14 ms·

Why Toys?

468 points by craigcannon 9y ago

zerostar07 9y ago
Toys are on demand because people have become more childish in a way. Avoiding responsibility, seeking protection, hiding behind the groupthink, having more time to engage in juvenile/schoolyard behavior. That is not considered in the article.
- wnevets 9y ago
  Looks like you didn't get pass the title.
- runesoerensen 9y ago
  "Unless you are doing cutting-edge research in your daily job, you are not much different from those indies working on "superficial crap", apart from the fact that being "part of a company" gives you the illusion that it's more legitimate. Was google search or skype superficial and trivial? They started as programmer toys. The point of the article is that a programmer can start with $0 and build the whole product." You, 6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202808#3203672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202808#3203672 "Show HN: A cryptocurrency portfolio simulator game" You, 28 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122873
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    This is not the sense of the word "toy" that the article discusses about. He brings up facebook as a primary example of a toy project, not in the sense that it was fun for the programmer (aren't they all?) but in the sense that it was fun for the end user, not serious business. Google for example was not trying to be fun from the get-go, maybe skype was, i m not sure. Facebook is a tool that brings adults back to high school, with all the ensuing drama of the glass house that schools are. In that sense it was a toy, even though from the get-go it pretended to be the more serious counterpart to myspace (look, real names!). The article also implies that facebook somehow turned more serious after growth, which is simply not truth, the sillyness has just moved from pokes to the collective comment cringe. now thanks for digging my ancient comments , but it's obvious that i meant "programmer's toys", in the sense of a fun project back then. Also my crypto simulator game is indeed a toy in both senses, its a fun side project that a few people found fun to try.
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    Amazing quotes. You're a gifted commenter.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  Many large tech businesses start out as "toys" because its easier to build a new technology to pursue something trivial than something essential. That's just how development works. Hobbies will pay more for something that might be a novelty than an improvement in efficiency. Tesla started with Luxury cars for the same reason, and those cars could be considered "toys" of a certain type. The next Microsoft or Google could very well be developing a "candy crush" style game in VR right now, because that is the market that pays for experimentation.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    VRChat is just a toy right now, but could become the gold standard for online interaction by the next decade.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    There is also the very real danger of investing in things just because they look toyish in an attempt to follow the pattern. it doesnt always pay out.
- Bjartr 9y ago
  I'm curious. Why do you believe those statements to be true? Looking back through history there is a constant pattern of each generation decrying the immaturity of the generations that follow it. Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia, or the same mistake was being made again and again in drawing that conclusion. How do you know your conclusion isn't due to the same mistake?
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    > Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia personal responsibility has been declining with the aid of comforting technology and it has led to the constant extension of state goverment reach. it's very possible the complaints are valid, and that's simply how history advances.
    - taeric 9y ago
      I'd be interested in citations saying personal responsibility has declined. More likely that your exposure to everyone else's responsibility has increased.
      - zerostar07 9y ago
        We 'd need a personalresponsibilitymeter for that. However we can consider trends, such as the use of death penalty only for heinous crimes, its abolition in most of the world, and constant increases in government welfare.
        taeric 9y ago
        Are you really equating the abolishment of the death penalty with a decline in personal responsibility? But... you are the one asserting there is a decline in personal responsibility. How are you asserting that?
  - pmilot 9y ago
    There's a third possibility: The definition of maturity is constantly shifting over generations. Each new generation is not "less mature" than the previous, but it's not an illusion either. There really is a change in the mindset of what it means to be an adult, it's just not a strict one-dimensional scale.
- taeric 9y ago
  I'd be surprised if we are truly more childish than historical periods. Indeed, just going off of naive views of life expectancy, we used to spend more of our living time as children. Now, leisure time has certainly increased. To an extent. We now have to spend far less time preparing food/clothing/etc. At least, for the average person. Upper classed people probably had more leisure time in the past, since they had other people to do this work for them. I saw a number recently on how much less time people spend doing laundry. It is impressive.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    > we used to spend more of our living time as children. not really, children used to work as soon as they were able to, agriculture or industry from very young ages and get married young. People marry a lot later now. IF for example we assume that ppl married at 18 when life expectancy was 60, and at 32 when life expectancy is 80, they spend a larger fraction of their life unmarried.
    - taeric 9y ago
      Working age is different than child age. Even today. My point was more on the description "childish." There are childish ways of acting that persist even in work for folks. The way my children "clean" their room, for example, is a lot less deliberate and effective than how I would do it. Which is really missing my main point. The leisure time aspect is much more relevant.
philwelch 9y ago
> This trend does not fit with history either. Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys. This is largely because "inventing a new thing" and "building a massive business from that invention" are more closely linked now than they have been, historically. Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. Boeing postdated the Wright Flyer by a few years, and even then mostly got off the ground due to the World Wars. (And the Wrights actually did try and make a business out of their invention, but that's another story.) The Apple I was a toy computer designed in 1976. The Apple II was a mass-market personal computer designed in 1977 by the designer of the Apple I. There wasn't a World War nor any obvious military applications for the early Apple Computers, and the inventor who designed them (Woz) just happened to be close friends with someone who was just mercenary enough to try and make a business out of it (Jobs).
- Animats 9y ago
  The Apple II was not a toy. It was what businesses used to run VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program. Huge productivity gain over doing spreadsheets with a big piece of ruled paper and a calculator.
  - imhoguy 9y ago
    That was parent's point. Apple I was a toy, and Apple II a serious product.
- TylerE 9y ago
  > Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. The first component of what was to become US Steel opened in 1857, only 2 years after the invention of the Bessemer process that made it practical to produce steel in industrial quantities.
  - brucephillips 9y ago
    Yep. And Rockefeller started refining oil soon after the discovery of subterranean oil.
ujeezy 9y ago
One of my favorite pg ideas: "When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think." http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
- diminish 9y ago
  while working on our startup [1] this is one of the top pg quotes I like. However while talking to our customers we regularly face the "toy" critic as opposed to "feature rich". however approaching it as a toy keeps it simple , though for saas it appears as too simplistic sometimes. [1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.
  - jamiegreen 9y ago
    Do you have a site you can share? Sounds cool!
    - diminish 9y ago
      We're still in early beta phase - here's a quick showcase for some client here: https://partners.zestoy.com/showcase/home/ https://partners.zestoy.com/showcase/home/ and the main website https://www.zestoy.com https://www.zestoy.com
  - jamiegreen 9y ago
    Additional question - what is the value prop for clients? Why do they buy your service?
    - inimino 9y ago
      Lego's "Serious Play" is a good example of this kind of marketing done really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play
