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Was Gmail a solution in search of a problem?
I was listening to Paul Buchheit about the origin of Gmail. He mentioned that he built the initial version by indexing his emails using Google's search engine and gave it to his colleagues. This seems to contradict 2 advice that YC partners often give:
1. Looks like, Gmail was built to see where all the Google's search engine could be useful i.e. solution in search of a problem.
2. He tested it with his colleagues, whose feedback might be biased, because they already believed in their search engine.
Seems like a terrible way to validate a product idea. How did he succeed?
- quaquaqua1 7y agoThe world apparently has a demand for an email service that is free, easy to use, secure, or whatever other attribute that makes hundreds of millions of people choose to use Gmail compared to any other client (SquirrelMail) or service (Yahoo). I'm sure Google's market influence had something to do with Gmail's success though.
- dekhn 7y agoHuh? I don't even understand this question on its face. There was huge demand at the time Gmail was released for easy email with large quotas. Good text search was nice, but it was the easy email interface and large quotas that made a real impact.
- billconan 7y agoI registered GMail immediately, because it offered 1GB storage, way more than other venders at the time. I seldom use its search, even today. Today, the biggest value of gmail for me is its spam filter. similarly, I immediately switched from yahoo to google when google came out, but it wasn't because I felt google's results were more relevant. I have never compared the results. it was because google's ui was very clean and fast. I also couldn't understand the value of dropbox given box.com, but again, I registered for the free storage. I think the intention of the "find a problem" suggestion is to avoid no demand, but I too think it might be too conservative and I can't map many successful startups to it well, like instagram, Minecraft and twitter. And I doubt their founders thought about solving a problem when they started their project. A while back, I read on HN an article saying that there are 2 types of good ideas, one solves a problem, the other creates new opportunities. I kinda agree. Imagine we went back to an ancient time and asked people if they need anything like TV for entertainment, I guess the answer would be no, because TV hadn't been part of their life. Without it, they had other forms of entertainment to kill the time. If we went to 1900 and asked if people need personal cars. They would probably say no because their work and social network were local. But personal cars enabled new opportunities, people can now commute farther for better job and extend their network. I guess if someone asks us today if we have a problem with not being able to do space travel. We would say no. But future people may think otherwise.