
Stop producing shit - mariusandra
http://mariusandra.com/blog/2012/08/stop-producing-shit/
======
pg
Actually the world probably does need "another way to connect with merchants."
The way you can convince yourself of that is to ask: have all the ways of
connecting with merchants been invented? "Connecting with merchants" is such a
large category that the answer is surely no. In fact it takes some effort to
find sentences of the form "All the ways of doing x have been invented" that
one can feel certain are true.

It's certainly not true for photo-sharing applications, because that's not
even a real category. Images are a fundamental medium, like text. We don't
lump Twitter, email, and blogging together as "text-sharing applications." The
only reason we do with photos is that it's only recently that smartphones have
brought a lot of photos online. But a huge number of what we would now call
"photo-sharing applications" remain to be invented. Ditto for text-sharing
applications incidentally.

~~~
eckyptang
I think you miss the point.

I think the point is more that "finding another way to connect with merchants"
really isn't that important or useful in the scale of things. The problem has
been artificially created so that it can be solved for profit.

Solving problems that humanity _really_ faces with tangible innovations rather
than inventing slightly different ways to top slice cash using virtual real
estate is much more important.

A million shitty rails apps yet nothing which truly changes the human
experience.

My father once said (whilst slaving over PDS7.1 writing yet another payroll
system in the late 80s): "I feel guilty sitting here taking money from people
for this. It genuinely doesn't improve their lives."

~~~
pg
Believe me, I'm familiar with the idea that there are two kinds of ideas, big
ones that change the world, and little ones that merely make money. But this
distinction isn't borne out empirically. In fact the space of ideas is a very
highly connected graph. You can get almost anywhere in a few hops. And that
means it's almost impossible to tell at first where an idea could lead. Big
things start as little things. And conversely starting with a "big idea" is
often a mistake, because when people have such ideas they tend to be pretty
blurry.

Empirically (unless you're a government) the way to do something big is to
start with something small but definite, then keep pushing its scope.

If your goal is to get to big + definite, it's easier to start with definite
and add big than to start with big and add definite.

~~~
gfodor
I agree with this 100% but would add that once you understand this concept, it
becomes possible to prune down the space of potential ideas to ones that you
can most imagine _could_ lead to a larger scope. I realize this is often hard
to see up front, but it seems more like a way to rule out short-sighted ideas
completely than to decide which ones are most likely to turn into world-
changing things.

~~~
saturdayplace
It is with this lens that I was finally able to come up with an idea for a
company that was actually interesting to me. Before, everything I came up with
was pretty one-dimensional. I couldn't get excited about building them because
I couldn't ever come up with a satisfactory answer to "What else could/should
this company do?" I found it hard to find the motivation to work on something
that I didn't see growth potential in. Once I landed on an idea that had room
for expansion, the code, designs and ideas just started to come.

------
petenixey
What a silly article.

I read and re-read this article but couldn't detect that it actually gave any
insight at all. All the article distilled down to was "make a startup that is
successful and not one that fails". This is not something that I believe is
opaque to those involved.

The author finishes with the statement "The world doesn’t need another way for
consumers to connect with merchants" which I think sums up exactly why this
article is reactive rant. Speak to any merchant and they will tell you that
there is one thing they care above above all else and that is customers. Those
customers are hard and expensive to find and merchants desperately require
scalable and efficient ways to find them.

Eric Reis used to have a great piece in one of his talks in which he compared
Ali G pitching his Ice Cream Glove
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs>) to an advert for a blanket with
sleeves. As Eric said, one of the two of those is a $50M/year company and the
other is Ali G. Pitch them though and it's not immediately clear which would
be which.

