
What are some startup ideas that persistently fail? - helwr
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-startup-ideas-that-persistently-fail/
======
fleitz
If failure is defined by not getting articles written about you in Quora / TC
then certainly.

Re dating sites: Try OkCupid / POF. Or the up and comer LikaALot.

"Social recommendations", seriously are you insane? Do you have any idea how
much business is driven via social recommendations? If social recommendations
didn't work then amazon would have no 'people who bought, also bought...' If
you had a company that could make those things 10% better you'd have a
truckload of money.

Anything that makes programming "easy for non-programmers or businesspeople":
You might want to ask a little company called Microsoft about that and how
much money they make by making it easy to program. Perhaps you've heard of
something called ruby / python, that offload massive amounts of intellectual
capacity off of programmers. Seriously, how many ruby programmers know
assembly? How many companies derive incredible amounts of money from things
like profilers, etc. Barely, anyone programs computers anymore.

Anything involving paying people to look at ads: You might want to ask the
hundreds of companies that run things called 'focus groups' about that.

Anything that promises to make email a thing of the past: You've probably got
an IM client on your desktop, might want to ask 37 signals about a product
called Campfire. There's also that company called Twitter.

~~~
drdaeman
As for programming for non-programmers, Ruby is still a programming language
for programmers. Just higher-level one.

But there are tools like LabVIEW and Simulink (MATLAB plugin), which are
fairly popular among engineers.

~~~
agazso
Ok, I tell you one everyone knows: Excel.

~~~
gruseom
Yes, spreadsheets are the obvious case of "programming for non-programmers"
having succeeded. Are there others? Hypercard? Lotus Notes?

~~~
lacker
HTML?

------
DrJokepu
I would be hesitant to draw far-fetched conclusions from this. Often an idea
persistently fails until someone finally does them right and then it doesn't
fail anymore. One example is document synchronization; people justified the
consistent failure of synchronization solutions with all sorts of explanations
(including the "people just don't need it" joker card) until Dropbox came
along, did it right, and now synchronization suddenly doesn't seem to be a
"dead on arrival" idea. There are plenty of other examples.

It's easy to justify the failure of a product or solution by blaming the
circumstances, like the "market not being ready" or "people don't need it" or
"the market is too small" etc. Often, it's just that the product sucks, which
might or might not be the fault of the creators.

TL;DR: Ideas only keep failing until someone does them right.

~~~
jerf
"Often an idea persistently fails until someone finally does them right and
then it doesn't fail anymore."

But I very strongly think that you should _know_ that you are walking into a
minefield, rather than just blundering into it. You should know that you need
to learn the landscape, try to figure out what failed, and sail your project
through what may be a very narrow window hard to find by chance, as opposed to
other startup core ideas where success is more about perseverance and market
savvy and a lot of other things other than sailing through a very small
technical window.

Also, document synchronization is a word I'd save for actually trying to
synchronize _documents_ , change tracking and merging, etc. Dropbox isn't the
first to _solve_ the problem of presenting your backed up files as a folder, a
much simpler problem, they're just the first to _productize_ it for consumers
successfully. Business and open-source-technical solutions were around for a
while.

------
netcan
It's interesting how little value the answers to this question seem to have.

dating/t-shirts - Lots of people date and buy t shirts online. I don't get
this.

social or mobile _____ - How long have these been pursued? Most people don't
even have smartphones yet and the first and only social thing they use is
facebook. Patience.

grocery delivery - I can get groceries delivered in my area (melbourne) by one
of several big companies. 10% or 1% of a one of the biggest markets is not
failure, is it?

Maybe it's not possible to answer this question in a useful way.

~~~
helwr
well, I asked pg to post a list of ideas he regularly rejects but I haven't
seen any.

~~~
tcarnell
Essential reading: <http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html> :-)

------
jacques_chester
Micropayments is a subject of interest to me, because my current hybrid
honours-project-slash-startup work is in approximately that field.

The business model I'm following most closely resembles the now-defunct
Contenture; Readability is similar but not identical. Obviously I have some
additional technology secret sauce or there wouldn't be a project in it to
satisfy university requirements.

To me the main failing of conventional tipjars is the requirement to manually
tip the recipient. To my eyes Tipjoy was the first real twist on this -- that
you could commit to tip before paying -- but otherwise it was the same as
Flattr and the dozens of others that have come and gone in this space.
Flattr's twist is OK, but I think imposes even more potential cognitive
overhead in terms of "I really like this site, I need to find more articles to
flattr".

I think that the Contenture / Readability / my-company-name-here model works
better because it requires no thought on the part of the customer. Payments
are divvied up automatically. No transaction cost ("Do I tip or not?") is
imposed on the user.

Mind you, my most imposing business obstacle is getting a merchant account.
Businesses which take money from party A and pay some portion to party B are
basically viewed as kryptonite crossed with rat poison by the banking sector.

Fair enough, too -- such businesses have statistically high rates of
complaints, failures and money laundering shenanigans.

