
Ten years ago today, I had the idea for an app I thought was interesting - necrodome
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1050990035892199424.html
======
mojuba
> Lesson: You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a little money

... if your rent/insurance etc. is magically paid for you by a fairy for the
whole duration of your startup's early stage. Easy! If you don't get the
lesson, read it again: _You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a
little money._

People seem to dismiss this factor too easily and assume that anyone can
become an entrepreneur the moment they decide to become an entrepreneur. No,
it's not that easy for the majority of people.

~~~
jakobegger
Sure, if you have a cushy dev job, a nice apartment, a new car, expensive
hobbies, no savings, and don't want to change your lifestyle, yeah, you're
going to have a hard time starting something without cash.

If, on the other hand, you share a cheap apartment, have parents or a partner
who can support you, and are willing to skip the expensive vacation, you might
get pretty far with little money.

I think that's the reason why so many startups are started by people just out
of college -- they're used to a modest lifestyle, and they usually don't have
a problem being dependent on someone.

It's amazing how quickly people think it's impossible to live on less money
after a few years of having a regular job.

~~~
kbenson
And don't have kids. Am I supposed to subject my children to hardship, or
quite literally put them at increased risk (less financial buffer, possibly
worse Healthcare) during formative years because I wanted a different type of
job? A big part of being a parent is being around, and making sure you know
what's going on. It's not impossible to do while trying to make a startup
work, but let's not act like it's so simple to make changes for everyone, and
it's just a matter of being willing to tough it out yourself.

~~~
jakobegger
You can live frugal with kids as well, but your partner needs to be on board.

For example, we moved in with my parents for some time when our first kid was
born to save money on rent. Obviously that specific solution won't work for
everyone, but I think that most times there's a way to make it work if you
really want too.

~~~
kbenson
Sometimes. I have three children, the oldest two in high school and Jr. High.
It's a different proposition to move a large family in with someone else.

I think it's hard to make sure your kids have a good environment conducive to
doing well in school, or preparing for college, if they are also forced to
make large living arrangement changes which may also change or eliminate good
times and locations to study. I think there's a large difference between
attempting that so the kids go from poverty to non-poverty (parents doing
night school, etc) and parents wanting to go from middle class to upper/upper
middle class by running their own business.

Putting your children in what is effectively poverty for a few years to gamble
for wealth is what's happening. Sometimes. That's worth it, but sometimes it
isn't.

~~~
jakobegger
Sure, it's different with older kids, that's why I said our solution doesn't
work for everyone. But I'm pretty sure that most people could find a way to
live with less money.

But if you feel that reducing your spending means living in poverty, then
maybe it's not for you, and you really need to leave entrepreneurship to other
people.

~~~
kbenson
> But if you feel that reducing your spending means living in poverty

I think at the point you can't afford to house yourself because your income
has been reduced or reallocated so you need to live with relatives, you're in
poverty, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.

> then maybe it's not for you, and you really need to leave entrepreneurship
> to other people.

There are other ways to go about it, such as doing it in addition to a regular
job. It's not always possible, and the type of business you want to start
might not be amenable to this, and it does put a lot of strain on the
individual, but it is another valid path. It's the one I've been taking for
the last nine months.

------
jakobegger
And 10 years later, sharing stuff with people nearby still kinda sucks.

1\. Instant Messaging Apps work for photos and contacts, but it's stupid that
you need to transfer things via cloud (makes everything hellish slow when the
network isn't fast)

2\. Airdrop works only between Apple Devices, and when the stars are aligned
just right. Other devices might appear, or they might not. If it works, it's
fast.

3\. USB drives are still the easiest way to share anything between computers.
(SMB / AFS / NFS / SCP / rsync are all annoying to set up and always seem to
fail for hard to debug reasons)

I think the opportunity for something like Bump is still there, but it seems
that most people just don't care enough about the inconvenience....

~~~
icebraining
Between Android/Linux/Windows, I'm quite happy with Superbeam. QRCode for
setting it up, then Wifi for transfer. I even use it between laptops, not just
with smartphones.

~~~
na85
It's galling to see the app developer list "get rid of annoying ads" as a
feature of the pro app.

Is there a libre alternative?

~~~
icebraining
Just seems honest to me.

I would also prefer a libre alternative, but I could never find one. Some file
managers have transfer, but none use Wifi direct or provide a simple way to
connect, from what I've tried.

~~~
na85
>Just seems honest to me.

It is honest, but the developer is the one who put the "annoying" ads in in
the first place.