bitwize 9y ago
Let's not forget perhaps the biggest toy to turn serious business in the past century or so: the microcomputer itself. Without which there wouldn't even be a Facebook, or a Y Combinator.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Pretty expensive to call it a toy. The Altair 8800 was $2000 in current dollars for the kit, $3000 assembled. The Apple II would be $5K now, the IBM PC $8K.
siong1987 9y ago
This is a really good post but it is disappointing that nowhere in the post it mentions Chris Dixon's post on this: http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...
- rhizome 9y ago
  Eight years on and I'm not sure that essay, while confident, has been borne out by time.
  - tlb 9y ago
    You could add substance to your comment by listing some things that became big after 2010, and saying whether or not they seemed like toys early on. One example: Bitcoin (2009, but few had heard of it before 2010), cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I think these support cdixon's claim. Another: Snapchat (2011) and other ephemeral messaging apps. These certainly seemed like toys.
    - qbrass 9y ago
      Beanie Babies looked like toys early on, too. Just because something found a market doesn't mean it's not still a toy.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    How about battery powered quadcopters with camera feeds and remote control? The Parrot AR.Drone was introduced in 2010, the first (AFAICT) consumer-priced drone to offer this kind of functionality. It was just a toy. Today similar low cost drones are used in film and TV production, wind turbine blade inspection, mapping, surveying... Consumer drones have even been weaponized by ISIS with small droppable grenades. Not that the latter is exactly a positive development, but it's not a toy use either.
ebspelman 9y ago
This reminds me a lot of a chapter in Jesse Schell's awesome book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.[1][2] He recommends occasionally thinking about a game as a toy. "The Lens of The Toy: To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with." [1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/0123694965 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/012369... [2] PDF version (see book page 90 // PDF page 119): http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf
- deleted 9y ago
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- runevault 9y ago
  I actually just bought this book and it is arriving Friday. Funny to see the pdf now, but I think in the end this is a case I'll appreciate having a physical copy.
rocky1138 9y ago
It might be helpful to have a case study of a "toy company" that became a "real company." I'd certainly love to read that.
djrogers 9y ago
This nicely highlights one of the huge distinctions between consumer startups and enterprise startups, and perhaps provides some reasoning behind why these two types of startups are run differently and have different results in the market. If I'm at an enterprise startup, ideally we've identified a business problem, and created a widget to address it. This falls very much in to the tool category, and anything I do to make it 'fun' is of marginal value. Unfortunately, in the Valley I see a lot of devs who want to work on the toys because they're fun, which means the pool of talent for the 'serious' startups is that much smaller. This is too bad, because in my experience the likelihood of having any startup equity attain significant value is much better in the enterprise startup world.
yters 9y ago
"There are plenty of mathematicians and engineers who write great papers. There are fewer of them who, like Shannon, are also jugglers, unicyclists, gadgeteers, first-rate chess players, codebreakers, expert stock-pickers, and amateur poets." https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shan...
aaavl2821 9y ago
i'd love to see more examples of SMB software that started either as "toys" or with "toy-like" features. the only one i can think of off hand is wufoo, but im sure there are others im working on a product that (hopefully) will address an important need, but developing the solution to that need will require pretty robust software and a services component that will take some time. to get users excited about going on that journey id like to help them have some fun and get their imagination stirring. they are used to crappy dry software and have tough jobs, so lightening their day a bit and inspiring them about the future would make them happy
- zerostar07 9y ago
  that kind of gamification does not alter the nature of your product though. it s still some kind of tool and not something people use almost exclusively for fun/leisure
jpwagner 9y ago
The best dichotomy I've heard for this is: Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]? Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands). [Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually building crap - just because you can play with it does not mean it has value.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Good point. I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all. Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    It is worth noting that Dropbox took a bundle of business problems that already had been solved in one small community and solved it for a much wider community. Specifically, the problems of "cloud" file storage were being solved by AFS in MIT's Project Athena. So, to argue at Dropbox's founding that it was a toy would require first arguing that businesses didn't have problems that resembled "All the folks working on this class project need to have one accessible and shareable place to store files".
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  - jharger 9y ago
    > Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys. That's only from the perspective of the user. From the perspective of businesses using the data for marketing, the actual customers, social networks are definitely not toys.
schnevets 9y ago
I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-localized, and offering its own personality and levity. It seems to me like the founders of the future are coding games today.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? Likely Wordpress or Wix... as unfortunate as that is the more interesting question is what form the lemonade will take.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Many businesses were launched from Wordpress, and I know more than a few bespoke technology products where the MVP was Wordpress with a few plugins. I don't think you're too far off-base here.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  has a lemonade stand ever evolved into serious business? I am of the impression they get abandoned
  - nikanj 9y ago
    No, but the lemonade stand _operator_ has evolved into a serious entrepreneur. OP was trying to identify business ideas that take very little when it comes to skill and capital.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Actual lemonade stands (run by children)? They're usually shutdown by the police, at least in the U.S. [Tho my sources severely skew my sample so as to entirely neglect counterexamples.] Metaphorical lemonade stands are almost always abandoned too. But that seems obviously fine anyways.
turingcompeteme 9y ago
Standard Oil actually did start out as a toy. They provided oil to burn in lamps. At the time most people thought that was a somewhat silly gimmick and a fad that would quickly pass. Oil in general was seen as something neat but not essential for years. But just like facebook, many people soon came around to the idea and it took over the world. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible detail, if it is something that interests you.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  I wouldn't call lamp oil a toy. The defining feature of a toy is that people use it just for the joy of using it, rather than to solve a problem.
  - gaustin 9y ago
    Having an abundance of light at night was a novelty and a luxury in the past. Definitely toy territory in my book.
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - khedoros1 9y ago
      I bought an LCD monitor in 2003. It was a novelty and a luxury to me at the time...but I bought it to solve the problem of not having space for a 20" CRT on my desk at school. I don't see how something being novel and luxurious necessarily means that it's also a toy.
      - gaustin 9y ago
        I never claimed it did. Further, I don't think there is a dichotomy here. You could have solved your problem in a dozen other ways. You were privileged enough to do it in the way that presumable pleased you most. There is a hint of toyness to it in that respect.
psadri 9y ago
Toy analogy mostly makes sense for online media where attention is valuable. If a “toy” is loved/used by tons of people, then it has their attention, and this attention can be monetized. Most likely through the usual advertising surface that it presents.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Also the usual startup lifecycle: shinier toy -> faster user acqusition -> your chances of getting acquihired increase.