~~~
adrianwaj
Check out Kachingle too: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10236893-2.html>

~~~
jacques_chester
I remember when I first learnt about Kerchingle -- I was gutted. I thought
that my idea was unique super-magic that would made me rich and I guarded it
jealously. At the time I felt that the first mover would take all. Since then
watching Facebook taught me that even an enormous network effect advantage can
be defeated and absorbed if you have the right mix and a smart growth
strategy.

I don't think Kerchingle's model is right either. They still require you to
click their medallion to begin payment to a publishing site, introducing that
same cognitive disruption as conventional tipjars. Also I think the "social
cents" thing is basically nuts. Far too easy to be embarrassed. It smacks of
that idiotic site that published credit card transactions. Blippy? Blit?
Something like that.

~~~
adrianwaj
The problem with money is everyone wants it and no one wants to part with it,
or as little as possible!! I'd be interested in having software analyze my
browser history (and my bookmarks), work out where I spend the most time or
what is important to me, and allow me to spend some money that will go
directly to those sites. A 2 minute carefully interfaced exercise every 6
months to a year. No background plugins, and little or no complexity for the
website to implement. Badaboom.

~~~
jacques_chester
You're close to what I have in mind. I did look at time-based, but my 'secret
sauce' doesn't fit it.

------
neworbit
Question and answer sites usually fall in this category (irony of this being
on Quora is not lost on anyone)

~~~
jdp23
Naver, yahoo answers, answers.com, and stackoverflow are counterexamples.
You're right though that there are a lot of failures

~~~
hasenj
I would classify yahoo answers as mostly a failure.

~~~
jdp23
Really? It's been a top-30 web site for four or five years ... Why do you see
it as a failure?

------
stevenj
Things that people don't actually want.

But there are many examples of things and markets which at first didn't seem
all that promising. But then someone made something slightly different (or
radically different) and it actually made users happy.

So just keep trying.

------
dabent
One thing stood out to me:

Semantic Search

1) It might be that it is hard for mortals to formulate a semantic query

2) _AI is hard_

That struck me as a problem that might be worth working on. Presumably we're
being paid to solve hard problems that might have value. If someone can
improve search by tackling the AI problem and make it relatively easy for
people to use, they could push search to the next level.

~~~
joshsegall
Semantic understanding (including the Semantic Web) will always be alluring,
but it's just not going to happen. We can't agree on semantics in real life
except in small groups or in very shallow ways. Computers just aren't going to
be any better at it until we create something smarter than ourselves.

I'm not saying some of the automated semantic extraction technologies are
useless. Some of them are very cool, and it is absolutely the way we should be
heading (waiting for humans to tag everything is a waste of time). However, we
need to recognize while this path is taking us somewhere good it will
ultimately fall short of the vision--much in the same way that the AI field
has given us some great improvements without approaching a true artificial
general intelligence.

------
abbasmehdi
Wow! I would never say something would fail because it has failed in the past.
Things fail because they're not done right. Demand can be created (and
destroyed). This list is a list of opportunities IMHO.

~~~
wladimir
Right, the idea is only a small part of the equation, actually getting it to a
state that people like it is the other.

These ideas are probably simply the most popular startup ideas. Which means
they also fail the most. Or simply, no one got them right yet.

For example, Dropbox became a big hit where a helluva lot of online drives and
sync services failed before.

~~~
abbasmehdi
Absolutely! Or the iPad, tablets were around for years.

------
jdp23
My first reaction was that unlike most Quora questions, the answer summary is
quite good on this. When I looked at it more, though, I realized that it
didn't distinguish at all between more-popular and less-popular answers: the
wisdom of the crowd (such as it is) has been lost. Also, credit for the
answers isn't included; and neither are links ... so it's still far from
ideal.

------
phil
Actually, quite a few of these ideas persistently succeed. Dating sites,
t-shirts, rss readers -- how many times have those worked since the dawn of
the Internet?

