
Is news.YCombinator an interesting test bed for software startup philosophies? - juwo

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juwo
Observing this newsgroup, I see at least a few things in this experiment:

1) Release Early, Release Often. I am certain the programmer who wrote it is a
better, more intelligent, more competent programmer than I. IMHO there are so
many irritations with this software because it was released prematurely. Even
Paul Graham says it is bare-bones. Yet people keep coming back. In spite of
it. It's because of the benefit of chatting at a high quality watering hole
for entrepreneur elephants.

2) The UI is very different from the traditional newsgroup interface. If you
are making people do things differently, then the benefit should be
extraordinary (Weinberger?). I am realizing this for myself. (See http://juwo-
works.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-need-your-advice-startup-failing.html)

3) Did they have to write this from scratch - was it the right strategy.
Couldnt they have built on top of some open source newsgroup code?

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juwo
4) Is the technology more important than the application? Isn't technology
(here, Arc) merely a vehicle for the application?

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danielha
You answered your questions for 1 and 2. volida is right with number 3 -- they
were also looking for something useful to build with Arc.

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juwo
I didnt really have a question - I am merely observing the ongoing experiment!
Any other principles you can observe?