ouid 9y ago
I call bullshit. The economy has run on toys ever since we figured out how to grow food with machines.
deleted 9y ago
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free2rhyme214 9y ago
I've heard the toy analogy with the iPhone or Facebook before. When you look at the front page of YC, most of the successful companies are either 1) Enterprise (Dropbox) or 2) Consumer Facing (Instacart, Airbnb, etc.) It's actually quite rare, Aaron, that they end up like Twitch or Reddit but I get your point.
brucephillips 9y ago
His example of a company that's built from a toy is Facebook. His example of companies that aren't are all enterprise. A simpler explanation of the value of a toy is just that being "fun" matters much more for consumer products.
ronilan 9y ago
My favorite example for this is Lego. It started as a small startup making toys and it became a multi-billion, multi national business and one of the worlds most loveable brands. It can happen to you too! Q.E.D. ;p
loorinm 9y ago
Cute title but this is actually just an extension of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”. Facebook had TIME to be a toy because Mark Zuckerberg had a rich family, and plenty of skills to get a job if it didn’t work out. “Making a toy” is only possible with the resources of money and time. People who need to make money need to focus earlier on making money, which stunts growth in the long run. This is true not only for startups but for individuals, and in nature as a whole. It often feels like 99% of “startup wisdom” comes down to “have a rich family that supported you emotionally and then paid for your college, and then let you start a company at their house for free” YC should give a talk at some underprivileged schools in crime-ridden areas to tell people to “just make toys for like 9 years guys”
- brucephillips 9y ago
  As much as I disagree with his thesis here, the entire point of it is that YC wants to and does fund toy companies. So they're trying to solve the exact problem you're railing against.
  - loorinm 9y ago
    So funding toy companies (IE Mark Zuckerberg and other well-off white men) is solving the problem of only funding Mark Zuckerberg and other well-off white men?
    - encoderer 9y ago
      So nothing is worthwhile if it doesn’t also solve inequality? Tall order.
      - loorinm 9y ago
        I am directly responding to above person’s claim that this practice by YC is somehow solving the very problem it is creating. At no point did I claim that everything has to solve inequality.
    - csallen 9y ago
fiatjaf 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens
azifali 9y ago
I don't quite agree with this analogy. This blog seems to be written by someone who had a deadline to meet.
durandal1 9y ago
"The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins." This is of course only true if you're playing the Silicon Valley VC game, a lot of healthy businesses has been built by focusing hard on turning profit early. For an example from recent news, look at IKEA.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Building toys probably requires the VC game. Ikea was never a toy.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Huh; I was thinking exactly the opposite, i.e. every cool new project with but a GitHub repo to its name is a 'toy'.
Jaruzel 9y ago
Ironically, it's overloaded. Text only, cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QrUx_pAX_UQJ:blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/&num=1&hl=en&gl=uk&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QrUx_pA...
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Huh. Guess you guys don't understand the word 'Ironically'. Irony: "happening in a way contrary to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this." The site is a ycombinator.com site, and ycombinator is all about helping tech startups, yet the site was offline due to too much traffic. Hence, the irony.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Interesting; I'm surprised to see this comparison made, even though in retrospect (thanks to 'ujeezy for pointing it out), I recognize the PG quote about things "described as a toy". The funny thing is; they've drawn a mostly different comparison using the same dichotomy ("toy" vs "serious") that I use for occasional rants on this site. I say mostly different, because here's the intersection: If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user. What I loathe about current startups and SaaS companies is that they seemingly can't - or don't want to - progress past the stage of a toy. I agree that when I see a random toy on the net, I'll have a positive reaction of curiosity. But then, at some point, I'll have an actual thing I want to get done efficiently. Suddenly, the toy becomes borderline useless, because it either can't help me with the task at all, or the help is very weak. What I mean is: if you're trying to show that something entirely new is possible, by all means, make it a pretty little toy. But when your site is full of advertising copy around "helping users" and "making world (of niche thing X) a better place", then for the love of $deity, make your product functional and efficient. The reality is, most SaaS startups seem to be toys in that sense, to the point (or because of) it infected the modern UX trends! UX people will tell you about uncluttering, removing functionality, "your user doesn't need that", "this is confusing", "put this in 'advanced options'", "actually, 'options' are confusing, drop it entirely"... For example, observe how, over the years, Google dumbed down its products from actual tools to pretty Material Design toys with a fraction of original functionality. And then people treat Google as role model... So yeah, startup founders: don't treat yourself seriously, but please, try to actually work on the value you're saying you're providing to your users. </rant>
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  This brings me back to a recent conversation on advertising not being informational. If the makers of $tool also said what their greatest deficiencies were then buyers would be much more able to decide. Instead they're motivated to hide their flaws and make the sale, hoping -- if it's profitable to do so -- to fix those errors/flaws/shortcomings later. In a slightly related note it grieved me to see the presenters/producers of the SpaceX launch hide the partial failure of landing the core (I swear you can see one of them set up to tell us, then they get a message in their ear). I thought it was a more progressive endeavour - targeting the end goal rather than media gloss.
f1mint 9y ago
http://www.f1mint.com/software-and-games/its-your-lucky-day-httpswinnerslottonet http://www.f1mint.com/software-and-games/its-your-lucky-day-...
dsimms 9y ago
I think Tesla is a great example of toy-first strategy. The roadster is comically niche. But: the electric drive train is super torquey so makes a great sports car, it's not an every day car so the lack of charging infrastructure is less critical, nor would the inevitable reliability problems dissuade that use, quite a few investors were Roadster owners first.
sien 9y ago
There is a book about this that they don't seem to mention: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30798471-wonderland https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30798471-wonderland It's not bad. It pushes the hypothesis to breaking point but there is something in the idea.
beatpanda 9y ago
Pretty tired of startupland using this idea as a shibboleth. Eventually, you're going to have to answer the charge of "Silicon Valley is just building a bunch of useless bullshit" with something that actually is not. Moving money from one industry to another doesn't count.
- roma1n 9y ago
  Maybe because entrepreneurship is not the path to solving humanity's pressing problems? For many USians, health care is a pressing issue but maybe the best chance at improvement is through "EU-style" socialized medicine? My main problem is being afraid to lose my job and therefore my home -- could this be solved by a combination of basic income, better training schemes, and a general reduction in working hours? Other than that, my main issues are noise and pollution -- I guess cleaner and quieter cars would help but fewer cars would be a lot better. How do you make a profitable company around that?
calchris42 9y ago
It strikes me that SW is a key reason for any shift toward a toy-first mentality. Most of the arguments in the article make sense when a (SW) product can be rapidly iterated. Physical products likely tend to be harder to start too toyish... well, except for when they are toys.
carapace 9y ago
:-D I'm working on Magnus-effect flying machines right now, starting with toys, for pretty much the reasons in this article.
cestith 9y ago
Why proofread?
aithoughts-io 9y ago