~~~
zalew
dating sites and tshirts will never die, but rss readers are a blast from the
past - even firefox removed the icon because people didn't use it. rss is
essential to provide content for web services when you don't have an api, but
on the user end it's not used anymore due to social newsstreams, dashboards,
etc.

~~~
smclintock
I'm not entirely sure actually - I think that the majority (if not all) of RSS
readers are out dated and lack "social" features that are necessary for them
to succeed. I'd list some of my ideas here but I'm currently building a very
simple "RSS reader" that might solve the problem - it'll be at
<http://www.northpad.com> when it's finished.

~~~
zalew
[http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-
both-...](http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-both-quietly-
kill.html?q=1)

[http://www.staynalive.com/2011/04/rss-is-not-dead-concept-
of...](http://www.staynalive.com/2011/04/rss-is-not-dead-concept-of-
subscribing.html)

------
crasshopper
Maybe recommendation engines fail just because the math is crappy. Current
scholarship in the field is pretty shallow and/or hackish.

~~~
bad_user
The best algorithms in the world won't make up for a lack of data. Few
companies are in a position to make good recommendation engines.

I also don't think math is to be blamed -- human psychology plays an important
role -- i.e. I may be interested in software-dev stuff or in startups stuff,
but not every hour of every day. Basically I'm inclined to read such stuff
only in the morning, while drinking my coffee (the perfect time of day for big
plans).

But in the afternoon I prefer reading articles about my OTHER (lighter)
interests / hobbies, like photography. And I also prefer getting stuff solved,
like finding an electrician to fix the poor wiring in my house or searching
for gifts for my wife/child.

For any person on this earth, immediate interest in something is relative,
based on time of day, time of year, mood, current needs, current problems,
current hobbies, etc...

A good recommendation engine is practically unfeasible -- because if it cannot
anticipate your future desires, both short-term and long-term, then it's
useless; because people "search" for stuff as soon as they realize they have a
new need/desire, and then it is too late to make a recommendation (at this
time, the user's history is only useful to "understand" / parse the search
query).

Recommendations need to happen before the user searches for stuff.

For example -- I searched for books on drawing / colors on Amazon, and bought
2. Amazon should have anticipated that I may like getting into photography, as
they do know a lot about me, but it didn't, even though Amazon's
recommendations are some of the best. Now that I already bought stuff, I don't
care about special offers on the same kind of stuff that I already bought.

Also, people with "hackish" attitudes have done pretty amazing stuff btw,
contributions to AI included -- software isn't just math, it's also biology /
chemistry / physics / psychology / philosophy, amongst others.

~~~
assiotis
There is no reason why time of the day, temperature outside, whether Obama
made a joke or not, etc can't all be features for a classifier to learn.

I love the idea of an algorithm anticipating my next move and I'd argue that
for the vast majority of people you can find repeating patterns that are
almost always relevant. These patterns will not be simple or obvious and as
you currently pointed out, the lack of data is what is holding most innovation
behind. I feel that companies that own the data like Amazon will have a lot to
gain if they do a Netflix-style competition to improve their recommendations
engine.

~~~
crasshopper
assiotis, have you tried giving a bazillion data points to an SVM? One needs a
sensible kernel as well.

------
JoeAltmaier
All the answers that said "its already been done" are not quite right. Its
often possible to do it better and eat their lunch. Look at DropBox. Lots of
mountable-cloud-storage solutions existed but they were (are) fragile and
expensive.

------
hasenj
Something tells me the very question is wrong. If you think avoiding failure =
avoiding bad ideas, then that tell me something about you: you place too much
an importance on the idea. If you're already thinking this way, eh, I can't
help but feel you're already starting on the wrong path.

The better question would perhaps be about a list of common reasons for failed
startups. I don't think "having a bad startup idea" would be anywhere on the
top of that list. Or for that matter, even "repeating a failed idea" wouldn't
occur on the list.

------
chmike
There are so many examples prooving that the type of shallow analysis given in
the first answer is pointless. I thought it was finally understood that it is
not the idea that matters but the execution. According to this type of
analysis, google was doomed from the start, dropbox as well, Android dito,
etc. etc.

My advise would be to ignore such type of answer and focus on making something
people want and generates traction. The author of the answer is too narrow
minded and lacks imagination and creativity.

------
tcarnell
There is a difference between a bad 'idea' and a bad implementation of an
idea.

Early search engines were pretty bad (Lycos, Altavista etc) - why? because the
idea was bad, or the implementation was bad?

I would say that if all dating sites fail in the same way then maybe there is
a brilliant opportunity to build one that works...which is what google did
with search engines.

------
pestaa
I like the overview, although I'd vastly prefer a list of startup ideas that
persistently succeed.