That feels like a real slap in the face.

~~~
Buge
The developer put them in because the developer needs money to live. I don't
think the economic reality of needing money to live is a slap in the face. One
alternative would be to only have the pro version, not the free version. But
that seems worse.

~~~
na85
Only having a paid version seems more honest to me. An adware version that
purposely annoys your users seems like a fuck-you move.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's not doing anything to be annoying on purpose. It's just a fact of life
that ads are annoying. If they could use non-annoying ads, I'm sure they
would.

------
justboxing
I remember Bump from their early days 2009 / 2010, they were demo-ing at
either SFBeta or SFNewTech (don't remember which, I used to work with the
organizers of both events back then).

It was pitched as a Business Card / Contact info exchange app back then and I
do remember getting a demo of it where 2 guys bumped their phones to exchange
professional contact info. I thought it was funny, didn't think I'd use it.

Interesting how their story played out. Looks like the Google acquisition was
more of an acqui-hire and less for IP...

EDIT 1: Found a demo video from 2011 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOpFuOP6_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOpFuOP6_k)

EDIT 2: Another video from the founder in 2010.
[https://youtu.be/2Ir2bg253ag?t=7](https://youtu.be/2Ir2bg253ag?t=7)

------
jpeg_hero
Seems like the graveyard of a lot of those '06 - '08 dreams.

Imagine all the things we can do with these new iphones, and so cheaply too!
-> no that world didn't happen -> working for the BIG 4.

~~~
Apocryphon
> They ran an experiment. None of their lives have been ruined.” He knew
> they’d get good jobs, even if it meant the life of a project manager at
> Yahoo. “And none of their investors’ lives have been ruined either. When
> they close up shop, their investors will say, ‘That’s one more off the
> books. I don’t need to help them anymore. I get my time back.’”

[...] “Let me tell you what the worst thing would be. The worst thing is that
these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another
year. So far, they only lost one.”

[...] All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret
actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young
men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors.
Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking
thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology
that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and
writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a
large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their
associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate
giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that
you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your
feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been
set up to fail by design.

No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902)

~~~
baxtr
Some thoughts:

\- I agree with the notion but I don’t think it’s only because it’s cheap.
It’s also about speed. Some projects take ages at large companies no matter
how much you throw at them

\- that’s the reason they havin PMF before you get funding is key. Show the
models works and then get money for scaling the business

\- I imagine getting VC money for a moonshot is great though when you don’t
need to get rich anymore. See Musk

~~~
leksak
> \- I agree with the notion but I don’t think it’s only because it’s cheap.
> It’s also about speed. Some projects take ages at large companies no matter
> how much you throw at them

I believe one thing that really kills (software) projects is throwing too much
resources (people) at them too soon in the anticipation of growth and success.

------
holografix
Passed out at the office from pushing too hard... took a weekend off. I could
never find that kind of drive to pursue a commercial endeavour.

Cure cancer? Maybe. Build a cute app? No thanks

~~~
ovi256
I think it's valuable to look at his BATNA (alternative strategy).

He was never going to work in a biochem wetlab to cure cancer. I feel safe
saying he would have gone into investment banking or management consulting,
prestigious jobs with high pay. Where people also regularly pass out from
working long hours and don't take holidays.

~~~
steelframe
BATNA stands for "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement," which applies
specifically to situations where you are in multi-party negotiations. The term
doesn't generalize to "alternative strategy." I think maybe the term you were
looking for was "opportunity cost."

~~~
ovi256
It's helpful to see a thing like career choice like the market participation
that it is, and see market participants, in a sort of game theory view, as
participants in an ongoing implicit negotiation.

------
xrd
I thought Google+ led to Google Photos. That wasn't in this story.

Everyone is claiming credit for Google Photos it seems!

~~~
webspiderus
really, Picasa led to Google Photos as the previous photo product the company
had ..

~~~
nostrademons
Surprised the parent's downvoted - it's as close to the truth as anything
else.

Like a lot of Google products, Photos has a lot of forebears. Picasa was one
of them, as was Google+ (IIRC, the Picasa team was folded into Google+ when
Larry refocused the company on Social in 2011). Sounds like Bump was also
aquihired into it, and I think there was also a lot of cross-pollination
between Image Search, Research, and Google Photos around some of the search &
content recognition features.

~~~
marban
And Picasa itself was originally created by Idealab. [I'm an EIR there]

------
scarface74
“I might find an iPhone veteran...”.

This was an email chain in October 2008? The iPhone had only been out for a
little over a year, the official SDK for 8 months, and the store for 3 months.