While interesting, I felt the essay didn't make a distinction on end users who eventually decides if the toy product would succeed or not. In an enterprise world, the end users are not looking for fun and often they want solutions to boring problems solved in a boring way (any fun way to solve might come across as being not serious). I can see in a consumer play where the end users are looking for fun, such toy projects could become a viable business when you acquire lot of customers (Facebook for example). Even so, toy projects are a great negative test (does anyone care?). Even when built for fun, if there are no takers, it's time to quit.
amasad 9y ago
Closely related is the adage that great ideas often look like bad ones. I think it's worth thinking about all these nuggets of wisdom in terms of efficient markets: Given that there are so many entrepreneurs building startups the best sounding ideas are already taken and what's left are the bad and seemingly bad ones. The market-economy is very good at picking low-hanging fruit. If you dropped a $20 bill in Grand Central station chances are it'll be taken in minutes, while if you dropped it in a random alley somewhere, you can probably go back the next day and find it. So for you to find a good idea that the market hasn't picked up yet it needs to be somehow hidden in plain sight -- a crumbled $20 bill that looks like a piece of garbage. A similar concept that I've been thinking a lot about in the context of my startup is a "scaling bottleneck". For you to get big and service everybody you have to first service a demographic that is often thought of as a dead-end in terms of making money. Say kids, or a hobbyists in a certain field. I think the Facebook example applies here too: it was hard to see how this toy could scale beyond college students. Worded as a statement about efficient markets: good ideas for startups that will initially service and grow on a potentially non-monetizable demographic will not attract entrepreneurs and therefore will be available for ones that have that insight.
koskaj 9y ago
Typo: 'The first is thing that goes wrong'
rsp1984 9y ago
The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins. While these things are important in the long run, focusing on them too early injects an impossible set of things for an early startup to do. How is this not in direct contradiction to http://paulgraham.com/aord.html http://paulgraham.com/aord.html? Can somebody shed some light on this? I don't necessarily disagree with Aaron but its tough to make any sense of it when one YC person tells you one thing and another YC person tells you pretty much the exact the opposite.
- akharris 9y ago
  One of the fun things about advice is that you'll find things that seem in direct opposition, even from people who generally agree. In this case, though, context is critical. PG's point here is around startups that have been around for a while, on which people are working full time, that are meant to be businesses. I'm trying to get at the part that comes before that stage. In this case, the additional context I'd look for would be around what the creator/founder is trying to do and how successful they've been at doing that.
- lmm 9y ago
  From the PG page you link: > It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise. There's a point at which you have to worry about profitability, and that point can be earlier than you think, but at the same time it's not something you should be doing right at the start.
wlamont 9y ago
I remember when the first iphone was released in 2007. I had several friends working at Blackberry at the time and they were dismissive of the iphone as merely a "toy". I always quiped in response "who doesn't love toys?". Had Blackberry taken the threat of the iphone more seriously, the smartphone market would look very different.
- hrktb 9y ago
  I think it’s way more complex than that. Blackberry made attempts at touch screens but they were all crappy. Some engineers might have been dismissive, but as a company I think it tried its best to live in the future. It just didn’t have the insight to take the right tradeoffs with the more efficient tech. Japanese phone makers had the same issue. As early as 2005 some maker tried to have touch screens, some with really innovative interfaces to compensate for the technology, but it stayed niche devices. I don’t think anyone really dismissed touch interfaces as non threatening. It was just damn hard to have anything that was remotely useful.
quickthrower2 9y ago
Bitcoin is a good example of a toy. It didn't really solve an immediate problem at the time.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It still doesn't. But I'll grant it's turning out to be tech's single best attempt at hastening the climate change and cooking us all on this planet.
  - langitbiru 9y ago
    Bitcoin gives us a way to transfer value which is censorship-resistant. That is BIG.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Which isn't really "an immediate problem" right now for anyone. Also, the "solution" isn't particularly good.
      - tim333 9y ago
        Or it's more an "an immediate problem" for people doing illegal stuff that it should be a problem for.
hownottowrite 9y ago
http://archive.is/ivZCA http://archive.is/ivZCA
tzhenghao 9y ago
Depending on the definition of the word startup, most (if not all) successful open source communities started off as a toy. The Ethereum foundation is a recent example of this. I also personally think that "toys" are great for building and sharpening one's skills, much like Lego in the real world. This can be everything from you trying to "sell" your toy so other kids will come play with it, all the way up to learning how to glue software components together and make it work. Some technical toy projects have steep learning curves, and as an engineer myself, I see it as an opportunity to learn things I otherwise wouldn't working on a "serious project".
andrew_wc_brown 9y ago
I have been trying to spin up projects for years since my early teens and the best project I've have had traction on so far is my open source Tetris Attack-like clone. I think it has come the farthest then any of my previous projects because I didn't take it seriously which made the barrier to entry for contributors easy since I set my standards very low. I'd normally try to build something to scale with a monetization plan from day one, and I was so burned out on failed projects I thought I'd just work on something I wanted to do, without care of generating money. I figured if I got one of my serious for cash projects going it would free up time for such a project but I got tired waiting. The seriousness has scaled with the project. Some team members stick around, some sunset, but this is fine because my project keeps attracting people who are suited for the current stage. Will my project go from toy to business? I don't care. I'll just ride the project for as long as I can, and its possible I will sunset from my project where people better than me will take it somewhere I can't. https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop
quadcore 9y ago
the ability to build something lasting Anyone can elaborate on that?
himynameistimli 9y ago
I think theres a typo. "A startup’s early and heavily engaged users are it’s only real bse of strength and chance for growth." Should it be 'base'?
- sjcsjc 9y ago
  and its not it's.
analognoise 9y ago
Because adults today are increasingly infantilized.
adrian_mrd 9y ago
Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company. Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc. (And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc). A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike. Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up. hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course. or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :) // edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum
- adrian_mrd 9y ago
  (Apologies for the poor formatting; time to brush up on my Markdown!)
- ramblerman 9y ago
  > Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company. (...Nintendo, Lego, Minecraft) I think you are stuck on 'literal' toys, which was not what was meant in the article.
jcoffland 9y ago
> Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys. Arguably, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft all started out as toy companies. I don't buy the basic premise of this article. How a company starts out often has very little to do with how it ends up. But, I suppose the real goal here is to whip the incubator into line.
koliber 9y ago
Spelling mistake: "real bse of"
matheweis 9y ago
This is funny, because of the half dozen or so startups that I tried to get off the ground, the couple of random projects where I actually made some money were 100% toys that I made just for fun with no intention of monetizing at first.
dlwdlw 9y ago
Toys are the stuff of life. What's the point of living if you're not having fun? A lot of "serious" things started out as toys. They just became ubiquitous and expected. The fabric of society becoming the fabric of reality. Especially if you had strong social needs. Religions for example started out as stories. philosophy itself is considered by some people to be toyish. Serious things often involve money. That their end use case is to eventually buy some sort of toy is often forgotten. Only with the positive and the negative electrode do Sparks fly.

