5 ms·

One category that's missing on the left is "Parents." There's Tinder for parents (Peanut), Birchbox for parents (multiple subscription boxes). It would be inter

by snegu 7y ago

One category that's missing on the left is "Parents." There's Tinder for parents (Peanut), Birchbox for parents (multiple subscription boxes). It would be interesting to think about what Uber or AirBnB for parents would be. I couldn't read the article though because I got that absurd uncloseable newsletter subscription screen. That was one of the most user-hostile things I've seen on a website lately.

shaftway 7y ago
It's KidzJet (http://www.kidzjet.com/ http://www.kidzjet.com/). They take your kids to after-school activities.
frandroid 7y ago
I found the X in white on white at the top right. Maybe a browser bug, I'm in Firefox.
nostrademons 7y ago
So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting to know them. These are the exact opposite qualities that you want in a mom-friend. When you're a new mom you're probably not looking your best, and putting up a profile picture isn't high on your list of things to do. You don't give a shit what your mom friends look like, and once you're reading through text it's more like "Facebook for moms". You have very little free time to swipe through profiles, and when you do, you want your mom-friend-relationships to count. There's a lesson there for people who want to phrase their startup idea as "X for Y". You should ask how similar Y is to the userbase that originally made X popular, and whether you are capturing the qualities they have in common or just randomly cargo-culting a successful product. "Flickr for video" works because a photo-viewing community and video-viewing community are substantially similar: they both have similar casual interactions around shared multimedia, and they both benefit heavily from recommendations, discovery mechanisms, and social sharing. Similarly, "Google for China" works because people in China have information needs too yet actual Google has an antagonistic relationship with the CCP. "Uber for laundry" and "Uber for housecleaning" are both terrible ideas because Uber's value proposition is that you can get transportation on-demand and it can be done by unskilled people as long as they get you safely to your final destination, while both housecleaning and laundry are stuff you do once a week, on a planned basis, and you really want to trust the people who are doing it. "Uber for grocery delivery" (Instacart/UberEats/DoorDash/Postmates) is a decent idea, though, because grocery delivery is also something you want on-demand, do regularly, and can be done by basically anyone.
- greggman2 7y ago
  me being stupid but I actually thought flickr for video would fail because video takes more work than photos to create and because it takes more time to view them. clearly I was wrong
  - rhizome 7y ago
    The part that gets me with video is the upload time. Do people just have faster connections than me, or is the secret to create a phone app that restricts the files to greatly reduced resolutions? Seems like flickr for video would require greater bandwidth or time requirements, but I might simply be clueless.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      Mobile data has been fast enough for many years now, depending where you live. My 2 year old phone has 20Mbit/s upload and 79Mbit/s download on a good day. I don't upload videos, but if I did I expect that's fast enough in the background. The phone upload is way faster than my "fiber" connection at home was, when I still had one.
      - rhizome 7y ago
        I think common speeds are enough for 15-120sec of video up to pretty large resolutions, but for 30min or more? YouTube commonly has multi-hour videos, do people just let their uploads run for a week or three? Families especially would probably not appreciate Dad filling the upload pipe with last week/s baseball games all the time. It may be obvious at this point that I don't know a lot about the producer side of internet video, and I'm sure there are 15 years worth of tools and techniques out there, but I'd be curious what the tolerances and expectations of users. YT probably pays a lot of money for focus groups to get that data, though.
        jlokier 7y ago
        At 20Mbit/s upload speed, the upload is 2x faster than real-time at Youtube's recommended encoding settings for 1080P (what was called "Full HD video"), and equal to YT's recommended encoding settings for 1440P. So at that rate, Dad can fill the upload pipe continuously, with 24x7 real-time streaming at 1080P and there will still be half a pipe left over for everyone else. The family might not even notice. However, at some ADSL upload speeds (say 2Mbit/s, which is a bit slow for ADSL in 2019), the upload is considerably slower than real-time. It might take 5 hours to upload a 1 hour video in 1080P. That's tolerable enough for a committed long video producer. I'm sure video producers have been doing multi-hour or overnight uploads for years. They don't need to run for weeks.

by snegu 7y ago

shaftway 7y ago

It's KidzJet (http://www.kidzjet.com/ http://www.kidzjet.com/). They take your kids to after-school activities.

frandroid 7y ago

I found the X in white on white at the top right. Maybe a browser bug, I'm in Firefox.

nostrademons 7y ago

So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting to know them. These are the exact opposite qualities that you want in a mom-friend. When you're a new mom you're probably not looking your best, and putting up a profile picture isn't high on your list of things to do. You don't give a shit what your mom friends look like, and once you're reading through text it's more like "Facebook for moms". You have very little free time to swipe through profiles, and when you do, you want your mom-friend-relationships to count. There's a lesson there for people who want to phrase their startup idea as "X for Y". You should ask how similar Y is to the userbase that originally made X popular, and whether you are capturing the qualities they have in common or just randomly cargo-culting a successful product. "Flickr for video" works because a photo-viewing community and video-viewing community are substantially similar: they both have similar casual interactions around shared multimedia, and they both benefit heavily from recommendations, discovery mechanisms, and social sharing. Similarly, "Google for China" works because people in China have information needs too yet actual Google has an antagonistic relationship with the CCP. "Uber for laundry" and "Uber for housecleaning" are both terrible ideas because Uber's value proposition is that you can get transportation on-demand and it can be done by unskilled people as long as they get you safely to your final destination, while both housecleaning and laundry are stuff you do once a week, on a planned basis, and you really want to trust the people who are doing it. "Uber for grocery delivery" (Instacart/UberEats/DoorDash/Postmates) is a decent idea, though, because grocery delivery is also something you want on-demand, do regularly, and can be done by basically anyone.

greggman2 7y ago
me being stupid but I actually thought flickr for video would fail because video takes more work than photos to create and because it takes more time to view them. clearly I was wrong
- rhizome 7y ago
  The part that gets me with video is the upload time. Do people just have faster connections than me, or is the secret to create a phone app that restricts the files to greatly reduced resolutions? Seems like flickr for video would require greater bandwidth or time requirements, but I might simply be clueless.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    Mobile data has been fast enough for many years now, depending where you live. My 2 year old phone has 20Mbit/s upload and 79Mbit/s download on a good day. I don't upload videos, but if I did I expect that's fast enough in the background. The phone upload is way faster than my "fiber" connection at home was, when I still had one.
    - rhizome 7y ago
      I think common speeds are enough for 15-120sec of video up to pretty large resolutions, but for 30min or more? YouTube commonly has multi-hour videos, do people just let their uploads run for a week or three? Families especially would probably not appreciate Dad filling the upload pipe with last week/s baseball games all the time. It may be obvious at this point that I don't know a lot about the producer side of internet video, and I'm sure there are 15 years worth of tools and techniques out there, but I'd be curious what the tolerances and expectations of users. YT probably pays a lot of money for focus groups to get that data, though.
      - jlokier 7y ago
        At 20Mbit/s upload speed, the upload is 2x faster than real-time at Youtube's recommended encoding settings for 1080P (what was called "Full HD video"), and equal to YT's recommended encoding settings for 1440P. So at that rate, Dad can fill the upload pipe continuously, with 24x7 real-time streaming at 1080P and there will still be half a pipe left over for everyone else. The family might not even notice. However, at some ADSL upload speeds (say 2Mbit/s, which is a bit slow for ADSL in 2019), the upload is considerably slower than real-time. It might take 5 hours to upload a 1 hour video in 1080P. That's tolerable enough for a committed long video producer. I'm sure video producers have been doing multi-hour or overnight uploads for years. They don't need to run for weeks.