Discovery comes from exploration and most lucrative discoveries tend to come
from the most risky experimentation.

~~~
spatten
Here's a link Eric's "Don't be the Ice Cream Glove" blog post:
[http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-
cre...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cream-
glove.html).

(I remember it well. It was one of the articles I used to test on of the
iterations of our book generator when we were first producing
<http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned>. I must have read this 100 times
:).

------
TravisLS
I think it's useful to think of ideas you could pursue in kind of a 2x2
matrix. You have revolutionary ideas and evolutionary ideas. You have high-
capital ideas and low-capital ideas.

If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible
creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing
revolutionary, high-capital ideas.

That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are
low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially
early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market,
or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something
revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those
companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of
potential acquirers in the existing market participants.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Further, I think typically there is a 'ramp up' over time from the low-capital
evolution => high capital revolutionary ideas.

Elon's first major success Zip2 was a company that provided "Internet platform
solutions for media companies and local e-commerce merchants"[1]

1 - [http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-
Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm...](http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-
Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.html)

------
munin
I love to rip on 'social startups' as much as any good hacker, and I basically
start my day with a cup of coffee and the 'startup guys' video.

reading this article, though, something clicked for me. why does it matter
that there are startups out there that are constantly pivoting or not
producing real products? what is the loss?

one statement I've seen put forward is that the startup energy would capture
smart people who could be our next Feynman or Shannon and instead of having
them do real science, we figure out how to get them to click on ads. I can
appreciate this fear, however, I've spent a lot of time on university campuses
lately and I've met a very large number of very smart and very motivated young
people who are getting educated in real science and have a passion to go into
the world and change it. They won't go figure out how to get people to click
ads.

is the fear that these little pivoting media startups will seriously suck all
of the spare cash out of the economy and we will wind up doing nothing but
producing Twitter clones? if you produce this analysis, in my opinion, you
should step back and consider that maybe you're too close to the bubble.

so what's the harm with having the brogrammers produce products that no one
wants to use? do you have a backlog of awesome work that you wish was being
done, could be done by these constantly pivoting wunderkinds, but isn't? maybe
you should start a company!

~~~
rjzzleep
Well it depends a bit when you pivot. I'm guessing most people pivot before
actually coming out with their product, simply because they don't know what
they really want and they have no idea how to do it either.

Pivoting is good when you're already out there with your idea and then
understand that you need to adjust to your customers needs. It is not when you
don't really know what to do and just experiment with other peoples money to
find out what YOU want.

------
mindcrime
So, how do these two statements jibe and form part of an sort of coherent
argument?

 _Some other guys had an idea, received validation from two potential clients,
raised funding, hired a lot of people, built a product and discovered nobody
really wants to pay for it._

 _Why does it feel like the lean startup movement has given a lot of people
the license to produce crap?_

The lean startup principles are pretty much specifically _against_ going out,
raising funding, hiring a lot of people, and then building something nobody
wants. The whole point of Customer Development is to _not_ do all of that
until you've validated the market for whatever it is you are proposing to
build.

And then you have this statement:

 _On the other side you have teams producing amazing products. Take for
example the Pebble smart watch, the DoubleRobotics telepresence robots, Appfog
free PaaS hosting, SmugMug photo hosting, SixthSense or any random project on
Kickstarter._

Where the author seems infatuated with a list of _products_ with no commentary
whatsoever on whether or not they are successful in the market. You can
produce a great product and still fail to have a successful business. So what
point is this article really trying to make?

 _If you’re in a startup looking forward to your next pivot, please just stop.
The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants or
an app that adds double rainbows to blurry pictures._

And again, we have to sentences that have absolutely no connection to one
another.

This article comes off as a mish-mash of interesting thoughts, jumbled
together, when the author's point seems to reduce to "work on big, world
changing ideas. Where's my flying car?" And that's not a bad sentiment, but
this article just seems to ramble all over the place to get there.

~~~
AdamFernandez
It's also important to note that SpaceX was not Elon Musk's first venture. I'm
sure success with PayPal gave him the confidence, clout, and partial financing
to take on such an ambitious endeavor.

------
programminggeek
Producing something meaningful or awesome doesn't solve any of the problems
the author describes. Plenty of people build outstanding things that nobody
will pay for or care about. Building something "great" doesn't guarantee
anything.

Sounds like the author is advocating "if you build it they will come", which
only works in Iowa if you are hallucinating about dead baseball players and
abducting James Earl Jones.

------
brandoncapecci
I think I'm going to write a counter-opinion post sometime called "Everyone
poops" about how the advice given here scores an 11/10 on my trite-meter.

Readers have by now heard their start-up isn't solving an important problem by
now - that doesn't help them start something that does. "Advice" of this
nature is just the author procrastinating from solving the same ambitious
problems he seems so enthusiastic about. If your going to change the world,
you need to stop _giving a shit_ about the inevitable dogdating sites of
others and just do it yourself.

------
ZanderEarth32
Start-ups are the new grad school, which was the new peace core. It's what you
do when you don't know what else to do. That in between stage, where you don't
have a next step planned but are anxious and need to do something. Back in the
day, you'd join the peace core. It was something productive to do, noble and
at least you weren't sitting on the couch collecting dust. Then when the peace
core wasn't pleasing, people would go to grad school upon graduation from
undergrad. You got your shiny new bachelors degree and no path, maybe no
opportunities. So, you'd saddle up for grad school because it bought you more
time.

Now, all those would be peace core grad students are starting start-ups
because it buys you time. They disguise it as 'wanting to change the world'
but it's really just buying time until you figure stuff out. This is why there
is abundance of shit in the start up world. Too many folks just buying
themselves time.

------
agscala
It seems like a lot of people are building a product just because it's cool to
build a product and they somehow forget to actually provide value. Then
they're surprised when it fails. I don't get it.

------
subsystem
I think he's forgetting how Elon Musk got started.

<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zip2>