468 points by craigcannon 9y ago

Toys are on demand because people have become more childish in a way. Avoiding responsibility, seeking protection, hiding behind the groupthink, having more time to engage in juvenile/schoolyard behavior. That is not considered in the article.

wnevets 9y ago
Looks like you didn't get pass the title.
runesoerensen 9y ago
"Unless you are doing cutting-edge research in your daily job, you are not much different from those indies working on "superficial crap", apart from the fact that being "part of a company" gives you the illusion that it's more legitimate. Was google search or skype superficial and trivial? They started as programmer toys. The point of the article is that a programmer can start with $0 and build the whole product." You, 6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202808#3203672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202808#3203672 "Show HN: A cryptocurrency portfolio simulator game" You, 28 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122873
- zerostar07 9y ago
  This is not the sense of the word "toy" that the article discusses about. He brings up facebook as a primary example of a toy project, not in the sense that it was fun for the programmer (aren't they all?) but in the sense that it was fun for the end user, not serious business. Google for example was not trying to be fun from the get-go, maybe skype was, i m not sure. Facebook is a tool that brings adults back to high school, with all the ensuing drama of the glass house that schools are. In that sense it was a toy, even though from the get-go it pretended to be the more serious counterpart to myspace (look, real names!). The article also implies that facebook somehow turned more serious after growth, which is simply not truth, the sillyness has just moved from pokes to the collective comment cringe. now thanks for digging my ancient comments , but it's obvious that i meant "programmer's toys", in the sense of a fun project back then. Also my crypto simulator game is indeed a toy in both senses, its a fun side project that a few people found fun to try.
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- fiatjaf 9y ago
  Amazing quotes. You're a gifted commenter.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Many large tech businesses start out as "toys" because its easier to build a new technology to pursue something trivial than something essential. That's just how development works. Hobbies will pay more for something that might be a novelty than an improvement in efficiency. Tesla started with Luxury cars for the same reason, and those cars could be considered "toys" of a certain type. The next Microsoft or Google could very well be developing a "candy crush" style game in VR right now, because that is the market that pays for experimentation.
- matte_black 9y ago
  VRChat is just a toy right now, but could become the gold standard for online interaction by the next decade.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  There is also the very real danger of investing in things just because they look toyish in an attempt to follow the pattern. it doesnt always pay out.
Bjartr 9y ago
I'm curious. Why do you believe those statements to be true? Looking back through history there is a constant pattern of each generation decrying the immaturity of the generations that follow it. Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia, or the same mistake was being made again and again in drawing that conclusion. How do you know your conclusion isn't due to the same mistake?
- zerostar07 9y ago
  > Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia personal responsibility has been declining with the aid of comforting technology and it has led to the constant extension of state goverment reach. it's very possible the complaints are valid, and that's simply how history advances.
  - taeric 9y ago
    I'd be interested in citations saying personal responsibility has declined. More likely that your exposure to everyone else's responsibility has increased.
    - zerostar07 9y ago
      We 'd need a personalresponsibilitymeter for that. However we can consider trends, such as the use of death penalty only for heinous crimes, its abolition in most of the world, and constant increases in government welfare.
      - taeric 9y ago
        Are you really equating the abolishment of the death penalty with a decline in personal responsibility? But... you are the one asserting there is a decline in personal responsibility. How are you asserting that?
- pmilot 9y ago
  There's a third possibility: The definition of maturity is constantly shifting over generations. Each new generation is not "less mature" than the previous, but it's not an illusion either. There really is a change in the mindset of what it means to be an adult, it's just not a strict one-dimensional scale.
taeric 9y ago
I'd be surprised if we are truly more childish than historical periods. Indeed, just going off of naive views of life expectancy, we used to spend more of our living time as children. Now, leisure time has certainly increased. To an extent. We now have to spend far less time preparing food/clothing/etc. At least, for the average person. Upper classed people probably had more leisure time in the past, since they had other people to do this work for them. I saw a number recently on how much less time people spend doing laundry. It is impressive.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  > we used to spend more of our living time as children. not really, children used to work as soon as they were able to, agriculture or industry from very young ages and get married young. People marry a lot later now. IF for example we assume that ppl married at 18 when life expectancy was 60, and at 32 when life expectancy is 80, they spend a larger fraction of their life unmarried.
  - taeric 9y ago
    Working age is different than child age. Even today. My point was more on the description "childish." There are childish ways of acting that persist even in work for folks. The way my children "clean" their room, for example, is a lot less deliberate and effective than how I would do it. Which is really missing my main point. The leisure time aspect is much more relevant.

philwelch 9y ago

> This trend does not fit with history either. Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys. This is largely because "inventing a new thing" and "building a massive business from that invention" are more closely linked now than they have been, historically. Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. Boeing postdated the Wright Flyer by a few years, and even then mostly got off the ground due to the World Wars. (And the Wrights actually did try and make a business out of their invention, but that's another story.) The Apple I was a toy computer designed in 1976. The Apple II was a mass-market personal computer designed in 1977 by the designer of the Apple I. There wasn't a World War nor any obvious military applications for the early Apple Computers, and the inventor who designed them (Woz) just happened to be close friends with someone who was just mercenary enough to try and make a business out of it (Jobs).

Animats 9y ago
The Apple II was not a toy. It was what businesses used to run VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program. Huge productivity gain over doing spreadsheets with a big piece of ruled paper and a calculator.
- imhoguy 9y ago
  That was parent's point. Apple I was a toy, and Apple II a serious product.
TylerE 9y ago
> Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. The first component of what was to become US Steel opened in 1857, only 2 years after the invention of the Bessemer process that made it practical to produce steel in industrial quantities.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  Yep. And Rockefeller started refining oil soon after the discovery of subterranean oil.

ujeezy 9y ago

One of my favorite pg ideas: "When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think." http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

diminish 9y ago
while working on our startup [1] this is one of the top pg quotes I like. However while talking to our customers we regularly face the "toy" critic as opposed to "feature rich". however approaching it as a toy keeps it simple , though for saas it appears as too simplistic sometimes. [1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.
- jamiegreen 9y ago
  Do you have a site you can share? Sounds cool!
  - diminish 9y ago
    We're still in early beta phase - here's a quick showcase for some client here: https://partners.zestoy.com/showcase/home/ https://partners.zestoy.com/showcase/home/ and the main website https://www.zestoy.com https://www.zestoy.com
- jamiegreen 9y ago
  Additional question - what is the value prop for clients? Why do they buy your service?
  - inimino 9y ago
    Lego's "Serious Play" is a good example of this kind of marketing done really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play

bitwize 9y ago

Let's not forget perhaps the biggest toy to turn serious business in the past century or so: the microcomputer itself. Without which there wouldn't even be a Facebook, or a Y Combinator.

