
What Not To Build - vorador
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-not-to-build.html
======
mechanical_fish
This is, literally, incoherent. The iPhone is a "fad", because:

 _most of the attention being paid to it has to do with applications and
games, not telephony._

A few paragraphs later, under the list of "dead technologies", we have...
"telephony".

Meanwhile, on his list of hot technologies is: alternative interfaces (where
the guy actually cites the iPhone as an example!), portability, location-
specific apps, intelligent recommenders, and sensor networks. All of which are
being explored on the iPhone platform.

~~~
jcromartie
Maybe he means the general glut of wholly worthless iPhone apps that merely
translate some web app or some gimmick onto the device. As an iPhone
developer, I agree that _most_ of what is going on falls into the fad
category. If that's what he is talking about, then he's right. Don't sink time
into building such-and-such _for the iPhone_ when you could be exploring any
of the other worthwhile areas he outlines in the list.

~~~
mechanical_fish
If that is what he means, he could have said so. It would have been a much
more coherent argument. Which is to say: +1. ;)

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rfreytag
Roll the clock back 9 years and "Don't build a search engine" would have been
on the list. Surprised it is not there now.

To me it seems it is the exceptions to the common knowledge that so often seem
to exceed the rest. Off the cuff: Japanese cars are cheap (answer: Lexus),
markets are efficient (answer: Buffett), VC's need home runs (answer: Y
Combinator?).

I wonder how is each item on the OP's list might be mistaken and why?

~~~
iron_ball
It's not there because at this point, it's self-evident. There may be a path
to profitability for niche engines, or engines which do something quite
different from the big players, but it seems ever more unlikely that a new
direct rival to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo will arise.

I mean, I get your point. But there's a difference between the pre-Google
world and now: before Google, search sucked, and everyone knew it. Now, search
is awesome. It's not really a pain point.

~~~
rfreytag
People were not aware of the potential for search before Google. They thought
the market for search was over-supplied with options. Evidence is in some
10-year-old Red Herrings that mention: Alta Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler,
DogPile, mySimon, etc., etc..

I was hard-pressed to make Google find anything 10-years-old+ from the web.
And advanced search was no apparent help. Perhaps fodder for a rival?

Clayton Christiansen might say that out of the niche of a rival which
undermines Google's business model rises the Google-killer, or at least
-queller.

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pg
Many of these are good, but a couple are wrong. We've funded both a social
network (<http://dailybooth.com>) and a travel site (still only soft launched)
and they're both doing well so far.

~~~
tjogin
He's not really saying it's _impossible_ to succeed at these things. Only that
there are other ideas out there with far better conditions and chances.

~~~
teej
I simply don't see the reasoning behind high competition = low chances. The
whole idea of web startups is to be able to move fast around big, slow
competition.

~~~
tjogin
Then by all means, out-facebook Facebook. I'll be cheering for you.

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Jach
I think the article has good general advice but stuff you should really take
with a grain of salt. As another commenter said, lots of counter-examples.
When I was reading the "don't build edutainment" bit, I couldn't help but
think of Brain Age.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The list is funny. I kept expecting it to keep going and turn into a parody.

Don't build edutainment.

Don't build an iPhone application.

Don't build a website.

Don't build an application that runs on any platform that is already popular.

Don't build anything that your customers can already understand.

Don't build anything that's like anything that people currently find useful.

Don't build anything that you expect to actually work.

Don't build anything that might turn on you and force you to stake it through
the heart before it devours your spunky sidekick.

Don't build anything with a computer.

Don't build anything.

~~~
evilslut82
:D :D

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JoelSutherland
On the surface this list makes a lot of sense. Each category of things not to
build comes with a couple of examples of giant competitors: Wikipedia,
Wordpress, Expedia...

If I were to build a startup in one of these categories, these would be the
examples I would think of in the bar-napkin stage. They are obvious. I don't
think 280 North will see this post and think "jQuery! We forgot about jQuery!"

There is always room for something giant and disruptive. More commonly there
is always room for something small and sustainable.

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aarongough
I think that the big take-away from this shouldn't be: "don't build an
application in X market" it should be "build a _niche_ application in X
market".

There's no way that you can compete easily with Facebook. But maybe there is
an opportunity to build a social network for people that specifically don't
want to share their real identities. Maybe you can't compete with Word, but
how about a word processor specifically designed for vision impaired users?

The internet is a _huge_ marketplace. If you choose a good niche and cater to
it then you'll more than likely find a enthusiastic audience.

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rriepe
Great suggestions and observations.

But I'll remind everyone, especially those considering a startup, that they're
not rules. Most likely, this article will be horribly wrong on at least one
point in five years. It could be wrong because of your idea.

