

Humble Beginnings - olivercameron
http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/humble-beginnings

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zoba
He makes a point of all of these companies having been ugly at the outset. I
don't disagree, they were, however the landscape has changed. In the past,
when the world was really still figuring out what the web is, it was okay to
be ugly -- because so much of the web actually was ugly. Now, however, there
is a lot of beautiful design on the web and people are having higher and
higher expectations.

Its a lot about signaling, I think. People want to know that they aren't
wasting their time. If a website is ugly and poorly designed, then its easy to
think "Whoever made this didn't put a lot of effort into it, and may continue
to not put effort into it." In the old days of the web, just being on the web
was signal enough that you put a fair amount of effort into your project. Now,
we have more sophisticated methods of signaling that our websites are better
than others. However, its a bit like clothing and jewelry in that it can be
superficial -- just because something is dressed up and pretty on the outside
doesn't always mean theres something worthwhile underneath.

Humorously, the Github repo title of my product contains the very words
"Humble Beginnings". We're launching this week, right Justin? ;)

~~~
hayksaakian
And Craigslist marches on

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adamnemecek
Because Craigslist is already established, I'm not sure if they'd be as
successful if they launched today.

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arscan
Another frontpage hn article today was asking for donations to the internet
archive, which helps make sure those humble beginnings are forever remembered:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931472>

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ececconi
Sobering. It makes me realize that one of the internet movements which I
appreciate the most, and also take the most for granted, is just how much more
good design is stressed. Now if I find something which is ugly or non-
intuitive, I really do take a step back and think about why things were shown
to public like that.

Sometimes people do point and say that most web 2.0 websites look similar and
uninspired, but I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing.

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msrpotus
I think the point is just as much that you don't need the best design in the
world to be successful. Just get started, even if it's not the most
attractive.

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jpdevereaux
But it seems this might not be the case anymore - if Twitter were launched
like that today, would people even bother checking it out?

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redidas
That's hard to speculate on. It might not have. But at the same time, I'd like
to think that if a service is revolutionary/unique enough, it will gradually
get some traction.

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polyfractal
I've always been struck by how little Amazon's design has changed:

[http://web.archive.org/web/19990828014913/http://www.amazon....](http://web.archive.org/web/19990828014913/http://www.amazon.com/)?

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frisco
A reminder of how small the tech world is: notice the first name in the
"Timeline" pane in the Twttr screenshot: "Kevin Systrom". This would have been
about four years before Instagram (was Systrom still an undergrad at Stanford
then, even?).

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stevenj
I think good design is important.

But it seems to me that the hardest thing is getting users to use your product
or service (especially repeatedly). In a sense, it's more of a
behavioral/psychological problem.

Ideas are bad because they don't get users. The best design won't turn a bad
idea into a good one.

The thing I find most interesting about these examples is that all of them (I
believe) had a dedicated user base -- as well as fast growing one -- in the
beginning.

People really wanted to _use_ them from day one.

~~~
zmitri
Totally on point about getting users to actually use it. That's kinda where
I'm at right now with what I'm working on, and it's by far the hardest step.
Twitter actually had very few users for the first 6 months I believe, but
things like Facebook and Instagram were big hits pretty quickly.

~~~
benesch
Agree with you on Instagram, but Facebook had the benefit of one-at-time
rollout to universities, which upped its exclusivity and draw. (Granted it was
also good product.)

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calinet6
Clearly, the YouTube home page screenshot there has mangled HTML and was not
what the page originally looked like on period browsers. And the "dating
fields" were probably just an ad that was misplaced by the same sort of
rendering errors.

Just sayin', it wasn't _that_ bad.

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ErikAugust
Take a look at the "Twttr" photo. Kevin Systrom (of Instagram fame) was
babysitting.

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TillE
Early Facebook designs were nice. Maybe not the one displayed in the
screenshot, but one or two iterations later with some tweaking, definitely.

Design is what really set them apart from MySpace. That, and semi-private
college communities.

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EugeneOZ
It's funny, thanks.