rhizome 9y ago
Pretty expensive to call it a toy. The Altair 8800 was $2000 in current dollars for the kit, $3000 assembled. The Apple II would be $5K now, the IBM PC $8K.

siong1987 9y ago

This is a really good post but it is disappointing that nowhere in the post it mentions Chris Dixon's post on this: http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...

rhizome 9y ago
Eight years on and I'm not sure that essay, while confident, has been borne out by time.
- tlb 9y ago
  You could add substance to your comment by listing some things that became big after 2010, and saying whether or not they seemed like toys early on. One example: Bitcoin (2009, but few had heard of it before 2010), cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I think these support cdixon's claim. Another: Snapchat (2011) and other ephemeral messaging apps. These certainly seemed like toys.
  - qbrass 9y ago
    Beanie Babies looked like toys early on, too. Just because something found a market doesn't mean it's not still a toy.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  How about battery powered quadcopters with camera feeds and remote control? The Parrot AR.Drone was introduced in 2010, the first (AFAICT) consumer-priced drone to offer this kind of functionality. It was just a toy. Today similar low cost drones are used in film and TV production, wind turbine blade inspection, mapping, surveying... Consumer drones have even been weaponized by ISIS with small droppable grenades. Not that the latter is exactly a positive development, but it's not a toy use either.

ebspelman 9y ago

This reminds me a lot of a chapter in Jesse Schell's awesome book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.[1][2] He recommends occasionally thinking about a game as a toy. "The Lens of The Toy: To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with." [1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/0123694965 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/012369... [2] PDF version (see book page 90 // PDF page 119): http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf

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runevault 9y ago
I actually just bought this book and it is arriving Friday. Funny to see the pdf now, but I think in the end this is a case I'll appreciate having a physical copy.

rocky1138 9y ago

It might be helpful to have a case study of a "toy company" that became a "real company." I'd certainly love to read that.

djrogers 9y ago

This nicely highlights one of the huge distinctions between consumer startups and enterprise startups, and perhaps provides some reasoning behind why these two types of startups are run differently and have different results in the market. If I'm at an enterprise startup, ideally we've identified a business problem, and created a widget to address it. This falls very much in to the tool category, and anything I do to make it 'fun' is of marginal value. Unfortunately, in the Valley I see a lot of devs who want to work on the toys because they're fun, which means the pool of talent for the 'serious' startups is that much smaller. This is too bad, because in my experience the likelihood of having any startup equity attain significant value is much better in the enterprise startup world.

yters 9y ago

"There are plenty of mathematicians and engineers who write great papers. There are fewer of them who, like Shannon, are also jugglers, unicyclists, gadgeteers, first-rate chess players, codebreakers, expert stock-pickers, and amateur poets." https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shan...

aaavl2821 9y ago

i'd love to see more examples of SMB software that started either as "toys" or with "toy-like" features. the only one i can think of off hand is wufoo, but im sure there are others im working on a product that (hopefully) will address an important need, but developing the solution to that need will require pretty robust software and a services component that will take some time. to get users excited about going on that journey id like to help them have some fun and get their imagination stirring. they are used to crappy dry software and have tough jobs, so lightening their day a bit and inspiring them about the future would make them happy

zerostar07 9y ago
that kind of gamification does not alter the nature of your product though. it s still some kind of tool and not something people use almost exclusively for fun/leisure

jpwagner 9y ago

The best dichotomy I've heard for this is: Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]? Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands). [Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually building crap - just because you can play with it does not mean it has value.

fiatjaf 9y ago
Good point. I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all. Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.
- afarrell 9y ago
  It is worth noting that Dropbox took a bundle of business problems that already had been solved in one small community and solved it for a much wider community. Specifically, the problems of "cloud" file storage were being solved by AFS in MIT's Project Athena. So, to argue at Dropbox's founding that it was a toy would require first arguing that businesses didn't have problems that resembled "All the folks working on this class project need to have one accessible and shareable place to store files".
  - deleted 9y ago
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- jharger 9y ago
  > Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys. That's only from the perspective of the user. From the perspective of businesses using the data for marketing, the actual customers, social networks are definitely not toys.

schnevets 9y ago

I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-localized, and offering its own personality and levity. It seems to me like the founders of the future are coding games today.

jacquesm 9y ago
> What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? Likely Wordpress or Wix... as unfortunate as that is the more interesting question is what form the lemonade will take.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Many businesses were launched from Wordpress, and I know more than a few bespoke technology products where the MVP was Wordpress with a few plugins. I don't think you're too far off-base here.
zerostar07 9y ago
has a lemonade stand ever evolved into serious business? I am of the impression they get abandoned
- nikanj 9y ago
  No, but the lemonade stand _operator_ has evolved into a serious entrepreneur. OP was trying to identify business ideas that take very little when it comes to skill and capital.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  Actual lemonade stands (run by children)? They're usually shutdown by the police, at least in the U.S. [Tho my sources severely skew my sample so as to entirely neglect counterexamples.] Metaphorical lemonade stands are almost always abandoned too. But that seems obviously fine anyways.

turingcompeteme 9y ago

Standard Oil actually did start out as a toy. They provided oil to burn in lamps. At the time most people thought that was a somewhat silly gimmick and a fad that would quickly pass. Oil in general was seen as something neat but not essential for years. But just like facebook, many people soon came around to the idea and it took over the world. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible detail, if it is something that interests you.

brucephillips 9y ago
I wouldn't call lamp oil a toy. The defining feature of a toy is that people use it just for the joy of using it, rather than to solve a problem.
- gaustin 9y ago
  Having an abundance of light at night was a novelty and a luxury in the past. Definitely toy territory in my book.
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  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I bought an LCD monitor in 2003. It was a novelty and a luxury to me at the time...but I bought it to solve the problem of not having space for a 20" CRT on my desk at school. I don't see how something being novel and luxurious necessarily means that it's also a toy.
    - gaustin 9y ago
      I never claimed it did. Further, I don't think there is a dichotomy here. You could have solved your problem in a dozen other ways. You were privileged enough to do it in the way that presumable pleased you most. There is a hint of toyness to it in that respect.

psadri 9y ago

Toy analogy mostly makes sense for online media where attention is valuable. If a “toy” is loved/used by tons of people, then it has their attention, and this attention can be monetized. Most likely through the usual advertising surface that it presents.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Also the usual startup lifecycle: shinier toy -> faster user acqusition -> your chances of getting acquihired increase.

ouid 9y ago

I call bullshit. The economy has run on toys ever since we figured out how to grow food with machines.