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robfitz
Just an FYI, the article is 11 months old

(which I think makes the article more interesting, as we can see the results
of his predictions)

And while I'm here, he isn't saying the iphone wasn't/isn't important, just
that it probably isn't the the most fertile field to spend time building a
business on.

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TravisLS
I think these are generally somewhat true, but with a lot of glaring counter-
examples. As the companies that control these spaces get larger, there will
always be room for smaller, disruptive competition, especially in more domain-
specific areas.

I'm reminded of an article from HN earlier this year wherein a Harvard
Professor admitted telling Mark Zuckerberg he was chasing his tail trying to
create a social network. (Anyone have this link?)

In 2004, a plain old social network probably wouldn't have worked, but a
Social Network of Ivy League colleges might.

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rpledge
Some good points, but I disagree with the what not to build section. If you
have a great idea for one of these that is truly innovative, build it. Just
because you'll have large competitors shouldn't stop you. Now if your idea
isn't that ground breaking, that's a different story

~~~
icefox
Think of it more as playing the odds. Yes Facebook will be surpassed one day,
but we don't know when.

Odds of succeeding to make the next facebook 1/5000 Odds of succeeding in
building recommendation system for something that currently has no
recommendation system 1/2.

Thinking about both of these problems for a few days you can come up with tons
of interesting angles and technical problems. Every once in a while a major
player will be replaced one someone else, but every day someone else will have
a sustainable business in a less competitive area.

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jasonlbaptiste
Don't start a photo site- Flickr

Don't start a search engine- Google

Don't start a "social network"- Twitter

Don't start a dating site- OkCupid

Don't start a word processor- Zoho

Don't start a blogging site- Posterous

Don't start a storage site- Dropbox

Don't start a project manager- Basecamp

~~~
nwatson
For each company in this list there are another 50 failed attempts at cracking
the same market. Several of which probably had the same or superior technical
merits but the wrong business approach, had personality issues, or had plain
bad luck.