~~~
pavlov
There were people around who had been writing Cocoa apps for years, some with
15+ years of experience going back to NeXT.

The iPhone SDK was very simple to pick up with that background because it was
basically a simplified AppKit where you get a single tiny window instance.

~~~
scarface74
As someone who wrote Windows Mobile apps back in the day in C# - that used the
same frameworks as the desktop equivalents - and since then has been
responsible for the back end architecture of mobile platforms, there are so
many more considerations that you have to think about when writing mobile apps
than just knowing the same language and frameworks as you would use on the
desktop.

Some of those considerations are interface design on a much smaller screen,
syncing, dealing with a semi connected state, much more resource constrained
hardware (especially in 2008), a much more restrictive permission system, etc.

------
Vekz
huh, I was just wondering what happened to bump the other day when I was asked
for a business card and contact info. Had no idea this is how the story played
out.

------
haser_au
Great story. I still think the sharing of photos with collocated friends needs
solving, or have I missed a Google photos feature release?

~~~
notatoad
I'm not an apple user, but isn't this essentially solved by airdrop? Or do
people not actually use that?

~~~
ndnxhs
Airdrop is pretty much useless because its proprietary and only works on apple
devices. A useful tool for photo sharing has to work for almost everyone.

~~~
grey-area
I think you're missing an 'I' or 'for me' in there somewhere. Lots of people
find airdrop useful.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Let's try to rescue this statement. Airdrop is useful in general, but there
are still large pockets of people for whom it's useless. Large, like don't
know, Europe.

Airdrop is the kind of tool that follows Metcalfe's law (with "network" being
"people who can Airdrop to each other"). In places where Android is the
dominant market player, you'll have little luck trying to use Airdrop to
exchange data with other people. This is not dissing Airdrop, just calling out
that there's a huge market segment that still has this problem.

~~~
CamTin
Why can't Europeans use Airdrop?

~~~
TeMPOraL
The default smartphone over here is an Android phone, not an iPhone.

~~~
CamTin
That's the case pretty much everywhere, including in the US. I thought that
the post implied some structural reason why Airdrop can't be used in Europe by
people with iPhones.

------
Quanttek
Twitter pictures on threadreaderapp.com don't load with Firefox's tracking
protection enabled

------
notatoad
Huh. I always thought bump had turned into the Android feature called
"nearby". Had no idea Google photos was what came out of the bump acquisition.

------
samspenc
So, did the team (formerly) at Bump give us Google Photos? If so, kudos to
them, it's one of the best Google apps I've used recently :)

~~~
webspiderus
some of that team helped build the Google Photos app, but Google Photos was a
product in its own right even before Bump joined the company and they were
part of a (much) larger effort, of course.

------
TeMPOraL
I miss Bump. It was pretty useful. Since Google acquihired them, I just
wonder, why not build that feature into Android?

~~~
Shywim
Android Beam is built-in since 8 years, but like many Android features,
there's little to no discoverability when using the OS past the initial
marketing on release.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Beam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Beam)

------
mariedm
Dup:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18207194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18207194)

------
ratsimihah
I've never seen so many people so happy getting thrown off the ground by a
shockwave from a CEO hitting the ground.

------
quickpost
Fantastic story of all sorts of serendipitous collisions - thanks for sharing!

------
freen
Why isn't Bump built into android?

------
kabes
How did bump actually work without NFC?

~~~
jakobegger
Both phones send a precise timestamp of the "bump" to the server. The server
finds bumps that happen at the same time, and "connects" the phones.

If multiple bumps happen at the same time, the server would probably use
approximate geolocation or something like that additionally, but the better
the resolution of the time stamp, the lower the probability of collisions
between bumps.

~~~
Jagat
"precise timestamps" from two phones is a hard distributed systems problem. If
timestamp and geo were the only things that the app used, I wonder if it
worked well only because there weren't too many people 'bumping' at the same
time from that geo.

------
k33n
Bump was always pretty much a joke. It's amazing that these guys saw decent
success without really contributing anything of value to anyone. Also, how do
you work so hard you collapse when you really aren't doing anything?

~~~
romed
Success without achievement is the whole story of YC. Everybody worships Sam
Altman, who cashed out a worthless app/site/service. PG's big claim to fame is
having sold something of no enduring value whatsoever to Yahoo! (same as Mark
Cuban, FWIW).

