4 ms·

Sometimes it's not just about shipping but also about knowing how to approach it and having the vision. Case in point - many many years ago, around 2004 or 2005

Sometimes it's not just about shipping but also about knowing how to approach it and having the vision. Case in point - many many years ago, around 2004 or 2005, I built this stupid app with a couple of friends - it was a text message based gossip app where you can share updates on celeb spotting and subscribe to get notifications by tags or locations. Whatever. It didn't pick up understandably (it had like 200 users in our city), but we thought maybe we'll pivot it: We aggregated the reports into a website with a nice feed, and then we thought, what if instead of one feed about celebs, people could just post whatever they want via text messages and others could follow them and get the texts or view the feed of these short (140 characters or so?) posts on a website? It would be kinda cool. But mobile providers would not allow us to send media messages, and we thought the idea just kinda sucked and is not worth a start-up, especially since now we have group text messaging in newer phones! And MMS support that we don't have. So yeah, I've basically written a proto-Twitter a bit before Twitter existed (the gossip version also predated Gawker Stalker by a year), but the harsh reality is that it didn't take off because of me and the people I worked on this with weren't made of the stuff of people who start billion dollar companies.

hoseja 6y ago
That "stuff" is utter lack of scruple and astronomic amount of luck, don't feel too bad. If there was someone like that among you, you'd probably end up like Noah Glass anyway.
- dvirsky 6y ago
  Maybe. One other funny anecdote about this project was that I attended this big tech unconference around that time, and I wrote a version of this app that allowed people to post updates from sessions, notify about upcoming sessions, follow hashtags, etc. So there I stood in front of 200-300 entrepreneurs and investors and internet pioneers (there were even a couple of billionaires or people who later became billionaires in that crowd), and I pitched it to them so they'd register and use it. The response was pretty lukewarm and only few people used it. And not a single one saw anything special about the idea. Which again, is probably how I presented it more than anything. But anyway the moral of the story is that contrary to popular belief, being in the right place at the right time, AND coming up with a "how come on one thought of that before" idea before anyone else, AND actually delivering a nice MVP - all those are not enough. Eventually it comes down to things like tenacity and charisma and boldness and obviously luck.
- paul_f 6y ago
  There were hundreds of proto-twitters before twitter. It isn't about being the first to think of something and attempt an implementation.

hoseja 6y ago

That "stuff" is utter lack of scruple and astronomic amount of luck, don't feel too bad. If there was someone like that among you, you'd probably end up like Noah Glass anyway.

dvirsky 6y ago
Maybe. One other funny anecdote about this project was that I attended this big tech unconference around that time, and I wrote a version of this app that allowed people to post updates from sessions, notify about upcoming sessions, follow hashtags, etc. So there I stood in front of 200-300 entrepreneurs and investors and internet pioneers (there were even a couple of billionaires or people who later became billionaires in that crowd), and I pitched it to them so they'd register and use it. The response was pretty lukewarm and only few people used it. And not a single one saw anything special about the idea. Which again, is probably how I presented it more than anything. But anyway the moral of the story is that contrary to popular belief, being in the right place at the right time, AND coming up with a "how come on one thought of that before" idea before anyone else, AND actually delivering a nice MVP - all those are not enough. Eventually it comes down to things like tenacity and charisma and boldness and obviously luck.
paul_f 6y ago
There were hundreds of proto-twitters before twitter. It isn't about being the first to think of something and attempt an implementation.