

The Problem With Young Web Entrepreneurs - ig0rskee
http://igorfaletski.com/2009/05/01/the-problem-with-young-web-entrepreneurs-myself-included/

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ashot
This is a meta-comment, and I'm meta-sorry for that, but I wanted to say that
HN has got to be the only social news site that has articles sit at the top
for some time before anyone comments on them. Is it that people are actually
reading and digest the content first?

~~~
dsil
I can think of 2 reasons for this. One, like you said, people don't seem as
quick to post the "first thing that comes to my mind" sort of comment, which
tend to be fairly shallow, or pun or meme-based.

Also, it doesn't take much for a story to get to the top, if only briefly.
5-10 up votes on a story shortly after it was submitted can get it near the
top of the front page. It takes many more votes to get to the front page of a
site like reddit, so more likely one of those up-voters commented as well.

~~~
psyklic
This is likely because you must open two separate windows -- one for the
article, and a second for the comments. often when i read an article in a
separate window, i want to make a quick comment but decide it's not worth the
effort to find the comments page again!

of course, this is remedied by some FF plug-ins, but i doubt most users have
those installed.

~~~
diN0bot
when i first moved here from reddit i ran into this problem a lot. then i got
slightly annoyed at having to have twice as many browser tabs open as before.
i still don't use the plugin, but it has ceased to be a problem. my friends
and i joke about having to get through all our tabs before getting down to the
brass tacks.

------
zaidf
If I had to guess, the problem behind _most_ failed companies (by young and
old people alike) is building something people don't want.

Also, don't forget that it is the same fiddling around that leads young people
to develop products that older folks could not come up with.

YC has a t-shirt that reads "Build something people want."

~~~
wschroter
Lots of people want YouTube and it is on track to lose nearly $500 million
this year. The fact that Google bought it doesn't mean they've created a
business.

Build something people want. That's not good enough.

Build something people will pay for. That should imply enough want and will
keep you around long enough to keep providing it.

~~~
zaidf
"The fact that Google bought it doesn't mean they've created a business."

A business can lose money and still remain a business, even a great one.
Companies go public all the time while in the red.

And that $500M figure you have for YouTube is the epitome of fuzzy-math.

~~~
zackattack
Amazon.com lost money for 7 consecutive years before first posting a profit in
Q4 2001.

~~~
defen
That was all part of the business plan though - there was a light at the end
of the tunnel, and they knew what it was. Whereas I don't think anyone knows
how to make money off of YouTube.

~~~
zaidf
"In June 2008 a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at US$200
million, noting progress in advertising sales."

We know two things for sure: a) youtube IS making money b) youtube is making
money in tens of millions.

What we don't know--and what makes the argument that YouTube is a financial
burden on google very difficult to prove--is the knowledge of YouTube's
expenses.

~~~
wschroter
I would definitely agree that there is a time and a place to debt-spend your
way to profitability.

But consider the fact that some companies, even once they have hit the ball
out of the park with thier original goal, still have no way to be profitable
doing it.

At some point YouTube becomes a public service charity, not a business.

------
trapper
That's why I believe there is such a low success rate of websites. The itch
you are scratching is unlikely to be one that others will a) want solved and
b) want to pay to be solved.

The best serial entrepreneurs (multiple 7+ exits) I know all have a structured
approach to picking a project, and it always starts with a statistics backed
market test of an either fake product or hacked together prototype.

~~~
falsestprophet
Who are they?

~~~
zackattack
Likely people who heed Steve Blank's "customer development" approach.

~~~
trapper
Possibly, they were promoting crossing the chasm at the time I got some
mentoring with them.

------
Genghis_Cohen
There is a reason to be technology driven. Most markets are mature and hard to
break into. The only good time for startups to break into a market is when
there's a technological disruption they can take advantage of. Otherwise, GE
or Microsoft can do it better than you. So it is actually a good bet to take
brand new technologies and find a use for them.

~~~
sfphotoarts
Microsoft do a lot of things well, like sales and marketing, but I'm not sure
technology is one of them. I cannot think of any technology they have done
really well. Browers, phone/computer operating systems etc.. IUnknown -
please! I guess c# is a well designed and thought out language, but I've been
a software engineer for 20 years and thankfully haven't had to go anywhere
near a MSFT technology in many years. I have nothing against them as a
company, they just don't make anything that I have found to be relevant for
quite a while.

~~~
bad_user
I'm also not using Microsoft's stack, the Unix world having grown on me, but I
think you're mistaken.

Their flagship product, Windows, has some poor design decisions in it,
decisions that were dictated mostly by their customers ... you can read "The
Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows" by
Raymond Chen for some insights on this.

