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Tarpit ideas: What they are and how to avoid them (2023) [video]

140 points by dgs_sgd 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 1y ago
When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas. Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits. AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver. Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies. So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades. Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has. Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed. You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.
- dgs_sgd 1y ago
  The video has a good heuristic to apply that I think works even within changing contexts: "avoid things with a high supply of founders who want to work on it but zero consumer demand for the thing itself", the classic one being a discovery/recommendations app.
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    I guess. Successful executions become so endemic you have to take a step back and recognize it. Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix. Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie. Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well. So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it.
    - fakedang 1y ago
      > Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix. Nope, HN is just an online forum. I can't tailor what I see on HN to my tastes, and there's a subset of posters who get preferential treatment on the frontpage (YC companies), so nope, HN is not a recommendation site.
  - ijustlovemath 1y ago
    is there a difference between this and product market fit?
  - anself 1y ago
    I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      What’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything?
      - fc417fc802 1y ago
        Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services. Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.
        bee_rider 1y ago
        That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.
        bjelkeman-again 1y ago
        It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.
        1y ago
  - nradov 1y ago
    That seems like terrible advice. First, many founders are targeting business or government customers rather than consumers. Second, when it comes to disruptive innovations, consumers don't even know what they want until you show it to them.
    - ozim 1y ago
      Even worse if you show it to them they still might not know they want it. You need like critical mass of early adopters so that people would see „hey this is useful, maybe I can use it too”.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Discovery and recommendation apps for music and videos, such as Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, are big hits. You just have to have a colossal inventory, and a reasonably good algorithm.
    - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
      Discovery and Recommendation in those apps seem to be features, not the purpose of the app itself.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - taurath 1y ago
        The purpose of the app is to sell ads via engagement, recommendation is at least a partial (majority?) driver of engagement, so it’s part and parcel of the purpose of the app. People want what they’re providing, companies want to sell ads, and increase people’s tolerance of ads. Until the next platform without ads comes out (note - tiktok didn’t have ads almost at all for the first year)
    - immibis 1y ago
      The main purpose of these apps is to click on them and watch/listen to some $foo. Not to just tell you what to watch/listen to.
    - pjc50 1y ago
      You can't have a discovery app _that doesn't host the content_.
      - quinnirill 1y ago
        Google and/or IMDb don’t count as discovery apps or not hosting the content?
      - doubled112 1y ago
        Last.fm did it, or did they host content and I've never realized this in 20 years?
  - dcow 1y ago
    Recommendation apps would work a lot better if we weren’t so collectively hing up on copyright.
  - f3b5 1y ago
    In central Europe our biggest tarpit are sustainability / climate topics. Even founders that are smart enough to realize the difficulties still pursue these topics because of an unfoly feedback loop where government agencies almost exclusively fund those "societally important" areas. There's no other risk capital available so most founders align their goals, just to fold 1-2 years later.
    - vanattab 1y ago
      I mean that's better then funding a bunch of startups that try and use psychological traps to capture the attention of your kids and ruining their ability to focus. Most of them also fold 1-2 years later.
    - pedalpete 1y ago
      I'm not sure I agree with this - though I'm not in central Europe. Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves. If you're trying to sell sustainabiity, what is your business? What are you selling? If it's advice on how people can be sustainable, or carbon credits or something, sure, those are things that may be tarpits. But electric vehicles were probably a tarpit idea until they went from being advanced golf carts to being real cars. Environmentally friendly packaging is doing very well. Etc etc.
      - popcorncowboy 1y ago
        > Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves. Tell that to the funding programs.
  - Enginerrrd 1y ago
    Yeah this is actually a really useful idea in general. I learned this when I was put on a team for a modeling competition in college. You had like 72 hours to solve the problem and write the report. It was really stressful but a LOT of fun. There were a range of topics that you could choose from. Some were really obvious how to apply mathematics to, and some... weren't. I was the math talent on the team... but my team members talked me out of going for one of the problems that were easy to apply math to. We instead picked the problem where it was LEAST obvious. And... we ended up winning the competition against a field of 10,000+. I think that lesson applies in business all over the place. There's actually a lot of good comfortable money to be made in unglamorous industries.
- mritchie712 1y ago
  I think many of the "fun" ones will always be tarpit ideas. e.g. "an app to help find something fun to do with friends"... that's just your chat app of choice.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Instagram has recently been quite successful at giving me ads for events that seem actually fun and relevant to me, to the point of me being low key afraid of throwing off the algorithm so it starts recommend worse things. So, I think there's potential but it's very elusive. I feel that my Instagram "getting it" is more of an accident than by design.
- fnord77 1y ago
  do you know of any technologies that are lousy now and might untar sometime later?
  - kens 1y ago
    Some thoughts: VR, fusion, non-refrigerant cooling technologies, personal genomics, silicon-on-sapphire ICs, every drug and treatment that is just around the corner, quantum computing, CO₂ capture, failed Google projects such as Google Glass, Google Wave, Google contact lens glucose sensor.