~~~
jerf
I've gotten to the point that any article that decries people making startups
because they don't copy Elon Musk is an instant bozo-bit flip for me. It is
not possible for some guy on the street to start a rocketry startup. Only an
idiot would hand some guy on the street the requisite billions. There's some
bite in the "photo sharing" accusations, but that doesn't generalize to all
low-capital network-based startups, and trying to imply otherwise is
definitely weak thinking. You have to start somewhere if you want to accrue
capital to take on those sorts of challenges.

~~~
dsirijus
But you need not start at photo sharing.

There's plenty of problems troubling humanity that need not rocket scientists
to solve.

~~~
jerf
Sorry, that was my point, but upon re-reading I agree I was not clear. There
are many little computer/network/internet startup niches where one can build
good businesses still out there.

------
awicklander
This is terrible advice. When you decide to create something, the first
thing....it's probably going to be crap. It's only by creating, and shipping,
over and over again that you begin to learn how to create products. Often
times, in fact most of the time, people are going to create a bunch of crap
before they finally make the gem that's going to be awesome.

------
nateberkopec
TL;DR: "The solution to having bad ideas is to have good ones instead."

What kind of advice is that? This is like telling kids to "be like Mike
[Jordan]". Yeah, I guess it would be nice...but, that's not a strategy.

~~~
notatoad
That's not the tldr I got from this at all. The solution to having bad ideas
is to stop and ask yourself if an idea is bad before you pour months or years
with of work into it. Everybody has bad ideas, and everybody has a few good
ones. Filter your ideas, instead of jumping on the first idea you come up with
just because you want to found a startup, any startup. Don't waste your time.

~~~
nateberkopec
What? Implying people work on ideas they know are bad?

~~~
klibertp
No. They work on ideas they never really tried to think through sufficiently
to know if those ideas are good or not.

And this is very, very common, at least in people I happen to know. It's hard
to look at yourself objectively, we all know that - do you think that looking
at your ideas objectively is easier?

------
fromdoon
Everyone out there needs some kind of cult, with which they can associate.
This happens in every sphere of life. After the information revolution,
everyone is exposed to the major success stories in the current times. So it
becomes really easy to fall in a cult associated with those success stories.
This is not a weakness nor it is bad. It is just how we are.

When you add above phenomena with easy access to development tools and free
tutorials that can teach you how to make a simplistic app in a matter of days,
then what follows is adaptation/modulation of currently successful ideas on a
grand scale. This is what we're a seeing right now. Everyone thinks they can
make a social app and make it big, because since the success of Facebook, even
when many startups have failed to get going on the social front, there a still
a few who've made it big and that is just enough to strengthen the cult. So as
long as we don't see a real disruption, kind of a wake up call from the sleep,
the prevalent cult of the time would sustain and keep sucking in a fraction of
the intellectual talent on Earth at any given time.

But we don't need to worry. As Scott Adams says, the advance of human
civilization has always been due to a minority and not because of the
majority.

The majority will keep going through the motions of our current times. While a
select few would lead us to new directions.

------
px1999

      How to: Stop producing shit
        1. Produce 10 shit ideas each day
        2. Throw them away
        3. ???
        4. Profit!
    

TBH I actually agree with these 4 steps, but they're exactly the reason people
should continue producing shit. It may not make you rich this time around (it
could have the opposite effect) and may not have a huge impact, but there's a
basis to the 10,000 hours rule, and you're working off some of those hours
(or, in oldschool parlance: you're learning from your mistakes).

The value is in producing ordinary work, but being able to recognize why it's
ordinary, and to improve upon your mistakes (in the idea, in the
implementation and in the execution) the next time around. Usually, the first
time painters pick up a brush, their work is shit; the first time musicians
pick up an instrument, their work is shit; same goes for developers. It's not
a reason to not pick up the brush - to tell someone to stop sucking and start
being awesome isn't really advice. I think that this advice is better:

    
    
        Practice, practice, practice.
    

It's much better to be constantly producing shit (and learning) than just to
sit around and consume it, and it's not a case of deciding "oh, hey, maybe
this time I'll make something good, just for the sake of it".

------
grabeh
I appreciate the sentiment but I don't think it is quite as simple as
imploring people to focus on solving actual problems. The creative spirit
isn't quite as straightforward as that nor is everyone capable of that
'Eureka!' moment.

Also many people will focus on building clones of existing websites because it
will help them to improve and develop their skills.

Also, on a related note, would you say that cherry.ee is solving a real
problem?

