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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 peo
by kristopolous 2y 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 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI 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 2y 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 2y agois there a difference between this and product market fit?
- anself 2y agoI 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 2y agoWhat’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything?
- fc417fc802 2y agoDo 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 2y agoThat 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 2y agoIt 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.
- 2y ago
- nradov 2y agoThat 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 2y agoEven 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 2y agoDiscovery 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 2y agoDiscovery and Recommendation in those apps seem to be features, not the purpose of the app itself.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- taurath 2y agoThe 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 2y agoThe 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 2y agoYou can't have a discovery app _that doesn't host the content_.
- quinnirill 2y agoGoogle and/or IMDb don’t count as discovery apps or not hosting the content?
- doubled112 2y agoLast.fm did it, or did they host content and I've never realized this in 20 years?
- dcow 2y agoRecommendation apps would work a lot better if we weren’t so collectively hing up on copyright.
- f3b5 2y agoIn 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoI'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 2y ago> Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves. Tell that to the funding programs.
- Enginerrrd 2y agoYeah 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoInstagram 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 2y agodo you know of any technologies that are lousy now and might untar sometime later?
- kens 2y agoSome 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 2y agooptical computing, custom printed medication(s) pills
- marcosdumay 2y agoI 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 2y agoNuclear energy (new OR existing technologies)
- worldsayshi 2y agoSocial media that aligns with human needs, permaculture farming, digital voting systems, smart contracts.
- ImHereToVote 2y agoChoose your own adventure games.
- api 2y agoMaybe 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 2y agoYou mean due-diligence in market research? Bah! That'll never work!
- cjohnson318 2y agoI 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 2y agoSimilarly 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 2y agoQuite 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 2y agoLearning the timing of timing is one key skill to learn.
- nickdothutton 2y agoOn 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 2y agoI 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 2y 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 2y ago> DSL era What's this mean?
- cplan 2y agoDigital Subscriber Line
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoIt means I now get to feel really old for the rest of the day.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y agoIf you imagine a modem handshake sound I wonder what baud rate it is.
- diggan 2y agoBefore 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 2y agoSurely 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 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoWhat 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 2y agoFrom 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 2y ago[dead]