

5 ways to break past the San Francisco echo-chamber - rams
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/12/youre-not-avera.html

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paul
There seems to be a common assumption that building things for people in SF is
a mistake. Targeting early adopters is not bad -- almost by definition, your
first users will be early adopters.

The important question is: Is this something that can grow to include the
larger population, or will it remain forever niche? If it's something that
will eventually spread to the rest of the world, then living in the SF "echo-
chamber" is actually a big advantage -- you get a clearer view of the future.
This also one of the reasons why many innovations come out of universities --
they also have a "future world" aspect to them (for example, I was using the
web in 1994, but "regular" people had never heard of it and had no use for
it).

Unfortunately, answering that question is very difficult. Early cell phones
provide a wonderful example of this -- the market predictions were off by
orders of magnitude.

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brlewis
I thought this article was about your important question.

When it comes to hitting a wall after the early adopters, the first thing I
think of is photo sharing. Wouldn't you think that would be one of the most
widely-used services? Yet on Quantcast flickr shows 1/10 the monthly unique
visitors of yahoo.com. In the top 100, only flickr, photobucket, and
(arguably) facebook are photo-sharing sites. Shouldn't photo sharing have a
wider appeal than blogging?

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imsteve
There should be a "techcrunch" that reviews sites with numbers/features that
speak for themselves instead of the bull* publicity process that now occurs.

~~~
pg
This already exists: it's called the print media. It's easy to write about
startups once they have numbers. The catch is, they may not have meaningful
numbers for months.

What makes Techcrunch unique is how early it judges startups: often the very
day they launch. At that point there are no numbers, only features, and
features don't speak for themselves. Considering how hard it is to judge
startups that early, it's surprising Techcrunch isn't wrong more often.

~~~
imsteve
wrong.

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iamelgringo
I think that part of the issue is that there are many problems that technology
can solve, that aren't really faced by people in San Francisco.

For instance, my family back East is into scrapbooking and crafting. I never
really thought about it much, though. But, after reading one of Andrew's
posts, I started looking into it. From the Craft Trade association's website,
crafting is a 30-40 Billion dollar industry. That's almost the same size as
the movie industry.

That is a huge market that your average 20 year old male founder living in San
Fran just isn't going to think about. That's the context that Andrew is
talking about. There are precious few people in fly-over country that have
heard of twitter, but there are millions of women in the South and Midwest who
get together on weekends and scrapbook. That's the echo-chamber.

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mattmaroon
Ha, I'd heard of just about everyone at the top of the Quantcast list, which,
btw, is highly suspect. I clicked on four sites I hadn't heard of, and two of
them were porn.

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staunch
I know people who are in various parts of the world and generally
disinterested in technology and the internet. I frequently ask them questions
to see what they've heard of and what they haven't. It's informal and
unscientific, but it definitely helps me get some idea of what the view is
like from the outside.

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brlewis
I would call these ways to understand that you need to break past the echo
chamber. They might open your eyes to the idea that people are different. To
actually break past the echo chamber you need extensive interaction with other
people.