~~~
abbasmehdi
For any success, there are countless failures.

------
petervandijck
Music and micropayments are definitely uphill battles.

------
mbesto
I think it's worthy to define failure first.

Company no longer exists? Completely bankrupt? Burn rate continues to
increase? Point is, even if a company goes bankrupt you can still can
technically still sell it. Does a failure constitue that all assets of a
business are completely no worth anything?

Side question - how do you actually close a company?

------
MatthewB
My favorite is craigslist killer...because craigslist is already dead. So
true.

------
Stormbringer
#1 "I can do it all"

#2 "I am smart enough to manipulate the system to beat the tax-man"

~~~
jacques_chester
2 is possible in the present, but the problem is that in the long run, the
taxman can change the rules and you can't.

------
scotfree
Startup ideas that confuse "persistent" with "consistent".

------
georgieporgie
_Anything that makes programming "easy for non-programmers or businesspeople"_

Hypercard.

Speaking of which, why did Hypercard die in 2004? With the explosion in
computer use by so many 'normals', I would think adoption would be huge. I'm
not aware of any web-based technology that would enable Hypercard level of
minimalist, user-friendly programming.

~~~
seanalltogether
_Anything that makes programming "easy for non-programmers or businesspeople"
Why? Make Car repair "easy for non-mechanics" ... presumes people want to work
on their own cars. They don't._

I don't buy in to this answer. People obviously connect with the idea of
creating content on their computer whether it's word processing, creating
music, or editing photos. I think people like the idea of creating their own
programs too.

The problem with general programming is that the output is too ambiguous, so
it's impossible to build simple tools to express them. Lego for instance has a
drag and drop tool for programming mindstorm legos but the input and output
are a known quantity. With PCs it is impossible to anticipate everything that
can and will be built.

~~~
_delirium
I also don't really buy that answer, but I think it's partly because many
businesspeople already _do_ do their own programming, in Excel, a good-enough
solution that also has the critical edge of being installed on most corporate
machines. There are thousands of people who don't consider themselves
programmers who do _all kinds_ of what amounts to dataflow programming in
Excel, ranging from quick scripts that automate repetitive tasks (what Unix
folk might use a shell or Perl script for), to full-on modeling and
simulation.

~~~
hencq
It always strikes me that Excel is essentially a functional programming
language. A limited one perhaps (no looping/recursion) with an awkward syntax
(all those commas), but still one that tons of non-programmers manage to learn
and create powerful stuff with. This language then has an IDE that is quite
advanced in some things (conditional formatting, charts) while strangely
archaic in others (why are all variables are laid out on a grid?)

I wonder if there's an opportunity for a product that introduces a more
powerful programming language and steps away from doing all the calculations
on a grid, but that keeps the intuitiveness of Excel.

~~~
3pt14159
You are right that Excel is the most widely used programing language, but it
_does_ have recursion and looping. They might be hidden under various tools
(Macros for the trivial case, but Goal Seek for optimization, Data Tables for
exploration, and Solver for multilinear optimization). Excel also does have
the ability to have a "variable" hold multiple values. Pressing control-shift-
enter will allow you to start using arrays in the cells, and there are a ton
of functions that can handle them.

So the reason excel won as the common mans programming language is that it
doesn't force you to learn everything all at once. It starts you off as just a
table of sorts (useful on its own), then you can graph stuff (useful), then
you learn about sum(a1:a30) (useful), and you just keep going down the rabbit
hole until you've mastered everything.

The only thing that I really hate about Excel is that Procs cannot be run in
parallel _, otherwise so many other cool things would be possible.

_ last time I checked, at least.

~~~
tsycho
>> The only thing that I really hate about Excel is that Procs cannot be run
in parallel, otherwise so many other cool things would be possible.

I think Excel 2007 and further, Excel 2010 improved on that. Pivot tables,
formula calculations and many other addins (not sure about Solver) use multi-
threading.

------
gcb
saying that craigslist is dead... the person probably never tried to buy a
(cheap) used car or a rent an apartment.

~~~
pnathan
Craigslist is dead? News to me. I was using it just the other night...