    - fnord77 1y ago
      optical computing, custom printed medication(s) pills
      - marcosdumay 1y ago
        I think optical computing is in the exact opposite of the situation the OP describes. We have known how to do it for a while now. There are just not too many applications where its strengths are more important than its drawbacks.
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      Nuclear energy (new OR existing technologies)
    - worldsayshi 1y ago
      Social media that aligns with human needs, permaculture farming, digital voting systems, smart contracts.
  - ImHereToVote 1y ago
    Choose your own adventure games.
- api 1y ago
  Maybe the moral is: before starting a venture like others in the past that failed, work out from first principles as much as you can whether the enabling technologies or other circumstances in the world have reached some kind of tipping point that makes it different this time. It probably won’t be different this time unless something has changed. “I’m just that good, I will out execute everyone before me” is probably BS. The people before you were probably not lazy or dumb, it just wasn’t time.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    You mean due-diligence in market research? Bah! That'll never work!
- cjohnson318 1y ago
  I think of "context change" as multiple technologies and trends that chaotically converge into a critical mass of opportunity. It's easy to spot looking backwards, but impossible to predict. You're just the nth individual trying this new/old thing, and now the market supports it, and for a while things are great, until you overreach, you don't reach enough, you're legislated, a new technology comes out of nowhere, there's a pandemic, there's a tectonic shift in global markets, etc.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Similarly a lot of people give up on something in their life, e.g. finding a partner, because of earlier attempts in different (worse) conditions.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Quite often we are incapable of identifying what those different conditions were. When something you don't think is important is the actual cause of the failure you're unlikely to notice and misatrubute the cause.
- j45 1y ago
  Learning the timing of timing is one key skill to learn.
- nickdothutton 1y ago
  On the subject of context I wrote a short post back in 2018 [0]. Smart people spend time on this problem/solution. Solutions appear but fall short of expectations. The technology or more commonly that application of it is stigmatised. Sometimes the whole field becomes tainted. The problem/solution complex is declared a “dead end” or “false dawn”. Interest cools. Nobody invests for a while. The wreckage of the previous cycle rusts away. The craters erode. This takes 20-30 years. During this period, some very small companies, academics, and individuals continue to guard the flame, but lack funding or new talent to advance. Go to step 1, invent new buzzwords/framing and repeat. Ignore much of what was learned during the previous cycle. [1] https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-future./ https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...
  - zik 1y ago
    I remember the excitement around VR back in the late 80s. These new polhemous motion tracking devices and LED microdisplays were going to change the world! Except the technology was expensive and ultimately it kinda sucked. It was barely used outside academia, interest died off gradually and eventually it was tacitly acknowledged to be going nowhere. Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either. I can't wait for round 3 in 2040 or so.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough I'm not sure what use cases you've tried it, but I'm "playing" a bunch of flight simulators, and after getting used using a HP Reverb 2 for all my simming, it's basically impossible to move back to "flat" screens again. It gives you a completely different depth-perception that is as vital when you fly as when you race, so basically any simming is a lot easier and more fun with VR. But again, if you make the plunge into VR simming, it's short of impossible to go back to "normal" afterwards. > hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either. Yeah, simultaneously I agree with this. VR-in-motion (so not sitting still) is still pretty bad, and the setups you need for good performance are pretty expensive, so it's unlikely to break into mainstream unless some breakthrough is being made. With that said, there are niches that are very well served by VR and personally I guess I hope it'll be enough when the mainstream hype dies off.
- michaelcampbell 1y ago
  > DSL era What's this mean?
  - cplan 1y ago
    Digital Subscriber Line
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    It means I now get to feel really old for the rest of the day.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 1y ago
      If you imagine a modem handshake sound I wonder what baud rate it is.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Before we had cables dedicated to internet, we reused telephone cables for both telephone+internet, so adding digital data on top of the existing network, hence Digital Subscriber Line :) It was the fiber of the 90s.
    - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      Surely a large # of North American internet users are still using DSL? I mean, I live rural and even I have fiber now, but that's new.
      - diggan 1y ago
        The island I grew up on in Sweden (with a population of ~700) got broadband in 2007 sometime I think, and in 2013 got fiber optics. Surely most of North America has to be using better stuff than DSL at this point? Although geographically and politically it is probably a bit harder to get high performance internet access everywhere there.
        1y ago
- maccard 1y ago
  I think the summary of the video captures this essence really nicely. > If your idea has been tried before, do your research and understand why it didn’t work. Assume the founders who tried before were very smart, very determined people; what’s different now? If you can't answer that question, don't try again.
- fidotron 1y ago
  What pushed YouTube over the edge was it had backers that were willing to overlook and fight for the rampant copyright violations that it had at the time. Then once big enough it then did the deals to go legit, which it now enthusiastically supports for any new entrants. No other streaming site would have got away with that. Napster was also a bit of a demonstration of how it probably wouldn't work, so it wasn't a low risk strategy.
- morsecodist 1y ago
  From the video it doesn't really seem like tar pit ideas are about technical limitations but more about solving the wrong problem. I don't think the ideas you list are tar pit ideas at all. The value proposition for all of these things is obvious. The technology was hard but once the technology existed it was pretty clear that people would want these things. At least from my read of the definition tar pit ideas are not just ideas that have been tried and failed but they are supposed to seem easy. Things like the restaurant discovery example are technically very easy to build but the limiting factor to people enjoying buying from restaurants is not a tech platform.
- aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
Scene_Cast2 1y ago
Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck. Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).
- little_ent 1y ago
  I did a project on this in like 2010 as a student hobby project. It wasn't accurate, but I also had no idea what I was doing. I mostly did it in a naive way, where I mapped out signal strengths in various rooms (it was dorm floor, 2 rooms shared each) and then trying to figure out where I was based on it. As a non-CS student I thought it was cool......
  - dfedbeef 1y ago
    It was cool
- genewitch 1y ago
  What about multipath? Is that not an issue at wifi wavelengths? Or is that a sub or superset of reflections? It was quite a long time ago now that the first "proof" that one could use leaky WiFi to "see through walls" and observe people moving around inside a building from without. Participate in a transmitter hunt (also called a foxhunt or a t-hunt) where the organizers or the people hiding the transmitter know their stuff. Reflections and multipath can lead you miles away from a transmitter location. Anyhow, someone asked me if I knew how to do this without consent once; that is, if I knew how to track people in a building without them knowing. This was 8 years ago or so. I had hoped saying "that's not possible" would dissuade them, but instead they just never spoke to me again.
  - Scene_Cast2 1y ago
    Oh yeah, multipath is the term I was thinking of. As I recall, the issues were that a "longer" path may have a stronger signal than a more "direct" path, and that a straight line of sight path is not a given.
dgs_sgd 1y ago
The video has a sequel released nine months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs
- samschooler 1y ago
  And for completeness, here is a video from 2022: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg&t=195s https://youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg&t=195s
surprisetalk 1y ago
https://taylor.town/tarpits https://taylor.town/tarpits
anself 1y ago
Is there a way to consume this in text instead? Video is far too slow and cumbersome and requires headphones
- tomhow 1y ago
  You can browse through to the video on YouTube then read the transcript (I think transcripts are available on all YouTube videos - perhaps unless the publisher disables it. But it’s definitely available on this one). I think it would be great if YC turned discussions like this into well edited written articles. I know there’s talk about producing more text content to help startups.
- djmips 1y ago
  Google Gemini will also summarize if you want to start there. The transcripts are tough to read IMO
mwilcox 1y ago
Maybe YC is the problem
bjornsing 1y ago
Why do I feel like YC videos are targeted at really slow people? The combination of discussion in slowmotion and exaggerated gestures reminds me of elementary school. I’m sure there are valuable ideas in there, but I just don’t have the patience to watch.
- 65 1y ago
  Sorry Mr. Smarty Pants that Hacker News is not Smart enough for you.
  - bjornsing 1y ago
    Hehe. But I must say HN in general is significantly higher pace than these YC videos, intellectually.
- eirikbakke 1y ago
  Just watch at 150% speed.
- joshdavham 1y ago
  YC (and Dalton & Michael in particular) like to emphasize clarity and "the basics" in their videos. Recall that their target audience are largely nerds in their early-mid twenties who've never started a business before.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  They are probably following some kind of training. Those features are very common on every educational video. I do agree that this one focus on an audience that is supposed to be too advanced in relation to the video depth of knowledge, so it shouldn't need it. But still it is normally pushed for every video, and the risks of getting the pacing wrong are very asymmetric.
gitroom 1y ago
dang that was packed with real talk - ive tripped over my share of looks obvious, actually impossible ideas too. you ever get tempted to try the same failing thing hoping this time the timings right?
joshdavham 1y ago
What are some tarpit ideas that y'all've come across? Any AI-specific tarpit ideas?
- janalsncm 1y ago
  If by “AI” you mean freemium platforms making api calls to OpenAI with a markup, I would say most of them. If it’s easy, 100 people are already doing it.
- wavemode 1y ago
  Any idea where you are basically just a wrapper over some other other company's API.
- queueueue 1y ago
  Not sure about AI specific but: Todo apps, habit trackers, lots of social media, job boards, recommendation apps, fun things to do with friends, travel planners, trackers (movies/books). I think it’s more common for B2C because these are things that a lot of people come across. Some of these ideas could maybe be done better now that we have genAI but the question might would it work as a standalone app or is it just a feature?
- tlb 1y ago
  It's far too soon to call any AI-specific ideas tarpits. Nothing newly made possible by LLMs or generative image models has been tried long enough to give up on. There are no startup bones to dig up yet.
- thruway516 1y ago
  Not AI but Ive seen a lot of social startup apps in my time all trying to be the next facebook with a twist. They all end up in the same place. If you have any idea along the lines of "Do/share X with your friends" it has probably been tried a million times before so just don't. Another one is dating apps. Everyone thinks they all suck and everyone thinks they have the new twist that will make it not suck. End result is so many shitty 'ghost town' dating apps that end up looking and functioning like the other 99%. Once in a while a Snapchat or Tindr will break out with a genuinely fresh idea but for every one of those there are a million carcasses of failed startup ideas
asimpleusecase 1y ago
The tarpit idea is very descriptive in hindsight. What makes something a tarpit is an idea that sounds cool on the surface and is accessible (don’t have to be one of a kind founder to do it) and when you talk to your friends and people who might be customers you get very positive feedback. So it all starts to feel like a slam dunk. However, if you are a VC you will have seen this exact idea or close variations in it a hundred times and they all flamed out to a zero. As the VC you have visibility into common failure modes ( not able to charge enough, no scaled market, not sticky enough, etc) what is hard from the founder side of things is all those issues and many more are common to almost any venture until you crack the problem and get market fit. So the tarpit concept is more a description of VC scare tissue than a fully operational definition for founders ,because a former tarpit can become a blue ocean of opportunity ( uncontested market) if some element of the equation changes ( technology shift, culture shift, deep founder insight etc) So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit? 1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were. 2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation. 3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention. But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.
- scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
  I found imagining the actual metaphor of tarpit enlightening - it looks like a nice healthy pool of water but turns out to be sticky and impossible to get out of. Under that attractive surface are all the corpses of everyone else who charged in and got stuck. So it’s exactly like you say: you keep your distance and you look for evidence. I do think the point of the metaphor is that sometimes a tarpit is just what it is. I.e. there is no value under that shiny surface and you’re only getting stuck staring at it.
badmonster 1y ago
this is a great video
aaron695 1y ago
I think it's a good video. "The restaurant doesn't exist" is an important axiom. It's why recommendation engines are useless, Netflix has nothing more. Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced. > the world seems limitless but for these physical things it's actually fairly limited This is a really good quote, it also applies to digital. Anyway, a list of tarpit ideas would be useful. The axiom's are too hard, like software complexity and getting money out of educational institutions.
- thruway516 1y ago
  > Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced. This. Nobody has invented a Recommendation engines that really works, the ones that seem to work just have lots of content they can throw at you. I really think tiktok would be no less succesful with an engine that simply threw a random video at you. Recommendations is a really hard problem and anyone that solves it had essentially solved AGI
cjs_ac 1y ago
I used to be a schoolteacher, so whenever I read about someone's shiny new EdTech idea, I can't help but think that it's a tarpit idea. Every developed country has a set of professional standards for teachers, and teachers who don't live up to those standards are pushed out, sometimes by having their teaching accreditation revoked. In Australia, for instance, there's a set number of hours of 'professional development' that teachers have to do every few years, and if you don't complete them, you lose accreditation and have to find a new career. The professional development activities and courses that meet the requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard. When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades. So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, probably because someone's seen a paper on spaced repetition. That's nice, but you can't build a business around this. It doesn't matter if all the thought leaders are all in on spaced repetition this year, because next year they'll have moved on to something else, because they need to have something new to talk about. In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads, so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space. If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.
- rolandog 1y ago
  I partially agree with what you just posted, but — walking along your train of thought, I take a bit of issue with the following paragraph (sliced for emphasis): > So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, [...] so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space. I am of the radical idea that lots of things should not be for-profit businesses (doesn't mean that it can't be profitable — just not exorbitantly so), and that economist's mistaken goal of exponential growth expectations is criminally separated from the sigmoid limits to reality. So, therefore, while I agree that EdTech is a bunch of fads, I think the fact that EdTech is a thing is wrong. And I agree with your main point that we should be chasing accumulation and refinement of knowledge, and not doing some sort of spring-cleaning every 10 years.
FinnLobsien 1y ago
I think an underrated aspect of this is also that YC is ultimately a VC fund and so they're talking about companies that have the potential to be massive, multi-billion dollar companies. Many typical tarpit ideas (to do apps, habit trackers, note taking etc.) can be great businesses for a couple of people building software together but not have venture-scale outcomes. I do agree that as soon as you get network effects (recommendations, marketplaces etc.), SOOOO much is tarpit.
bob1029 1y ago
B2C is virtually impossible compared to B2B. This may not be immediately apparent but it is so obvious in hindsight. The biggest reason I think founders are going for B2C is because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them? The advantage of B2B is that once you figure it out for the first customer, you are on an exponential path to happiness. You can practically cancel your marketing budget at that point. B2C requires an ongoing assault on the dopamine economy. Unless you can get someone on a subscription and program them to forget about it, you're gonna get steamrolled by TikTok & friends.
- nkzd 1y ago
  > because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them? How do you learn this skill? Any resources or books you recommend?
  - gatnoodle 1y ago
    Sure, a lot of people have written about this but this isn't a skill that you can learn from a book.
    - mettamage 1y ago
      Which is why it feels virtually impossible to many founders. Some people may claim B2B is easier, but only if you have the skill and it is hard to figure out how to obtain it
      - bob1029 1y ago
        Not everyone needs to be on the sales team. You only need ~one person who knows how to do it. Once they get the channels opened with the client and the technical people are sending emails directly & regularly, even the most closeted nerds (including those who might also be founders) can begin to contribute meaningfully. This is what being a "non-technical" founder is all about - building bridges between people and organizations.
dzink 1y ago
An idea is tarpit until someone, or some new tech, or regulation cracks it. YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.
debarshri 1y ago
Sometimes a tarpit idea might work because of founders execution. Then the upside is huge. For instance, some animals who survived the tarpit were naturally selected for evolution. Philosophically, idea of building a startup is a tarpit too. You need lot of perseverance and courage to navigate out of it, survive and eventually win.
davidedicillo 1y ago
It's only a tarpit idea when you don't know it's a tarpit idea. I'm building a bookmarking service. I have no illusions that this will become anything more than a hobby project. Still, I love solving specific problems for myself (specifically, making consumption easier to deal with content overload).
- noemit 1y ago
  this is neat. i think digg should come back.
sneak 1y ago
I wish HN had a wiki, and that articles like this could have a list associated with them, with links to the companies that tried and failed under each tarpit idea.
more_corn 1y ago
Tarot idea number 101: putting information that could be a list of text into a video.

