5 ms·

Stop producing shit

107 points by mariusandra 14y ago

rocky1138 14y ago
Disappointed. I thought this was going to teach me how to avoid double-poop Mondays.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  Double poop? I have to deal with quadruple poops most days I drink coffee =(
- highace 14y ago
  Not constructive, but I lolled.
grabeh 14y ago
I appreciate the sentiment but I don't think it is quite as simple as imploring people to focus on solving actual problems. The creative spirit isn't quite as straightforward as that nor is everyone capable of that 'Eureka!' moment. Also many people will focus on building clones of existing websites because it will help them to improve and develop their skills. Also, on a related note, would you say that cherry.ee is solving a real problem?
- espadagroup 14y ago
  While I understand the creative spirit isn't always normal, I'd guess the OP is saying if you can't think of a real problem to solve then don't put your (valuable) energy and time into crap.
  - grabeh 14y ago
    True - although this does rather increase the irony of the OP being involved as co-founder of what appears on first glance to be a daily deals website. I'm not saying it's crap but I'm not sure it's solving a 'real problem' of the type alluded to in the OP's post.
ajuc 14y ago
Coming up with 10 ideas a day is simple. Knowing which one is good is hard.
- mlvljr 14y ago
  Let's start together with obviously silly ones: 1. Cat pic "aggregator" & search engine.
  - ajuc 14y ago
    2. internet forum designed for convenient arguing. Looking different from traditional boards. There would be one huge (potentialy infinite) 2d plane, and people can place their opinions somewhere in a rectangle, others can place their counterarguments nearby and connect it with arrows, there are other kinds of relations like "supports", "contradicts", "example of", "counterexample", "implies", etc. People can only vote on arrows, not on nodes.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  True, but just the act of forcing yourself to come up with 10 new ideas, seems like something that could be valuable. In fact, that's probably the most useful part of this article. I might just give it a try, to see how it goes. I'll start a list of ideas, and try to add 10 new (unique) ones to it every day. I'm guessing after about day 2, it'll be hard to come up with 10 new unique ideas, that aren't just ridiculous. By day 3, it'll probably look like: 1) Start a service to let people launch the remains of their deceased pets into orbit. 2) an Android app that makes Farting noises (probably already exists) 3) a YCombinator clone 4) Something that combines the best elements of Slashdot, XKCD, 4chan, and Ebay. 5) An AS/400 compatible RPG environment, to let businesses move off of (expensive) iSeries hardware and onto commodity Linux boxes without expensive porting costs. 6) A bitcoin marketplace for cat pics
mindcrime 14y ago
So, how do these two statements jibe and form part of an sort of coherent argument? Some other guys had an idea, received validation from two potential clients, raised funding, hired a lot of people, built a product and discovered nobody really wants to pay for it. Why does it feel like the lean startup movement has given a lot of people the license to produce crap? The lean startup principles are pretty much specifically against going out, raising funding, hiring a lot of people, and then building something nobody wants. The whole point of Customer Development is to not do all of that until you've validated the market for whatever it is you are proposing to build. And then you have this statement: On the other side you have teams producing amazing products. Take for example the Pebble smart watch, the DoubleRobotics telepresence robots, Appfog free PaaS hosting, SmugMug photo hosting, SixthSense or any random project on Kickstarter. Where the author seems infatuated with a list of products with no commentary whatsoever on whether or not they are successful in the market. You can produce a great product and still fail to have a successful business. So what point is this article really trying to make? If you’re in a startup looking forward to your next pivot, please just stop. The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants or an app that adds double rainbows to blurry pictures. And again, we have to sentences that have absolutely no connection to one another. This article comes off as a mish-mash of interesting thoughts, jumbled together, when the author's point seems to reduce to "work on big, world changing ideas. Where's my flying car?" And that's not a bad sentiment, but this article just seems to ramble all over the place to get there.
- AdamFernandez 14y ago
  It's also important to note that SpaceX was not Elon Musk's first venture. I'm sure success with PayPal gave him the confidence, clout, and partial financing to take on such an ambitious endeavor.
programminggeek 14y ago
Producing something meaningful or awesome doesn't solve any of the problems the author describes. Plenty of people build outstanding things that nobody will pay for or care about. Building something "great" doesn't guarantee anything. Sounds like the author is advocating "if you build it they will come", which only works in Iowa if you are hallucinating about dead baseball players and abducting James Earl Jones.
agscala 14y ago
It seems like a lot of people are building a product just because it's cool to build a product and they somehow forget to actually provide value. Then they're surprised when it fails. I don't get it.
rprime 14y ago
Cool, but nothing new, people do what they can do best and if making a new rainbow fart app is what they can do best, that's it. Also seeing such an article coming from some one who co-founded an "another/similar/clone of X" is a bit of a disappointment.
JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Not actionable.
TravisLS 14y ago
