The idea behind the YC slogan "Make something people want" is not that doing so is sufficient, but that (a) it's necessary and (b) it's so difficult that worrying about anything else is premature optimization. That said, this article does have some useful advice on how to pick a "something" that maximizes your chances of success.
Making something people want is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for start-up success, and it's one that I see tripping up early-stage startup founders the most. Its incredible how many people build in a vacuum for 6+ months, and then release an overly-complex product that doesn't address a single real customer need.
Being able to rationalize "why now?" is much easier after the fact, as the OP demonstrates with his list of his now-successful companies. Doing the same looking forward is much trickier.
Being able to rationalize "why now?" is much easier after the fact, as the OP demonstrates with his list of his now-successful companies. Doing the same looking forward is much trickier.
I agree, and think the retrospective analysis on this is often really sloppy. In hindsight, the iPhone was clearly at the right time, and the Newton was clearly at the wrong time, but the track record of anyone distinguishing between those is very poor. Even Jobs, famous for some of the big wins on that score, was wrong about timing as often as he was right (e.g. NeXT was about as timely as the BeBox with its initial launch).
(Obviously) I don't think asking why now is the right time for your idea is premature. I think it's orthogonal to the product building piece. I think a lot of YC companies could avoid a lot of pain if they asked this question early on, because it would lead them to talk to others who have worked in the space. Often they will quickly discover that the fundamental dynamics of an industry haven't changed yet and no matter how much time they spend building it's not worth their time yet. At the very least they should be able to point to why the other, previous attempts weren't quite right and why the time is now for this idea to take hold. But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.
On the other hand, one shouldn't underestimate the power of not knowing something is impossible.
If you talk to a lot of others who have worked in the space you may well end up with a long list of reasons why your idea is doomed. It may stop you from wasting time on an idea that can't succeed. Or, possibly more likely, it will muddy your thoughts and prevent you from observing the space with the fresh eyes that are needed to see what those before you have missed.
But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.
Sometimes you need to just start building to begin to understand exactly why previous attempts have failed.
I'm a big proponent of naively trying to do what others tell me is impossible and it's served me perfectly well. That being said, if someone's startup was unsuccessful for a very clear reason that still exists today, the point is to understand that cause and your own plan for overcoming it, or don't start dedicating a bunch of resources only to get to the exact same point and realize it's not something that can be overcome.
It would be like starting a poker website now and completely ignoring what just happened to Full Tilt. Online poker is illegal. Until that changes, probably not a good space to play in.
Figuring out "why now?" implies you understand and can verbalize the exact spot an industry is in. This wil take you at least 4 years of working in hat industry. Infact I would go so far as to say it's nearly impossible to answer the question "why now" without creating a product or working in that industry. "build something people want" is a much better tactic than making decisions based on an answer to this question which in all essence is a thought experiment of dubious value.
Well, just to play devil's advocate to the article, foursquare (to pick one example) is something that nobody wanted, surely. 'Make people want something' could be equally important..?
foursquare (to pick one example) is something that nobody wanted, surely
I think local merchants desperately wanted a way to use social networking to connect with customers and get them coming back. My local sushi place has a deal, check in 3 times and get a free appetizer. Users wanted a new, fun way to use the GPS on their smartphones, and they were looking for something more engaging than Twitter or Facebook.
I can say with 100% certainty that Foursquare addressed both needs nicely. I'm not a Twitter user, but I used Foursquare religiously in the early days. I spent more time (and money) becoming a regular at said sushi place just to defend my mayorship.
Foursquare tried to make them want it, and retrospectively it looks like people did. The decreasing number of checkins on that and Places would suggest that it didn't work, because presumably people didn't actually want it and they weren't convinced enough to use it.
Edit: in fact, it's kind of a perfect example of 'why now' making it seem like it makes sense, and bandwagoning, and the appearance of 'solving a problem' and 'changing the world', all to little effect because it's a shakey idea to begin with.
This is definitely true, but unlike with, say, Google and their products, that arguably have the same chain of product/retailer, Foursquare users get basically f*ck all for all their work. I don't think people are stupid enough to use something unless they see dramatic benefits from using it, and Foursquare just doesn't seem to be heading that way quickly enough (anecdotally, it feels too late to me, in my City anyway)
And a skilled marketer helps people see the problems they didn't even realise they had. Huge success is where a visionary solves a problem that customers either don't know they have, or can't imagine being solved, and then communicates the solution to everyone who does have, or could have, the problem.
A true visionary solves a problem that customers don't even realize they have yet (and is only called visionary if he succeeds).
This is true, but the timing and pricing have to be right as well. Look at the Apple Newtwon...it was too early and it failed. More than a decade later, the iPad is a runaway success.
Are you really asserting that it is possible to know in advance what conditions will make the business venture successful? Or even to know in retrospect which ones made them unsuccessful?