140 points by dgs_sgd 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas. Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits. AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver. Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies. So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades. Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has. Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed. You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.

dgs_sgd 1y ago
The video has a good heuristic to apply that I think works even within changing contexts: "avoid things with a high supply of founders who want to work on it but zero consumer demand for the thing itself", the classic one being a discovery/recommendations app.
- kristopolous 1y ago
  I guess. Successful executions become so endemic you have to take a step back and recognize it. Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix. Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie. Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well. So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    > Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix. Nope, HN is just an online forum. I can't tailor what I see on HN to my tastes, and there's a subset of posters who get preferential treatment on the frontpage (YC companies), so nope, HN is not a recommendation site.
- ijustlovemath 1y ago
  is there a difference between this and product market fit?
- anself 1y ago
  I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    What’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything?
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services. Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.
        bjelkeman-again 1y ago
        It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.
        1y ago
- nradov 1y ago
  That seems like terrible advice. First, many founders are targeting business or government customers rather than consumers. Second, when it comes to disruptive innovations, consumers don't even know what they want until you show it to them.
  - ozim 1y ago
    Even worse if you show it to them they still might not know they want it. You need like critical mass of early adopters so that people would see „hey this is useful, maybe I can use it too”.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Discovery and recommendation apps for music and videos, such as Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, are big hits. You just have to have a colossal inventory, and a reasonably good algorithm.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    Discovery and Recommendation in those apps seem to be features, not the purpose of the app itself.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - taurath 1y ago
      The purpose of the app is to sell ads via engagement, recommendation is at least a partial (majority?) driver of engagement, so it’s part and parcel of the purpose of the app. People want what they’re providing, companies want to sell ads, and increase people’s tolerance of ads. Until the next platform without ads comes out (note - tiktok didn’t have ads almost at all for the first year)
  - immibis 1y ago
    The main purpose of these apps is to click on them and watch/listen to some $foo. Not to just tell you what to watch/listen to.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    You can't have a discovery app _that doesn't host the content_.
    - quinnirill 1y ago
      Google and/or IMDb don’t count as discovery apps or not hosting the content?
    - doubled112 1y ago
      Last.fm did it, or did they host content and I've never realized this in 20 years?
- dcow 1y ago
  Recommendation apps would work a lot better if we weren’t so collectively hing up on copyright.
- f3b5 1y ago
  In central Europe our biggest tarpit are sustainability / climate topics. Even founders that are smart enough to realize the difficulties still pursue these topics because of an unfoly feedback loop where government agencies almost exclusively fund those "societally important" areas. There's no other risk capital available so most founders align their goals, just to fold 1-2 years later.
  - vanattab 1y ago
    I mean that's better then funding a bunch of startups that try and use psychological traps to capture the attention of your kids and ruining their ability to focus. Most of them also fold 1-2 years later.
  - pedalpete 1y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with this - though I'm not in central Europe. Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves. If you're trying to sell sustainabiity, what is your business? What are you selling? If it's advice on how people can be sustainable, or carbon credits or something, sure, those are things that may be tarpits. But electric vehicles were probably a tarpit idea until they went from being advanced golf carts to being real cars. Environmentally friendly packaging is doing very well. Etc etc.
    - popcorncowboy 1y ago
      > Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves. Tell that to the funding programs.
- Enginerrrd 1y ago
  Yeah this is actually a really useful idea in general. I learned this when I was put on a team for a modeling competition in college. You had like 72 hours to solve the problem and write the report. It was really stressful but a LOT of fun. There were a range of topics that you could choose from. Some were really obvious how to apply mathematics to, and some... weren't. I was the math talent on the team... but my team members talked me out of going for one of the problems that were easy to apply math to. We instead picked the problem where it was LEAST obvious. And... we ended up winning the competition against a field of 10,000+. I think that lesson applies in business all over the place. There's actually a lot of good comfortable money to be made in unglamorous industries.
mritchie712 1y ago
I think many of the "fun" ones will always be tarpit ideas. e.g. "an app to help find something fun to do with friends"... that's just your chat app of choice.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Instagram has recently been quite successful at giving me ads for events that seem actually fun and relevant to me, to the point of me being low key afraid of throwing off the algorithm so it starts recommend worse things. So, I think there's potential but it's very elusive. I feel that my Instagram "getting it" is more of an accident than by design.
fnord77 1y ago
do you know of any technologies that are lousy now and might untar sometime later?
- kens 1y ago
  Some thoughts: VR, fusion, non-refrigerant cooling technologies, personal genomics, silicon-on-sapphire ICs, every drug and treatment that is just around the corner, quantum computing, CO₂ capture, failed Google projects such as Google Glass, Google Wave, Google contact lens glucose sensor.
  - fnord77 1y ago
    optical computing, custom printed medication(s) pills
