

Two special startup types: the Twitter and the Hoverboard - danshapiro
http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2011/07/a-twitter-a-hoverboard-or-something-in-between/

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mechanical_fish
I sense that we could construct an amusing zoo of subcategories here.

e.g.

The Oyster: A species of Hoverboard that appears to magically parse natural
language or generic web data but which on close inspection turns out to be a
slick-looking wrapper around a rat's nest of Perl regular expressions which
are being frantically updated by a harried group of hackers to deal with each
"edge case" as it arises.

The Turk: Like an Oyster, but without the regular expressions.

The Esperanto: A Hoverboard that promises to help non-programmers write
programs by using "natural" syntax that is "just like human language". See
e.g.: AppleScript.

The Gift-Horse Engine: A Twitter that is in fact virally popular, but only
because it bribes adopters by giving away something below cost in an
unsustainable way.

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bennyfreshness
AirBnB in my opinion is no longer a "Twitter Startup." Maybe at first, but now
they've proven people will sacrifice some level of comfort to save money,
which in my opinion took a lot of gumption. This now proven disruptive model
(sacrificing some comfort/certainty/social norms to save money) I think is
only beginning.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I think this article isn't describing startups so much as startup _ideas_ ,
and/or very early startups that have yet to demonstrate the elusive
product/market fit. Once you've proven that your Hoverboard works, and that it
really is a Hoverboard ("an idea that, if it works, will practically sell
itself") then it isn't really a Hoverboard anymore. And once your Twitter
concept has users and a viable business model it isn't a Twitter anymore.

Ironically, AirBNB is no longer a Twitter startup, but Twitter arguably still
is. ;)

~~~
bennyfreshness
Good point, although I'd argue Twitter has shown its product/market fit
(political strife/breaking news/Bieber).. Also, I agree, my comment is off
topic, but I'm a bit tired of poor little AirBnB (now valued at $1 billion)
not getting credit for sticking their noses in and bravely creating a new
market.. PG might agree w/ me <http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html>

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DrewG
I like the part where he says "if you aren't one of these types, keep calm and
carry on."

A lot of articles seem to try and classify all startups into 2 or 3 types
which is honestly pretty silly.

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JohnnyBrown
This is a neat, memorable way of explaining what Steve Blank calls
[Customer/Market Risk versus Invention
Risk]([http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-
markets-2-customer...](http://steveblank.com/2009/05/28/vertical-
markets-2-customermarket-risk-versus-invention-risk/))

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jonmc12
Here is Ali G pitching a hoverboard to a VC.. great stuff:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc> \- go to 5:20 on the video.

    
    
      Ali G: "Its a hoverboard" (holding a skateboard with no wheels)
      Investor: ".. but it doesn't do that"
      Ali G: "Well, it doesn't do it yet.  Thats where you come in - with your science"

~~~
_anoop
He's a non-science founder ;)

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j_baker
_it’s not going to be very hard to solve the problem technically (you’d be
wrong, of course, but that’s besides the point)_

Actually, I would say that the problems twitter is solving _aren't_ terribly
difficult. Now, doing it at such a massive scale is very difficult. But I
think a large portion of twitter's success is that their solution seems rather
easy to implement at small scale.

~~~
romey
Agreed. Twitter-like apps seem to be the go to first project for learning a
new language for web development.

