think you missed my point which was that determining why things work now _can_
also be a difficult question.

~~~
kristopolous
I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples.

There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in
that are now ubiquitous.

It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to
succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid.

For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are
doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said
would never come.

Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g.,
[http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...](http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_recall)).
And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty
impressive.

~~~
nitrogen
This is a meta request: could you post the direct YouTube link instead of, or
in addition to, the link through your descriptive URL redirector? Despite the
descriptive nature of the URL, I still trust a direct link to YouTube a lot
more.

~~~
kristopolous
interesting. I just wrote that earlier that day. I was trying it for the first
time in that comment. Failure already! That was fast.

------
jacquesm
The only important factor in 'it's been tried before' is the 'before' bit, the
timing. If the timing was off and that's why the venture failed then re-doing
it makes sense. If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it
wasn't timing then it does not even count. But 'tried before and failed' will
stick for everything where timing wasn't a factor.

During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are
successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random
partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried
before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if
you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means
do a re-run.

~~~
chacham15
>The only important factor

I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The
main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but
rather execution.

~~~
ThomPete
Using a term like execution to describe why someone is successful is
tautological and IMO meaningless.

What's more important is to figure out what the actual execution consisted of.

For instance it's speculated that one of the reasons why Dropbox got a lot of
cover was that they where Mac based rather than Windows based.

Since a lot of tech-journalists have Macs it was easier for them to try out
and write about it:

"My earlier version of this post was about how Syncplicity and Dropbox
competed for mindshare back in 2008 when both companies launched. My initial
Quora post was about some of the reasons why, around our respective launches,
Dropbox was able to get more attention. 3 years ago, the press and early tech
adopters were starting to fall in love with Mac products. The average consumer
didn't have a Mac, but they were hot amongst influencers. Having a Windows-
only product dramatically limited the attention Syncplicity received from the
press. Today, I can't imagine launching a desktop app without Mac support.
When we started developing Syncplicity, it wasn't obvious that Mac support was
critical for press attention. Today both companies have Mac clients."

[http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-
tha...](http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-
programs-with-similar-functionality)

~~~
hobs
It is meaningless, but I think saying "it was that one thing" is also probably
being too specific, and there is a requirement for a happy medium.

If the answer was obvious (in hindsight even) usually it is imo, an
oversimplification of success.

Many times success isnt doing one thing right, its doing the right things
right enough, and the wrong things not often enough to piss everyone off.

------
jacoblyles
A market with a successful competitor can be a good sign of consumer demand.
However, a market with dozens or hundreds of failed/stagnant startups and no
standout winners is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad.

~~~
vbl
_cough_ Smartphone-based loyalty cards _cough_

~~~
jacoblyles
I had four or five examples ready to go, but I didn't say them because I know
people working on each of them :)

The startup fad that caught me was a phone app that helps you meet strangers
near you. I thought I was being unique and clever, but then a hundred other
startups came out in the space and failed spectacularly. The only one that
survived was grindr.

~~~
thrush
Hardly. Highlight is pretty active still.

------
sunnybunny
Saying that it's possible to nail a business that has been tried and failed
before is fine, but you had better understand why things are different now.

What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution
flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make
things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing,
and an opportunity has opened up now?

------
primo44
In his title, he needs to use "It's" as a contraction of "It Has". "its" is
the possessive for "belonging to it" -- always.

~~~
narsil
Its not that important.

------
nnq
There are two kinds of founders-inventors:

1\. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information
about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good
chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with
semi-successes

2\. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with
truly new ideas that _create markets for themselves_ , that bring solutions
that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first
place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to
sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and
"poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before"
market

If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP
is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to
fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why
they failed, you know...).

------
stcredzero
An important way to evaluate others, especially prospective colleagues, is to
observe how much information they use to come to a decision, and note what
they do with it.

Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know?
Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with
oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How
skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well
over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're
attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why
settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.)

However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.

------
mindcrime
I wish I could find this blog post now, but it seems to have disappeared...
but there's one by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that I found very influential
some time ago. It goes something like (paraphrased) "Don't be afraid to enter
a crowded market - just be better than everybody else".

Now, this may not _always_ be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it
applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having
competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better
than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products,
better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys
and you at least have a shot.

~~~
nitrogen
_"Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody
else."_

I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing,
then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping
palettes.

His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one
more.

------
wcdolphin
" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an
unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their
OS)."

Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in
their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an
argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely
not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows.

I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of
Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions
provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage
seems a rather large generalization.

------
thatthatis
It matters greatly if you're entering a thriving market, or a graveyard market
(one littered with tons of failed attempts and no reasonable success stories).

If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income
into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason
so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's
probably a reason they all failed too.

The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market
fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're
shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.

------
thetrumanshow
+1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of
times before. :)

I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet)
puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch.
Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills
in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the
jump is quite small.

And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I
wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed
up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.

------
joshbaptiste
yep, HN'ers especially are very well aware of this.. the only critiques I
usually see on "Show HN" is how does your X product differentiate from already
existing Y product, not oh this was done before don't bother etc...

------
EternalFury
This post has already been done before under the title "On the value of a
better mouse trap".

------
pbreit
I'm going to start posting this to all the HN bozos who comment to the affect
"hasn't this already been done" (after downvoting them, of course).

------
Millennium
Smart people care if it's been tried before. The only thing better than
learning from your mistakes is learning from someone else's mistakes.

------
alexqgb
In the early part of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon said (in
essence) "Man cannot do what has never been done, except by means not yet
tried."

There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting
both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts
doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it
mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily
be the key to new varieties of failure.

What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems
is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.

------
dlss
anyone who cares about base rates.