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      I think optical computing is in the exact opposite of the situation the OP describes. We have known how to do it for a while now. There are just not too many applications where its strengths are more important than its drawbacks.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Nuclear energy (new OR existing technologies)
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Social media that aligns with human needs, permaculture farming, digital voting systems, smart contracts.
- ImHereToVote 1y ago
  Choose your own adventure games.
api 1y ago
Maybe the moral is: before starting a venture like others in the past that failed, work out from first principles as much as you can whether the enabling technologies or other circumstances in the world have reached some kind of tipping point that makes it different this time. It probably won’t be different this time unless something has changed. “I’m just that good, I will out execute everyone before me” is probably BS. The people before you were probably not lazy or dumb, it just wasn’t time.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  You mean due-diligence in market research? Bah! That'll never work!
cjohnson318 1y ago
I think of "context change" as multiple technologies and trends that chaotically converge into a critical mass of opportunity. It's easy to spot looking backwards, but impossible to predict. You're just the nth individual trying this new/old thing, and now the market supports it, and for a while things are great, until you overreach, you don't reach enough, you're legislated, a new technology comes out of nowhere, there's a pandemic, there's a tectonic shift in global markets, etc.
HPsquared 1y ago
Similarly a lot of people give up on something in their life, e.g. finding a partner, because of earlier attempts in different (worse) conditions.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Quite often we are incapable of identifying what those different conditions were. When something you don't think is important is the actual cause of the failure you're unlikely to notice and misatrubute the cause.
j45 1y ago
Learning the timing of timing is one key skill to learn.
nickdothutton 1y ago
On the subject of context I wrote a short post back in 2018 [0]. Smart people spend time on this problem/solution. Solutions appear but fall short of expectations. The technology or more commonly that application of it is stigmatised. Sometimes the whole field becomes tainted. The problem/solution complex is declared a “dead end” or “false dawn”. Interest cools. Nobody invests for a while. The wreckage of the previous cycle rusts away. The craters erode. This takes 20-30 years. During this period, some very small companies, academics, and individuals continue to guard the flame, but lack funding or new talent to advance. Go to step 1, invent new buzzwords/framing and repeat. Ignore much of what was learned during the previous cycle. [1] https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-future./ https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...
- zik 1y ago
  I remember the excitement around VR back in the late 80s. These new polhemous motion tracking devices and LED microdisplays were going to change the world! Except the technology was expensive and ultimately it kinda sucked. It was barely used outside academia, interest died off gradually and eventually it was tacitly acknowledged to be going nowhere. Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either. I can't wait for round 3 in 2040 or so.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough I'm not sure what use cases you've tried it, but I'm "playing" a bunch of flight simulators, and after getting used using a HP Reverb 2 for all my simming, it's basically impossible to move back to "flat" screens again. It gives you a completely different depth-perception that is as vital when you fly as when you race, so basically any simming is a lot easier and more fun with VR. But again, if you make the plunge into VR simming, it's short of impossible to go back to "normal" afterwards. > hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either. Yeah, simultaneously I agree with this. VR-in-motion (so not sitting still) is still pretty bad, and the setups you need for good performance are pretty expensive, so it's unlikely to break into mainstream unless some breakthrough is being made. With that said, there are niches that are very well served by VR and personally I guess I hope it'll be enough when the mainstream hype dies off.
michaelcampbell 1y ago
> DSL era What's this mean?
- cplan 1y ago
  Digital Subscriber Line
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  It means I now get to feel really old for the rest of the day.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 1y ago
    If you imagine a modem handshake sound I wonder what baud rate it is.
- diggan 1y ago
  Before we had cables dedicated to internet, we reused telephone cables for both telephone+internet, so adding digital data on top of the existing network, hence Digital Subscriber Line :) It was the fiber of the 90s.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    Surely a large # of North American internet users are still using DSL? I mean, I live rural and even I have fiber now, but that's new.
    - diggan 1y ago
      The island I grew up on in Sweden (with a population of ~700) got broadband in 2007 sometime I think, and in 2013 got fiber optics. Surely most of North America has to be using better stuff than DSL at this point? Although geographically and politically it is probably a bit harder to get high performance internet access everywhere there.
      - 1y ago
maccard 1y ago
I think the summary of the video captures this essence really nicely. > If your idea has been tried before, do your research and understand why it didn’t work. Assume the founders who tried before were very smart, very determined people; what’s different now? If you can't answer that question, don't try again.
fidotron 1y ago
What pushed YouTube over the edge was it had backers that were willing to overlook and fight for the rampant copyright violations that it had at the time. Then once big enough it then did the deals to go legit, which it now enthusiastically supports for any new entrants. No other streaming site would have got away with that. Napster was also a bit of a demonstration of how it probably wouldn't work, so it wasn't a low risk strategy.
morsecodist 1y ago
From the video it doesn't really seem like tar pit ideas are about technical limitations but more about solving the wrong problem. I don't think the ideas you list are tar pit ideas at all. The value proposition for all of these things is obvious. The technology was hard but once the technology existed it was pretty clear that people would want these things. At least from my read of the definition tar pit ideas are not just ideas that have been tried and failed but they are supposed to seem easy. Things like the restaurant discovery example are technically very easy to build but the limiting factor to people enjoying buying from restaurants is not a tech platform.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

