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The best ideas are ones that sound stupid to most people at first. Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea?
by fourseventy 6y ago
The best ideas are ones that sound stupid to most people at first. Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea?
- seattle_spring 6y ago> Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea? Oh my God, Yes I definitely can say that I didn't think Airbnb or Uber were stupid. I had been hosting on Couchsurfing.org since 2004, 5 years before Airbnb first launched. I thought Airbnb was an amazing idea from day 1, and felt stupid for not thinking of it myself. As for Uber, I had regularly been fucked by taxi drivers up until Uber came out. I used it the first day I could, and remember fondly how amazing the experience was when it first came out. That was when tipping was explicitly not required and the only option were the Black towncars.
- stevehawk 6y agoI think the majority of people would say that those two weren't stupid ideas. Uber didn't become a 'stupid' idea until it's business idea shifted to "sell everything at half cost and hope we never run out of money". Airbnb still isn't a stupid idea, to my knowledge. Particularly if you're wealthy enough to afford spare property.
- majormajor 6y agoThose ideas didn't require raising over a billion dollars just to try. And they were also much more of an actual "new idea" than just "somewhere between youtube and netflix, with both subscription revenue AND ad revenue despite another new subscription (that still has ads at the entry tier!) being a hard sell to users." Which is an idea that has failed before, Quibi thought they could just buy their way to popularity by raising more money. The more money you need to raise, the higher the burden of evidence for "non-stupid" needs to be.