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free2rhyme214 9y ago

I've heard the toy analogy with the iPhone or Facebook before. When you look at the front page of YC, most of the successful companies are either 1) Enterprise (Dropbox) or 2) Consumer Facing (Instacart, Airbnb, etc.) It's actually quite rare, Aaron, that they end up like Twitch or Reddit but I get your point.

brucephillips 9y ago

His example of a company that's built from a toy is Facebook. His example of companies that aren't are all enterprise. A simpler explanation of the value of a toy is just that being "fun" matters much more for consumer products.

ronilan 9y ago

My favorite example for this is Lego. It started as a small startup making toys and it became a multi-billion, multi national business and one of the worlds most loveable brands. It can happen to you too! Q.E.D. ;p

loorinm 9y ago

Cute title but this is actually just an extension of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”. Facebook had TIME to be a toy because Mark Zuckerberg had a rich family, and plenty of skills to get a job if it didn’t work out. “Making a toy” is only possible with the resources of money and time. People who need to make money need to focus earlier on making money, which stunts growth in the long run. This is true not only for startups but for individuals, and in nature as a whole. It often feels like 99% of “startup wisdom” comes down to “have a rich family that supported you emotionally and then paid for your college, and then let you start a company at their house for free” YC should give a talk at some underprivileged schools in crime-ridden areas to tell people to “just make toys for like 9 years guys”

brucephillips 9y ago
As much as I disagree with his thesis here, the entire point of it is that YC wants to and does fund toy companies. So they're trying to solve the exact problem you're railing against.
- loorinm 9y ago
  So funding toy companies (IE Mark Zuckerberg and other well-off white men) is solving the problem of only funding Mark Zuckerberg and other well-off white men?
  - encoderer 9y ago
    So nothing is worthwhile if it doesn’t also solve inequality? Tall order.
    - loorinm 9y ago
      I am directly responding to above person’s claim that this practice by YC is somehow solving the very problem it is creating. At no point did I claim that everything has to solve inequality.
  - csallen 9y ago

fiatjaf 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

azifali 9y ago

I don't quite agree with this analogy. This blog seems to be written by someone who had a deadline to meet.

durandal1 9y ago

"The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins." This is of course only true if you're playing the Silicon Valley VC game, a lot of healthy businesses has been built by focusing hard on turning profit early. For an example from recent news, look at IKEA.

mseebach 9y ago
Building toys probably requires the VC game. Ikea was never a toy.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  Huh; I was thinking exactly the opposite, i.e. every cool new project with but a GitHub repo to its name is a 'toy'.

Jaruzel 9y ago

Ironically, it's overloaded. Text only, cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QrUx_pAX_UQJ:blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/&num=1&hl=en&gl=uk&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QrUx_pA...

Jaruzel 9y ago
Huh. Guess you guys don't understand the word 'Ironically'. Irony: "happening in a way contrary to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this." The site is a ycombinator.com site, and ycombinator is all about helping tech startups, yet the site was offline due to too much traffic. Hence, the irony.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Interesting; I'm surprised to see this comparison made, even though in retrospect (thanks to 'ujeezy for pointing it out), I recognize the PG quote about things "described as a toy". The funny thing is; they've drawn a mostly different comparison using the same dichotomy ("toy" vs "serious") that I use for occasional rants on this site. I say mostly different, because here's the intersection: If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user. What I loathe about current startups and SaaS companies is that they seemingly can't - or don't want to - progress past the stage of a toy. I agree that when I see a random toy on the net, I'll have a positive reaction of curiosity. But then, at some point, I'll have an actual thing I want to get done efficiently. Suddenly, the toy becomes borderline useless, because it either can't help me with the task at all, or the help is very weak. What I mean is: if you're trying to show that something entirely new is possible, by all means, make it a pretty little toy. But when your site is full of advertising copy around "helping users" and "making world (of niche thing X) a better place", then for the love of $deity, make your product functional and efficient. The reality is, most SaaS startups seem to be toys in that sense, to the point (or because of) it infected the modern UX trends! UX people will tell you about uncluttering, removing functionality, "your user doesn't need that", "this is confusing", "put this in 'advanced options'", "actually, 'options' are confusing, drop it entirely"... For example, observe how, over the years, Google dumbed down its products from actual tools to pretty Material Design toys with a fraction of original functionality. And then people treat Google as role model... So yeah, startup founders: don't treat yourself seriously, but please, try to actually work on the value you're saying you're providing to your users. </rant>

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
This brings me back to a recent conversation on advertising not being informational. If the makers of $tool also said what their greatest deficiencies were then buyers would be much more able to decide. Instead they're motivated to hide their flaws and make the sale, hoping -- if it's profitable to do so -- to fix those errors/flaws/shortcomings later. In a slightly related note it grieved me to see the presenters/producers of the SpaceX launch hide the partial failure of landing the core (I swear you can see one of them set up to tell us, then they get a message in their ear). I thought it was a more progressive endeavour - targeting the end goal rather than media gloss.

f1mint 9y ago

http://www.f1mint.com/software-and-games/its-your-lucky-day-httpswinnerslottonet http://www.f1mint.com/software-and-games/its-your-lucky-day-...

dsimms 9y ago

I think Tesla is a great example of toy-first strategy. The roadster is comically niche. But: the electric drive train is super torquey so makes a great sports car, it's not an every day car so the lack of charging infrastructure is less critical, nor would the inevitable reliability problems dissuade that use, quite a few investors were Roadster owners first.

sien 9y ago

There is a book about this that they don't seem to mention: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30798471-wonderland https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30798471-wonderland It's not bad. It pushes the hypothesis to breaking point but there is something in the idea.

beatpanda 9y ago

Pretty tired of startupland using this idea as a shibboleth. Eventually, you're going to have to answer the charge of "Silicon Valley is just building a bunch of useless bullshit" with something that actually is not. Moving money from one industry to another doesn't count.

roma1n 9y ago
Maybe because entrepreneurship is not the path to solving humanity's pressing problems? For many USians, health care is a pressing issue but maybe the best chance at improvement is through "EU-style" socialized medicine? My main problem is being afraid to lose my job and therefore my home -- could this be solved by a combination of basic income, better training schemes, and a general reduction in working hours? Other than that, my main issues are noise and pollution -- I guess cleaner and quieter cars would help but fewer cars would be a lot better. How do you make a profitable company around that?

calchris42 9y ago

It strikes me that SW is a key reason for any shift toward a toy-first mentality. Most of the arguments in the article make sense when a (SW) product can be rapidly iterated. Physical products likely tend to be harder to start too toyish... well, except for when they are toys.

carapace 9y ago

:-D I'm working on Magnus-effect flying machines right now, starting with toys, for pretty much the reasons in this article.

cestith 9y ago

Why proofread?

aithoughts-io 9y ago

While interesting, I felt the essay didn't make a distinction on end users who eventually decides if the toy product would succeed or not. In an enterprise world, the end users are not looking for fun and often they want solutions to boring problems solved in a boring way (any fun way to solve might come across as being not serious). I can see in a consumer play where the end users are looking for fun, such toy projects could become a viable business when you acquire lot of customers (Facebook for example). Even so, toy projects are a great negative test (does anyone care?). Even when built for fun, if there are no takers, it's time to quit.

