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I can't find it now, but I read a story that's been repeatedly posted here about someone who got an idea, dropped everything, built an MVP, showed it to potenti
by exikyut 6y ago
I can't find it now, but I read a story that's been repeatedly posted here about someone who got an idea, dropped everything, built an MVP, showed it to potential customers who loved it... and was told "I definitely need this, but I wouldn't pay for it." And then the person realized that the customer was right (the worst kind of right), and that the idea was both awesome and unmonetizable.
In the same vein... question.
Google is absolutely terrible at customer support and handling these kinds of issues. I once read in a comment posted here that they apparently don't even regard issues as valid signal unless 10,000 users are affected. (I've personally always instinctively shied away from app/site feedback buttons myself, and now I know why.) I'm guessing it's because con$i$tent ridiculou$ adverti$ing revenue ("we can do no wrong") has caused the death/deselection of normal customer support feedback loops.
Sooo... could a startup, or startups, fill the absolutely massive vacuum that is being created here?
For every story that trends on HN, how many more false negatives of people being bankrupted are there that never see the light of day? :(
I can only think that this number is probably remarkably high given that stories have to trend on social media and/or popular websites, for multiple days, before a connection is made and the problem can be fixed.
Once again, the more I look at this, the more I get the impression that this is a huge hole that could be filled to great benefit.
But thinking about it, I don't think it would be monetisable:
- It would ultimately be a company taking people's money to leverage a few private contacts. It doesn't take much squinting to see this as extortion and gatekeeping, which happens everywhere but would legally be very interesting to defend (especially against a company the size of Google). :/
- The contact issues only exist because of process and organizational failure, so even if private contacts were successfully established, the signal/noise ratio was ideal, and this company did perfect triage, it wouldn't take long for manglement to hear of the situation and decree that no Google employee were allowed to interact with the company professionally
- The whole thing would have to operate under the radar to operate at all... and maybe such operations exist and are successful, we've just never heard of them. Problem.
Running the whole thing as a volunteer operation maybe sounds like it could work though.
And if issues don't get fixed until >10,000 people "notice" maybe such an operation could have noticeable presence before being acknowledged.
Just thinking out loud. What think?
- richardwhiuk 6y agoThe signal to noise ratio would still be terrible. The company would have no mechanism to work out who was actually being honest. For every story that trends on HN, 9 times out of 10, it turns out Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook were right, and the company was doing something dodgy.
- exikyut 6y agoFacepalm. I forgot to mention the stipulation part that I mentioned last time I mused about this. The platform would require HN profile info, GitHub account details, maybe a keybase identity or two, perhaps a project website, etc, demonstrating years of organic ongoing activity, to be submitted with cases in order for them to be lodged. Basically any and every type of dev-oriented signal that would be extremely difficult for a scammer to fake.