Scene_Cast2 1y ago

Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck. Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).

little_ent 1y ago
I did a project on this in like 2010 as a student hobby project. It wasn't accurate, but I also had no idea what I was doing. I mostly did it in a naive way, where I mapped out signal strengths in various rooms (it was dorm floor, 2 rooms shared each) and then trying to figure out where I was based on it. As a non-CS student I thought it was cool......
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  It was cool
genewitch 1y ago
What about multipath? Is that not an issue at wifi wavelengths? Or is that a sub or superset of reflections? It was quite a long time ago now that the first "proof" that one could use leaky WiFi to "see through walls" and observe people moving around inside a building from without. Participate in a transmitter hunt (also called a foxhunt or a t-hunt) where the organizers or the people hiding the transmitter know their stuff. Reflections and multipath can lead you miles away from a transmitter location. Anyhow, someone asked me if I knew how to do this without consent once; that is, if I knew how to track people in a building without them knowing. This was 8 years ago or so. I had hoped saying "that's not possible" would dissuade them, but instead they just never spoke to me again.
- Scene_Cast2 1y ago
  Oh yeah, multipath is the term I was thinking of. As I recall, the issues were that a "longer" path may have a stronger signal than a more "direct" path, and that a straight line of sight path is not a given.

dgs_sgd 1y ago

The video has a sequel released nine months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs

samschooler 1y ago
And for completeness, here is a video from 2022: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg&t=195s https://youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg&t=195s

surprisetalk 1y ago

https://taylor.town/tarpits https://taylor.town/tarpits

anself 1y ago

Is there a way to consume this in text instead? Video is far too slow and cumbersome and requires headphones

tomhow 1y ago
You can browse through to the video on YouTube then read the transcript (I think transcripts are available on all YouTube videos - perhaps unless the publisher disables it. But it’s definitely available on this one). I think it would be great if YC turned discussions like this into well edited written articles. I know there’s talk about producing more text content to help startups.
djmips 1y ago
Google Gemini will also summarize if you want to start there. The transcripts are tough to read IMO

mwilcox 1y ago

Maybe YC is the problem

bjornsing 1y ago

Why do I feel like YC videos are targeted at really slow people? The combination of discussion in slowmotion and exaggerated gestures reminds me of elementary school. I’m sure there are valuable ideas in there, but I just don’t have the patience to watch.

65 1y ago
Sorry Mr. Smarty Pants that Hacker News is not Smart enough for you.
- bjornsing 1y ago
  Hehe. But I must say HN in general is significantly higher pace than these YC videos, intellectually.
eirikbakke 1y ago
Just watch at 150% speed.
joshdavham 1y ago
YC (and Dalton & Michael in particular) like to emphasize clarity and "the basics" in their videos. Recall that their target audience are largely nerds in their early-mid twenties who've never started a business before.
marcosdumay 1y ago
They are probably following some kind of training. Those features are very common on every educational video. I do agree that this one focus on an audience that is supposed to be too advanced in relation to the video depth of knowledge, so it shouldn't need it. But still it is normally pushed for every video, and the risks of getting the pacing wrong are very asymmetric.

gitroom 1y ago

dang that was packed with real talk - ive tripped over my share of looks obvious, actually impossible ideas too. you ever get tempted to try the same failing thing hoping this time the timings right?

joshdavham 1y ago

What are some tarpit ideas that y'all've come across? Any AI-specific tarpit ideas?

janalsncm 1y ago
If by “AI” you mean freemium platforms making api calls to OpenAI with a markup, I would say most of them. If it’s easy, 100 people are already doing it.
wavemode 1y ago
Any idea where you are basically just a wrapper over some other other company's API.
queueueue 1y ago
Not sure about AI specific but: Todo apps, habit trackers, lots of social media, job boards, recommendation apps, fun things to do with friends, travel planners, trackers (movies/books). I think it’s more common for B2C because these are things that a lot of people come across. Some of these ideas could maybe be done better now that we have genAI but the question might would it work as a standalone app or is it just a feature?
tlb 1y ago
It's far too soon to call any AI-specific ideas tarpits. Nothing newly made possible by LLMs or generative image models has been tried long enough to give up on. There are no startup bones to dig up yet.
thruway516 1y ago
Not AI but Ive seen a lot of social startup apps in my time all trying to be the next facebook with a twist. They all end up in the same place. If you have any idea along the lines of "Do/share X with your friends" it has probably been tried a million times before so just don't. Another one is dating apps. Everyone thinks they all suck and everyone thinks they have the new twist that will make it not suck. End result is so many shitty 'ghost town' dating apps that end up looking and functioning like the other 99%. Once in a while a Snapchat or Tindr will break out with a genuinely fresh idea but for every one of those there are a million carcasses of failed startup ideas

asimpleusecase 1y ago

The tarpit idea is very descriptive in hindsight. What makes something a tarpit is an idea that sounds cool on the surface and is accessible (don’t have to be one of a kind founder to do it) and when you talk to your friends and people who might be customers you get very positive feedback. So it all starts to feel like a slam dunk. However, if you are a VC you will have seen this exact idea or close variations in it a hundred times and they all flamed out to a zero. As the VC you have visibility into common failure modes ( not able to charge enough, no scaled market, not sticky enough, etc) what is hard from the founder side of things is all those issues and many more are common to almost any venture until you crack the problem and get market fit. So the tarpit concept is more a description of VC scare tissue than a fully operational definition for founders ,because a former tarpit can become a blue ocean of opportunity ( uncontested market) if some element of the equation changes ( technology shift, culture shift, deep founder insight etc) So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit? 1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were. 2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation. 3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention. But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.

scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
I found imagining the actual metaphor of tarpit enlightening - it looks like a nice healthy pool of water but turns out to be sticky and impossible to get out of. Under that attractive surface are all the corpses of everyone else who charged in and got stuck. So it’s exactly like you say: you keep your distance and you look for evidence. I do think the point of the metaphor is that sometimes a tarpit is just what it is. I.e. there is no value under that shiny surface and you’re only getting stuck staring at it.

badmonster 1y ago

this is a great video

aaron695 1y ago

I think it's a good video. "The restaurant doesn't exist" is an important axiom. It's why recommendation engines are useless, Netflix has nothing more. Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced. > the world seems limitless but for these physical things it's actually fairly limited This is a really good quote, it also applies to digital. Anyway, a list of tarpit ideas would be useful. The axiom's are too hard, like software complexity and getting money out of educational institutions.

thruway516 1y ago
> Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced. This. Nobody has invented a Recommendation engines that really works, the ones that seem to work just have lots of content they can throw at you. I really think tiktok would be no less succesful with an engine that simply threw a random video at you. Recommendations is a really hard problem and anyone that solves it had essentially solved AGI

cjs_ac 1y ago

I used to be a schoolteacher, so whenever I read about someone's shiny new EdTech idea, I can't help but think that it's a tarpit idea. Every developed country has a set of professional standards for teachers, and teachers who don't live up to those standards are pushed out, sometimes by having their teaching accreditation revoked. In Australia, for instance, there's a set number of hours of 'professional development' that teachers have to do every few years, and if you don't complete them, you lose accreditation and have to find a new career. The professional development activities and courses that meet the requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard. When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades. So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, probably because someone's seen a paper on spaced repetition. That's nice, but you can't build a business around this. It doesn't matter if all the thought leaders are all in on spaced repetition this year, because next year they'll have moved on to something else, because they need to have something new to talk about. In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads, so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space. If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.

rolandog 1y ago
I partially agree with what you just posted, but — walking along your train of thought, I take a bit of issue with the following paragraph (sliced for emphasis): > So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, [...] so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space. I am of the radical idea that lots of things should not be for-profit businesses (doesn't mean that it can't be profitable — just not exorbitantly so), and that economist's mistaken goal of exponential growth expectations is criminally separated from the sigmoid limits to reality. So, therefore, while I agree that EdTech is a bunch of fads, I think the fact that EdTech is a thing is wrong. And I agree with your main point that we should be chasing accumulation and refinement of knowledge, and not doing some sort of spring-cleaning every 10 years.

FinnLobsien 1y ago

I think an underrated aspect of this is also that YC is ultimately a VC fund and so they're talking about companies that have the potential to be massive, multi-billion dollar companies. Many typical tarpit ideas (to do apps, habit trackers, note taking etc.) can be great businesses for a couple of people building software together but not have venture-scale outcomes. I do agree that as soon as you get network effects (recommendations, marketplaces etc.), SOOOO much is tarpit.

bob1029 1y ago

B2C is virtually impossible compared to B2B. This may not be immediately apparent but it is so obvious in hindsight. The biggest reason I think founders are going for B2C is because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them? The advantage of B2B is that once you figure it out for the first customer, you are on an exponential path to happiness. You can practically cancel your marketing budget at that point. B2C requires an ongoing assault on the dopamine economy. Unless you can get someone on a subscription and program them to forget about it, you're gonna get steamrolled by TikTok & friends.

nkzd 1y ago
> because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them? How do you learn this skill? Any resources or books you recommend?
- gatnoodle 1y ago
  Sure, a lot of people have written about this but this isn't a skill that you can learn from a book.
  - mettamage 1y ago
    Which is why it feels virtually impossible to many founders. Some people may claim B2B is easier, but only if you have the skill and it is hard to figure out how to obtain it
    - bob1029 1y ago
      Not everyone needs to be on the sales team. You only need ~one person who knows how to do it. Once they get the channels opened with the client and the technical people are sending emails directly & regularly, even the most closeted nerds (including those who might also be founders) can begin to contribute meaningfully. This is what being a "non-technical" founder is all about - building bridges between people and organizations.

dzink 1y ago

An idea is tarpit until someone, or some new tech, or regulation cracks it. YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.

debarshri 1y ago

Sometimes a tarpit idea might work because of founders execution. Then the upside is huge. For instance, some animals who survived the tarpit were naturally selected for evolution. Philosophically, idea of building a startup is a tarpit too. You need lot of perseverance and courage to navigate out of it, survive and eventually win.

davidedicillo 1y ago

It's only a tarpit idea when you don't know it's a tarpit idea. I'm building a bookmarking service. I have no illusions that this will become anything more than a hobby project. Still, I love solving specific problems for myself (specifically, making consumption easier to deal with content overload).

noemit 1y ago
this is neat. i think digg should come back.

sneak 1y ago

I wish HN had a wiki, and that articles like this could have a list associated with them, with links to the companies that tried and failed under each tarpit idea.

more_corn 1y ago

Tarot idea number 101: putting information that could be a list of text into a video.