There are likely other less sexy product ideas where the expected return on
investment is much larger because the ideas aren't as obvious or the fields
addressed aren't your in your typical hacker domain and haven't gotten the
loving care of good software development.

~~~
sirrocco
"For each company in this list there are another 50 failed attempts at
cracking the same market" .

I'm pretty sure you can say the same thing about almost all successful
products in any market. Whenever I look at such a product, I'm sure that if I
search hard enough I'll find the (at lease) 50 failed ones.

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markessien
I've found that in technology, it's a bad idea to use negations. If you say
things that should "not be done" or "will never happen" or "is not possible",
at some point in the future, someone will quote you and laugh at you.

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callmeed
So, basically ... everything is good enough and established enough. Don't try
to improve or compete.

Yuck.

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GeneralMaximus
I'll employ a well known Internet meme to describe this article: EPIC FAIL.

Are the current technologies really the answer to our computing problems? Are
Linux, Windows and OSX the "final" operating systems, Microsoft Word the
"final" Word Processor, Facebook the "final" social network?

No, seriously. I believe we can do better than this. In fact, I believe that
the current crop of technologies are just a teaser of something better to
come.

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slay2k
To quote Paul Buchheit, all such 'advice' is just someone's limited life
experience expressed as a set of over-generalizations. If it was really this
simple, VCs would have success rates upwards of 90%.

All said, I can understand how someone who reads proposals for a living could
come off sounding jaded. It's pretty easy to pass judgment, especially from
the sidelines.

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rantfoil
Don't listen to lists telling you what you should or should not build.

Any one of the points he lists could have been acceptable if explained, but so
many are dismissive and not fully reasoned.

For instance, it blows me away that people think cloud computing is a fad,
when I know for a fact that computing power-on-tap has changed the way we and
most of my startup friends do business.

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F_J_H
He will no doubt be proven right on some things and wrong on others.

In general though, if I had a big pot of money and had to decide on where to
invest it, my decisions would likely fall along the same lines. Key here, as
another commenter said, is not that success would be "impossible" but rather
"improbable".

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xiaoma
He really went off the deep-end in the last paragraph. Transportation has been
getting much cheaper adjusted for inflation, regardless of whether one looks
at bicycles, cars, subway tickets, train tickets, plane flights or cargo
shipping. Any blind assertion that all these things will get more expensive is
difficult to take seriously. Ditto for his comments about living in "closer
communities" and individuals growing their own grapefruit.

I suppose if the advance of technology ground to a halt, it could happen.
What's far more likely, though, is that manufacturing and transportation will
both continue to get cheaper, communities will be even less bound by geography
and people who grow their own grapefruit won't be doing so for economic
reasons.

------
Tichy
I must admit a lot of the points made me feel the exact opposite: if the
general feeling is that "application X is done, finished", it seems to be a
tremendous opportunity.

It means that people are already blinded to the true possibilities in that
area. They can only see the status quo and not see beyond it. Anybody entering
the field with some revolutionary way of doing things might be able to grab a
huge market share. They would not have any competition, because it never
occurred to anybody to even consider innovating in that area anymore.

------
fragmede
(note the Jan 4th post date)

2 things not to build seem contradictory: Don't build a platform-specific app
Don't build a new standard While I can see limited usefulness of yet another
markup standard xqrhtml43, generic apps, as opposed to platform-specific, have
to look to standards to work upon. What should be read, however, is when
building a new standard, extend existing standards to meet your needs, if at
all possible, and make sure there is some sort of 'reference implementation'
(ie, yours).

------
chmike
I understand this analysis as a heuristic and not rules to follow by the
letter.

Disruptive innovation can invalidate the analysis.

For instance, I suspect such type of analysis would have classified web search
as a no go domain when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started working on the
google web search algorithm. There were plenty search engines provided by the
big players at the time.

The added value (or problem solving) criteria is a much better heuristic to
determine where to go or not.

------
tcarnell
The comment I left on his site:

I think this is a pretty one dimensional view on the world of innovation. You
say "dont build an operating system", but you also say "do build cloud
computing technologies" - but what if the operation system was designed
specifically for cloud computing, or for decision support systems?

Why not build a better auction website? In your world would businesses still
be doing manual payrole because 'we shouldn't innovate'?

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zmimon
Seems rather silly to say not to build a java application. Surely what matters
is what the application does. If your idea will fail purely because of being
implemented in Java then I think it must have some other rather serious issues
with it. I can only think here he means some specific unstated context, but it
sounds rather naive and ignorant as written.

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yannis
I found this point quite interesting and thought provoking:

'From the point of view of the internet, 'you' are a concept - the one thing
in the whole system that isn't actually a part of the system. How to leverage
that will be the stuff of genius and innovation'.

I will welcome any ideas as to how it can be leveraged.

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limist
Know your competition.

I think that's the shortest summary of a mixed-bag of an article. And knowing
your competition is mostly a marketing challenge, especially where the
competition is virtual, like the NULL competition of non-consumption/non-use
(of your product/service).

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rokhayakebe
Don't build something you can't buy qualified traffic for and have a positive
ROI.

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rdez6173
Do: build a better mousetrap.

It's the "better" and "mousetrap" that are the hard parts.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Actually the "build" isn't all that straight-forward either. A common
observation is that ideas are easy, what really matters is execution.

(Running through my head is that mousetraps execute mice - not sure that's
helpful or useful.)

~~~
techiferous
The "a" part is also hard.

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johnl
I like the "sensor data processing" one. Measuring, grouping and manipulating
traffic whether on the web or on the street will give search much more
dynamics.

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evilslut82
imho not so great article, its still best to build all the things you use
yourself. Third party scripts are a pain and take about the same time to check
for errors, bugs and faults then writing some from scratch. I dont mean that
you need to re-invent the wheel, but you can make a wheel that drives even
better on your road..... instead of using a drupal to make your website....

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RyanMcGreal
> There is a range of applications we might call Kantian applications - they
> depend on time and place.

I quite enjoyed this.

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forensic
Hell of a lot of words to pretty much just recover, "Build something people
need."

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Kliment
Very insightful article about ideas that sound good but are actually a dead
end.

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chanux
gist: Build around a problem that exists.

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clistctrl
He mentions E-Government... I have thought about this subject for great
length. My ultimate conclusion, is while it may certainly be possible to make
it happen today. The idea itself is most likely not what is best (at least in
todays world) My first idea on the topic was to make an open source platform
for a virtual currency. I imagine the currency could be distributed via
interest free loans. Transparency would be important. The key would seem to be
convincing people to accept the currency, as it would have no value of its
own... The system could on its own evolve into an E-Government as regular
government experiences troubles. For instance the US seems to be heading
towards an inevitable fate due to our growing national debt. As an ideal, this
seems like a good idea (though i believe an economy based on debt is a bad
idea, but couldn't think of an alternate method) but most people are not
informed, and easily tricked. My solution to this was a competency test before
you are allowed a vote. Of course, the test can be manipulated to a groups
interests (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test>)

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diN0bot
half an hour a post really shows....

does hn count as a destination site? cus i come here an awful lot.... also to
webcomics websites.... i don't use a rss reader, i just rely on firefox's url
bar autocompleting when i type a letter.