But otherwise the Windows programming model is pretty solid and consistent
(usually).

------
ig0rskee
@zaidf At least the founders of the company must want their own product, like
@hwijaya was saying. However that doesn't mean anybody else does.

Also a great quote on the need/want subject: “If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster horses.” [Henry Ford]

~~~
pg
You don't have to do the @thing. We have nested comment threads.

------
nopassrecover
Not a bad point but he says: "Steve Jobs wanted to build a computer that could
show the beautiful typography that he likes so much."

From what I've read this wasn't the purpose at all - he (or perhaps more Woz)
liked the technology and so wanted to find a way to make a living making great
technology.

~~~
mariorz
and I'm pretty sure Larry Page did not design pagerank to be used for ranking
academic papers, it was for the web since the start. There was actually
previous work on a similar ranking system for academic papers that was
referenced in pagerank iirc.

~~~
ig0rskee
I wish I could call them up and ask, I stand corrected

~~~
mariorz
Well you can't call them but here is their paper on pagerank
<http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/>

There is a short mention of previous work done with academic citation analysis
and there is also a bit at the end about the original purpose of the algorithm
(displaying ranked backlinks.)

------
bravura
When I started out, I pitched a technology solution to my (now) advisor. He
answered: "What problem are you trying to solve?"

I learned a lot from this question, and ask it any time a newcomer pitches me
a technology solution.

------
oomkiller
Me myself being a young entrepreneur (20), I can definitely see this guys
point. However, I think that there are many (probably unsuccessful)
entrepreneurs like this, no matter what age or market segment. Maybe the young
ones just haven't been burned and given up/changed careers yet.

Some people just don't understand that a 'good idea' is only a very small
fraction of what goes into making a good business. The real judge of an
entrepreneur is NOT the ideas they come up with, but how they execute them,
and also WHICH ideas they execute.

------
hwijaya
Not sure if he's right with regards of building great company. We're also on
our ways of solving our own problem at the moment.

So far, i can say that, the only concern that i personally have with solving
our own problem is, "is it just us that have the problem or other people got
the same issue?" (a.k.a is this a big enough problem where we should spend our
valuable time on? or should we move to another project).

From my own experience, 2 benefits that i personally have with solving our own
problems are: you understand exactly on what is the 80% of the pains and when
things get tough, you can encourage yourself that worst case scenario is you
use it yourself.

~~~
trapper
That's why you test to see if your target customers have the problem and are
willing to pay for it. Do this before building your product if possible (and
it usually always is).

------
BenS
I think there are as many successful companies started by careful market
analysis as there are company's started by an entrepreneur's mission to solve
a personal problem.

Jeff Bezos coldly examined markets and decided books were the right entry
point into ecommerce. However, these don't make the best pr stories, and so
aren't told...or in some cases, the story is just fabricated after the fact,
such as Pierre Omidyar building ebay to sell pez dispensers.

------
edw519
"Most of the time, this leads to the well-known case of solutions looking for
problems - beautiful technology that can’t become a profitable business."

OP dances around the solution, but never gets there:

Find a customer.

They're everywhere. And they need everything (or so it seems sometimes). And
they're not bashful.

Once you have a half dozen customers in _any_ industry, identify something
they would all love. Pretty good bet building a business around _that_ , not
what you love.

~~~
anigbrowl
Isn't that what he's doing? I took the article as a piece of marketing,
written so that someone who identifies with that problem will pick up the
phone to have a talk with him. I like the cut of your jib, young fellow-me-
lad!

~~~
ig0rskee
I actually added that later to make it clear to our customers that I am not
talking about the product they're paying for.

But I like your train of thought =))

~~~
anigbrowl
Well, nothing wrong with signaling that you as a business person have decided
to focus on value-add. Honestly, many business books are thinly-designed
resumes so you could do worse than coin a few buzzwords and just write a book
with some provocative title like 'Escaping the foxhole, or how I learned to
love the recession'.

------
ahoyhere
The root of the issue is not idea-centricism, but self-centricism.

People think their ideas are unique, but they're not. They think that _their_
implementation of a pre-existing thing is different or better, but it's not.
They think _their_ service is worth paying for or acquiring, but it's usually
not.

That's why there's so damn much me-tooism in the "startup" world (and
everywhere else):

"If it feels special or new or exciting to me, it must be exciting or new or
special."

We live out our entire lives looking out of our own skulls, mired in our own
viewpoints, so everyone feels like he or she is the center of the universe
(for better and for worse).

It's basic human nature, and therefore people who are not like that are a very
rare item indeed. Overcoming it can make you an immensely powerful force.