I don't know about this. Even if you could say that (for example) a number of ships hit a particular iceberg, which has now melted, so what? The ocean is full of icebergs.
I wonder if, on average, it might be even more advantageous to try something where everyone agrees there's an obvious barrier to success. What if conventional wisdom is wrong even some of the time, or if that barrier suddenly disappears for its own reasons? I'm pretty sure you can see this pattern in a lot of anomalously successful companies.
No - I state in the post that you can't know this looking forward. You can take educated guesses based on observed patterns though.
Ships don't float around the ocean randomly. They have captains and crews. If they hit an iceberg, there's usually a good reason for it. In the startup world you can track down and talk with founders, CEOs, and investors and pick their brains to understand why something didn't work.
It's very hard to know if something will succeed looking forward. It's easier to know why something succeed looking backwards. To the people who built the business, it's usually pretty obvious why something failed.
The pattern you see in anomalously successful companies is absolutely one of violating conventional wisdom; By definition these companies are outliers because they are successful. But there's always a reason for it. Picking something that people have an aversion to is a great place to start. Figuring out what has changed about the ecosystem or opportunity that may enable it to succeed today where it had previously failed is the critical question to answer.
It's not to say that you can predict everything that could go wrong, but if that one iceberg is still there and it blocks the only route to port (like, what you want to do is still illegal), probably not too smart to jump in a canoe headed that direction.
If you look at the icebergs that were in the way before and they're gone now, it doesn't guarantee success or mean there aren't other obstacles, but at least you know that the previous reasons for failure aren't still insurmountable.
I think that this 'world changing' stuff is diluting the power of peoples' mindsets. How could you convincingly believe that, let's say Foursquare, is world changing? And that's a successful enough example. Why not just that it's a 'money earning' idea, and have the potential for business growth be the motivating factor before you start worrying about solving real problems?
Foursquare will be world changing. Don't dismiss it because it looks small now. Keep in mind pg's thoughts on toys:
Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.
Yeah, like the other commenter said, it might be a visionary 'toy', or it might just be a toy. I don't know which one it is yet, but at a guess, i'd say that it wont be world changing, because the benefit/effort is skewed too far in favour of retailers.
It reminds me of...i hope somebody can remember the name of some of these because i tried looking the other day...back in the 90's, there were a bunch of (legit, i think?) companies that gave you money if you installed a little application on your computer that showed you ads while you browsed the internet. Like, a penny per 3 minutes viewing, or a penny per 50 webpage views, something like that (anybody remember?!). This seemed like money-manna from heaven to my dumbass teenage eyes, until i realised how little i was getting out of the equation (my dumbass teenage eyes didn't factor in that it cost me a penny a minute to browse, at the time, too).
They'll need to un-chore it, if they're going to turn things around. And they'll need to come up with some big shift if it's going to be world changing...
There's been many articles on HN over the last few months saying there is. I'll try find some, but the basic gist was, there may be more users but there are a lot less checkins per user.
I'm not sure this really answers the question he originally posed. Sure, painters gotta paint and entrepreneurs gotta build, but whether its world changing or not is irrelevant. Some people want to do world changing things, some don't, and some stumble into it on accident.
Whether or not its world changing, a lot of the rules are pretty much the same.
Yes. A painter's gotta paint. Because he enjoys it. Not necessarily because he thinks his art will change the planet. But art collectively has a huge impact.
So if people built businesses because they like to do something and found out that they can make money doing it, why does it all of a sudden have to change the world? Because same as the painter example above, one biz doesn't have to change everything but collectively they can have a huge impact.
@steventruong It's not just about building. How you build and what you build are dramatically different on the spectrum from small/lifestyle to massive/global. There's a big difference between Google or Apple and 37Signals. The way a company gets financing, thinks about scaling a business, thinks about selling a business, thinks about hiring, etc. These are all core to how a business grows, how it scales, how to think about the value in the business (cash vs equity). In technology businesses, those sorts of decisions are usually made very early in a company's formation and baked into the DNA. The types of founders that want to build a massive company are usually pretty different from the types of founders that don't.
While I agree with a lot of the arguments you're saying, I disagree with the end statement. Building a massive company and building a world changing company are not mutually exclusive. It's probably more common but should not be implied.
Ususally the types of founders who want to build massive ginormous companies (that's a technical term) are different: they a) fail and/or b) don't make things; they're "idea guys" to steal a line from Signal vs. Noise.
That seems pretty inconsistent with how most companies and founders talk about their business. Amazon started with Bezos wanting to build the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Apple wanted to put a computer on every desk. Larry Page at Google when he was doing his first round of financing told John Doerr that he thought search was a $10 billion revenue business. These guys may not have realized what that would entail exactly but once they had the earliest inkling of product-market fit they committed to it.