~~~
espadagroup
While I understand the creative spirit isn't always normal, I'd guess the OP
is saying if you can't think of a real problem to solve then don't put your
(valuable) energy and time into crap.

~~~
grabeh
True - although this does rather increase the irony of the OP being involved
as co-founder of what appears on first glance to be a daily deals website. I'm
not saying it's crap but I'm not sure it's solving a 'real problem' of the
type alluded to in the OP's post.

------
rjzzleep
thank you, thank you, I've been wanting to write something similar for a while
now, but have been advised not to, because of my tone.

I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there
is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not.

There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie,
i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless
shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three
simple questions they all fail to answer:

1\. where is the value? 2\. what's your competitive advantage? 3\. who's your
target and how are you planning to make money.

just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is
useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really
care, as i just need to build up some funds."

let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching
their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a
way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at
least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential
to make a shitload of money.

But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a
chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook
and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not
only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones.

But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable
of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They
have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers
needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the
customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.

------
gfodor
It's kind of hard to cite Elon Musk in an argument against building ways for
merchants to connect to customers. How do you think Elon got the capital to
make SpaceX and Tesla possible? Those are his _second act_.

------
ajuc
Coming up with 10 ideas a day is simple. Knowing which one is good is hard.

~~~
mlvljr
Let's start together with obviously silly ones:

1\. Cat pic "aggregator" & search engine.

~~~
ajuc
2\. internet forum designed for convenient arguing. Looking different from
traditional boards. There would be one huge (potentialy infinite) 2d plane,
and people can place their opinions somewhere in a rectangle, others can place
their counterarguments nearby and connect it with arrows, there are other
kinds of relations like "supports", "contradicts", "example of",
"counterexample", "implies", etc. People can only vote on arrows, not on
nodes.

------
joelrunyon
I think there needs to be a differentiation between "stop producing sh _t and
being happy with it as the final products" and "stop producing sh_ t in
general."

The first is a cancer on all startups/businesses/etc.

The second is a necessary step in evolving as a business, company and person.
If you don't create something you're embarrassed about first, you'll probably
never start at all. Very few people hit a grand slam their first day in the
majors.

------
ahc
Says the guy making a Groupon clone...

------
twillson
I agree with pg, all possible ways of "connecting with merchants" have not
been invented and will forever be evolving. That said, what new kinds of
e-commerce problems could be solved for merchants from photos uploaded with
smartphones?

------
rprime
Cool, but nothing new, people do what they can do best and if making a new
rainbow fart app is what they can do best, that's it.

Also seeing such an article coming from some one who co-founded an
"another/similar/clone of X" is a bit of a disappointment.

------
hnruss
"Now imagine a world where instead of starting Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Elon
Musk would have built a social media news aggregator."

Good point

------
JoeAltmaier
Not actionable.

------
momma-joe
most accurate post i've read since 1999.

------
rocky1138
Disappointed. I thought this was going to teach me how to avoid double-poop
Mondays.

~~~
highace
Not constructive, but I lolled.

