

Why is what you're building only possible or necessary today? - newy
http://euwyn.com/post/4872646183/why-is-what-youre-building-only-possible-or-necessary

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phil
I think this is often not true, and the examples in the post show that.

People had already been willing to put their real names online. Friendster
launched 1-3 years earlier, grew very fast, and if they hadn't been alienated
their users and been hamstrung by technical problems, they might have gotten
to be Facebook.

Airbnb is a great company, but VRBO.com had been around since 1995 and is now
going public (as part of HomeAway) -- they did pretty well through the real
estate boom. There was also Couchsurfing, founded about 5yrs before Airbnb.
Could they have been Airbnb? They succeeded at getting users, so I think they
were only missing two key pieces: they hadn't realized that if you charged
people to stay you had a great business (or didn't want to do that), and they
weren't very good at making backups.

Of course Dropbox had a whole forest of competitors. I don't think Box.net or
Xdrive or whoever failed to become runaway successes because people didn't
have enough devices - there were millions of geeks with multiple computers and
there had been for years. And there was plenty of broadband: YouTube had
already been around for 3 years. Dropbox succeeded because they made syncing
easier to use, and because they marketed that better than anyone else.

There are definitely some startups that couldn't have succeeded a few years
earlier, (like the Zynga example which needed the FB channel to exist). You
couldn't have made AdMob any earlier because a lot of people needed to go buy
smartphones. You might have been able to build YouTube in 2004, but not in
2002, because you needed broadband penetration, fast computers, and a Flash
player that could stream video.

Sure, riding a wave or exploiting market trends can be helpful. I think a lot
of great products could have been built much earlier though, and the limiting
factor is often simply that it's difficult to know what's important, and
difficult to get the important things right.

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pluies
Good article, but I think the reference to Dropbox is a bit out of place.

Online backup/sync, which is what Dropbox does, was readily available when
they arrived. The thing was, nobody was using these services because they were
not straightforward enough to set up, or were too costly, etc. Dropbox "got
that right", so to speak.

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newy
Good point. I was focused on how I use Dropbox today, which is to sync media
between my various devices (this seems to be where the company seems to be
heading). But Dropbox did win largely because of flawless product execution,
and IIRC was initially focused on the backup problem.

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sorbus
Another, related, question: "If what you are building has been necessary and
possible for a long time, why hasn't anyone done it?"

~~~
Alex3917
Or, alternatively, "Which temporary economic disequilibrium are you
arbitraging? What are its properties?"

This actually wouldn't be a bad question for the YC application.

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yuvadam
Is this a must?

What disequilibrium did Facebook or Twitter arbitrage?

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Alex3917
In the case of Facebook, it was clear that there needed to be a website that
showed people what all of their friends were doing, and helped people plan
social engagements with their friends. In the (paraphrased) words of Mark
Zuckerberg, "I knew someone was going to make a social network with a billion
plus users, so why not me?"

In the case of twitter, I don't think there was any temporary economic
disequilibrium, which is why they are stuck with the revenue model of a
service business and the cost structure of a startup. You could always make up
something after the fact, like saying they are arbitraging the lack of money
and literacy ability of inner city minorities, but that's clearly absurd
because they never would have started the business if they had thought about
it that way.

If they were applying to YC back in 2006 and had to answer that question, they
probably would have written that there isn't currently a way to send text
messages to groups, and it's clear this is going to exist some day. But that's
probably about as much detail as they could have given, plus maybe some
version of the usual mobile software use cases from Howard Rheingold's book
Smart Mobs.

Is it necessary to have a temporary economic disequilibrium? According to the
business school definition of entrepreneurship, it's one of two things that
separates a lifestyle business from a startup, the other one being the
potential for rapid scalability. (Cornell b-school actually uses the phrase
'temporary economic disequilibrium' in their 'official' definition of
entrepreneurship, I didn't just make that up.)

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jmboling
shouldn't the question really be "why is what you're building only possible or
necessary tomorrow?"