amasad 9y ago

Closely related is the adage that great ideas often look like bad ones. I think it's worth thinking about all these nuggets of wisdom in terms of efficient markets: Given that there are so many entrepreneurs building startups the best sounding ideas are already taken and what's left are the bad and seemingly bad ones. The market-economy is very good at picking low-hanging fruit. If you dropped a $20 bill in Grand Central station chances are it'll be taken in minutes, while if you dropped it in a random alley somewhere, you can probably go back the next day and find it. So for you to find a good idea that the market hasn't picked up yet it needs to be somehow hidden in plain sight -- a crumbled $20 bill that looks like a piece of garbage. A similar concept that I've been thinking a lot about in the context of my startup is a "scaling bottleneck". For you to get big and service everybody you have to first service a demographic that is often thought of as a dead-end in terms of making money. Say kids, or a hobbyists in a certain field. I think the Facebook example applies here too: it was hard to see how this toy could scale beyond college students. Worded as a statement about efficient markets: good ideas for startups that will initially service and grow on a potentially non-monetizable demographic will not attract entrepreneurs and therefore will be available for ones that have that insight.

koskaj 9y ago

Typo: 'The first is thing that goes wrong'

rsp1984 9y ago

The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins. While these things are important in the long run, focusing on them too early injects an impossible set of things for an early startup to do. How is this not in direct contradiction to http://paulgraham.com/aord.html http://paulgraham.com/aord.html? Can somebody shed some light on this? I don't necessarily disagree with Aaron but its tough to make any sense of it when one YC person tells you one thing and another YC person tells you pretty much the exact the opposite.

akharris 9y ago
One of the fun things about advice is that you'll find things that seem in direct opposition, even from people who generally agree. In this case, though, context is critical. PG's point here is around startups that have been around for a while, on which people are working full time, that are meant to be businesses. I'm trying to get at the part that comes before that stage. In this case, the additional context I'd look for would be around what the creator/founder is trying to do and how successful they've been at doing that.
lmm 9y ago
From the PG page you link: > It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise. There's a point at which you have to worry about profitability, and that point can be earlier than you think, but at the same time it's not something you should be doing right at the start.

wlamont 9y ago

I remember when the first iphone was released in 2007. I had several friends working at Blackberry at the time and they were dismissive of the iphone as merely a "toy". I always quiped in response "who doesn't love toys?". Had Blackberry taken the threat of the iphone more seriously, the smartphone market would look very different.

hrktb 9y ago
I think it’s way more complex than that. Blackberry made attempts at touch screens but they were all crappy. Some engineers might have been dismissive, but as a company I think it tried its best to live in the future. It just didn’t have the insight to take the right tradeoffs with the more efficient tech. Japanese phone makers had the same issue. As early as 2005 some maker tried to have touch screens, some with really innovative interfaces to compensate for the technology, but it stayed niche devices. I don’t think anyone really dismissed touch interfaces as non threatening. It was just damn hard to have anything that was remotely useful.

quickthrower2 9y ago

Bitcoin is a good example of a toy. It didn't really solve an immediate problem at the time.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
It still doesn't. But I'll grant it's turning out to be tech's single best attempt at hastening the climate change and cooking us all on this planet.
- langitbiru 9y ago
  Bitcoin gives us a way to transfer value which is censorship-resistant. That is BIG.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Which isn't really "an immediate problem" right now for anyone. Also, the "solution" isn't particularly good.
    - tim333 9y ago
      Or it's more an "an immediate problem" for people doing illegal stuff that it should be a problem for.

hownottowrite 9y ago

http://archive.is/ivZCA http://archive.is/ivZCA

tzhenghao 9y ago

Depending on the definition of the word startup, most (if not all) successful open source communities started off as a toy. The Ethereum foundation is a recent example of this. I also personally think that "toys" are great for building and sharpening one's skills, much like Lego in the real world. This can be everything from you trying to "sell" your toy so other kids will come play with it, all the way up to learning how to glue software components together and make it work. Some technical toy projects have steep learning curves, and as an engineer myself, I see it as an opportunity to learn things I otherwise wouldn't working on a "serious project".

andrew_wc_brown 9y ago

I have been trying to spin up projects for years since my early teens and the best project I've have had traction on so far is my open source Tetris Attack-like clone. I think it has come the farthest then any of my previous projects because I didn't take it seriously which made the barrier to entry for contributors easy since I set my standards very low. I'd normally try to build something to scale with a monetization plan from day one, and I was so burned out on failed projects I thought I'd just work on something I wanted to do, without care of generating money. I figured if I got one of my serious for cash projects going it would free up time for such a project but I got tired waiting. The seriousness has scaled with the project. Some team members stick around, some sunset, but this is fine because my project keeps attracting people who are suited for the current stage. Will my project go from toy to business? I don't care. I'll just ride the project for as long as I can, and its possible I will sunset from my project where people better than me will take it somewhere I can't. https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop

quadcore 9y ago

the ability to build something lasting Anyone can elaborate on that?

himynameistimli 9y ago

I think theres a typo. "A startup’s early and heavily engaged users are it’s only real bse of strength and chance for growth." Should it be 'base'?

sjcsjc 9y ago
and its not it's.

analognoise 9y ago

Because adults today are increasingly infantilized.

adrian_mrd 9y ago

Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company. Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc. (And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc). A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike. Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up. hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course. or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :) // edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum

adrian_mrd 9y ago
(Apologies for the poor formatting; time to brush up on my Markdown!)
ramblerman 9y ago
> Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company. (...Nintendo, Lego, Minecraft) I think you are stuck on 'literal' toys, which was not what was meant in the article.

jcoffland 9y ago

> Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys. Arguably, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft all started out as toy companies. I don't buy the basic premise of this article. How a company starts out often has very little to do with how it ends up. But, I suppose the real goal here is to whip the incubator into line.

koliber 9y ago

Spelling mistake: "real bse of"

matheweis 9y ago

This is funny, because of the half dozen or so startups that I tried to get off the ground, the couple of random projects where I actually made some money were 100% toys that I made just for fun with no intention of monetizing at first.

dlwdlw 9y ago

Toys are the stuff of life. What's the point of living if you're not having fun? A lot of "serious" things started out as toys. They just became ubiquitous and expected. The fabric of society becoming the fabric of reality. Especially if you had strong social needs. Religions for example started out as stories. philosophy itself is considered by some people to be toyish. Serious things often involve money. That their end use case is to eventually buy some sort of toy is often forgotten. Only with the positive and the negative electrode do Sparks fly.