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The problem with this is that had they made the exact same post on Hacker News an hour earlier or later there's a good chance it would have gotten no more than
by Alex3917 11y ago
The problem with this is that had they made the exact same post on Hacker News an hour earlier or later there's a good chance it would have gotten no more than two or three upvotes and never even made the front page. If that had happened, which in fact is probably the most likely outcome given repeated experiments, does that mean that it was a bad business idea? (For example, this is a great blog post but it's getting no upvotes, and so most likely no one is ever going to see this comment.)
I think the first idea was probably just a bad idea and they could have figured that out on their own or by asking someone.
The second idea, if they had gone and asked professors, they probably would have gotten mostly folks telling them it was a great idea. But in fact that was still a bad idea also.
And the third idea was a legitimately good idea, but I think the validation they got was as much due to luck as anything else.
So I like the idea in theory, but it's trickier than it sounds. A lot of people make the mistake of not doing any market valuation. But even if you put in the work to do this, there is still a very high value to building something that has a lot of optionality going forward.
- rdudekul 11y agoI disagree with the statement that it was pure luck that they got so many upvotes/stars based on timing. Many other posts of startups got more upvotes and failed. Segment is providing a very useful service of translating and routing analytics data to other services. There is a lot of value in the service (in terms of time/resources it saves). High value services, sooner or later get discovered and more importantly, people/companies start paying for such services. Great article though, some thing that each technical founder should read.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jorgecurio 11y agoYou know this is what I was thinking. HN is such an arbitary measure to gauge whether it's a vitamin or a painkiller. If one of their other idea suddenly got a ton of upvotes, they might have ended up with a different product. In my honest opinion, the product really doesn't matter when there's money being thrown around. Any of those previous 'bad' ideas he posted if enough money was raised for it, you bet your ass professors and students began demanding it. I'm just realizing this more and more that most of the shit we read are exactly that bullshit because the contextual experience is missing. It is only reading the comments and realizing that 'wow I'm not alone and maybe im not crazy' building shit and trying to get people to pay you for it can take a long time a good 24 months which is ironically the point at which I'm thinking of calling it quits a while ago. Unfortunately, segment.io is a vitamin not a painkiller. The problem that it solves is a 'nice to have' imho. For instance, at first it seemed like a great idea. One single point to send all your analytics to and then plugin bunch of other 3rd party SaaS. Sort of like Zapier. But unlike Zapier which is a great pain killer for non technical users, segment.io is sort of a vitamin at best at the problem it solves and the target but hey this is just my take on it.