You don't get big by thinking small. World changing tech companies tend to have a big vision from the beginning. Manufacturing, mining, or other industries may be different. But you rarely see tech companies that touch 100 million lives without wanting to do that from the beginning.
If someone thinks "make something people want" means "pick a problem and solve it well", then it seems to me they are out of their minds. If people don't want it yet, it doesn't matter how well you make it; they don't want it. I find it very hard to believe that that interpretation is really so widespread. Maybe I'm naive.
This post has a lot of good ideas. "Why now?" is a good question. But if you have a problem with people's mistaken interpretation of a phrase, say that in your blog post about it, instead of critiquing/rejecting the phrase itself.
If you read his definition as, "Pick a problem that others are willing
to pay for a solution, and solve it well," the whole post becomes very
good, rather than just having a few good parts.
Maybe you're not reading enough into his definition, or maybe I'm
reading too much into it. Either way, I prefer to read over the rough
spot and extrapolate where need be, so I appreciated the article (thanks
avichal).
There are only two types of people in this world; those that can
extrapolate from incomplete information.
I actually had almost exactly this in the original version of the article. I changed it because there are lots of products/solutions that don't require people to pay for them but where the same framework still applies -- Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are three examples.
I think you had it right the first time, and changing it detracted from
your real point, "Why now?"
You intentional blurred the normally clear distinction between something
sold (product/service), and a buyer. In the case of Google, Facebook,
LinkedIn, Twitter, and similar, the users of the service are the product
being sold, and the buyers are (typically) advertisers. The users are
given something useful and beneficial (search results, creepily stalking
other people, pointless "business" connections, publicly broadcasting
the precise color of your last bowl movement, etc.) to attract them, but
there must be someone else, a buyer/customer, willing to pay for it
all or you don't have a business.
In the above sense, collecting users by offering free services is really no different than manufacturing physical products; in both cases your expending capital to create a "product" with the intent of selling it for more than what it cost you to create.
Facebook, Twitter, etc. also have to build something that their users want to use and this follows the same paradigm. Google could build something to make every advertiser happy but if it pissed off all of their users it would kill their business. They have to solve this problem on both sides -- they have to build something users want to use and they have to build something advertisers will pay for. Both halves of it have to answer the Why Now
Asking "why?" in general is a good place to start, because there's also:
--Why isn't anyone else doing this? (Depending on your idea, they probably are. Hint: if it's idea A + B = C, they are.)
--Why me? (If you can't answer this, then it shouldn't be you.)
--Why this and not something else? (If you can't muster up some passion, save yourself the time.)
In other words, "why?" is one of the toughest questions to answer, and keep answering because you can always ask "why?" again. But if you CAN answer it, you may just have something.
I think you need to replace "pick a problem" with "pick a good problem". The distinction between those two phrases is a big part of the start up game, IMO.
Spaceship trips existed for 50 years. But it costs $10,000,000 per person. Not enough tourist potential to offset the costs.
Now with many companies and countries entering, it's down to $200,000 per person. And probably going down more. Now, there's enough tourist potential to offset the costs and derive profit.
This misses the case where the plausible solution space is much larger than could be explored by the smart people that have attempted to solve it in the past.
Also, a lot of times the enabling new technology or new customer behavior doesn't obviously solve the problem. So there may be new technology and/or behavior that make the problem solvable, but it's not obvious until you try to solve it. There is new technology and customer behaviors that make a whole slew of seemingly unrelated problems solvable now, and if I knew the mapping there, I wouldn't be posting here, I'd be running a company that solves the problems.
I see the "why now" aspect as adding a level of consideration as to opportunity cost -- why should I spend my time on building "something people want" vs. anything else? It's much more relevant in terms of the solution/product being developed.
The ideal scenario is one where the answer to the "why now" question makes pulling the trigger on building the "something" worthwhile, and avichal makes note of some of those, such as Foursquare.
That said, "why now" is not as important as building something people want. It simply contributes to the conditions about whether or not it's a worthwhile endeavor.
"Steve - it is Steve, right? You say this gadget of yours is for ordinary people. What on earth would ordinary people want with computers?" (Pirates of Silicon Valley)
Yeah. But on top of that, people often don't seem to know what they want, so the whole premise seems iffy in the first place. On top of that, i think focussing on 'why now' leads dilution of ideas, in the sense that too many people seem to jump onto an ailing bandwagon when it's a bit late, because well, now's the time.
That's hardly true--enabling professionals can easily be more world-changing than catering to people who are not "tech savvy". Plenty of technologies--take SQL, for example--are very world-changing but only ever used by tech-savvy people.
I do not think anybody said that build something people want would be enough. Only, it's really essential for the success. How something is done has almost been always irrelevant for the consumer of a service or a product, but a) if it is something that serve them b) economic enough c) easy enough.