I think it's useful to think of ideas you could pursue in kind of a 2x2 matrix. You have revolutionary ideas and evolutionary ideas. You have high-capital ideas and low-capital ideas. If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing revolutionary, high-capital ideas. That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market, or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of potential acquirers in the existing market participants.
- wamatt 14y ago
  That's a pretty nice way to think about these things, Kudos! A visualization of the concept, would make a great blog post.
- michaelbuckbee 14y ago
  Further, I think typically there is a 'ramp up' over time from the low-capital evolution => high capital revolutionary ideas. Elon's first major success Zip2 was a company that provided "Internet platform solutions for media companies and local e-commerce merchants"[1] 1 - http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.html http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm...
munin 14y ago
I love to rip on 'social startups' as much as any good hacker, and I basically start my day with a cup of coffee and the 'startup guys' video. reading this article, though, something clicked for me. why does it matter that there are startups out there that are constantly pivoting or not producing real products? what is the loss? one statement I've seen put forward is that the startup energy would capture smart people who could be our next Feynman or Shannon and instead of having them do real science, we figure out how to get them to click on ads. I can appreciate this fear, however, I've spent a lot of time on university campuses lately and I've met a very large number of very smart and very motivated young people who are getting educated in real science and have a passion to go into the world and change it. They won't go figure out how to get people to click ads. is the fear that these little pivoting media startups will seriously suck all of the spare cash out of the economy and we will wind up doing nothing but producing Twitter clones? if you produce this analysis, in my opinion, you should step back and consider that maybe you're too close to the bubble. so what's the harm with having the brogrammers produce products that no one wants to use? do you have a backlog of awesome work that you wish was being done, could be done by these constantly pivoting wunderkinds, but isn't? maybe you should start a company!
- rjzzleep 14y ago
  Well it depends a bit when you pivot. I'm guessing most people pivot before actually coming out with their product, simply because they don't know what they really want and they have no idea how to do it either. Pivoting is good when you're already out there with your idea and then understand that you need to adjust to your customers needs. It is not when you don't really know what to do and just experiment with other peoples money to find out what YOU want.
rjzzleep 14y ago
thank you, thank you, I've been wanting to write something similar for a while now, but have been advised not to, because of my tone. I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not. There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie, i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three simple questions they all fail to answer: 1. where is the value? 2. what's your competitive advantage? 3. who's your target and how are you planning to make money. just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really care, as i just need to build up some funds." let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential to make a shitload of money. But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones. But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.
subsystem 14y ago
I think he's forgetting how Elon Musk got started. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zip2 http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zip2
- jerf 14y ago
  I've gotten to the point that any article that decries people making startups because they don't copy Elon Musk is an instant bozo-bit flip for me. It is not possible for some guy on the street to start a rocketry startup. Only an idiot would hand some guy on the street the requisite billions. There's some bite in the "photo sharing" accusations, but that doesn't generalize to all low-capital network-based startups, and trying to imply otherwise is definitely weak thinking. You have to start somewhere if you want to accrue capital to take on those sorts of challenges.
  - dsirijus 14y ago
    But you need not start at photo sharing. There's plenty of problems troubling humanity that need not rocket scientists to solve.
    - jerf 14y ago
      Sorry, that was my point, but upon re-reading I agree I was not clear. There are many little computer/network/internet startup niches where one can build good businesses still out there.
pg 14y ago
Actually the world probably does need "another way to connect with merchants." The way you can convince yourself of that is to ask: have all the ways of connecting with merchants been invented? "Connecting with merchants" is such a large category that the answer is surely no. In fact it takes some effort to find sentences of the form "All the ways of doing x have been invented" that one can feel certain are true. It's certainly not true for photo-sharing applications, because that's not even a real category. Images are a fundamental medium, like text. We don't lump Twitter, email, and blogging together as "text-sharing applications." The only reason we do with photos is that it's only recently that smartphones have brought a lot of photos online. But a huge number of what we would now call "photo-sharing applications" remain to be invented. Ditto for text-sharing applications incidentally.
- sophacles 14y ago
  I think there is a good question in here somewhere: Is it better for startups to monte carlo (and/or) genetic algorithm style variations on a theme to find the best way, or is it better try find something truly different to create and push the state of the art into a new area? And of course, that brings up the meta-question: did I just propose a false dilemma, are the two things really different?
- eckyptang 14y ago
  I think you miss the point. I think the point is more that "finding another way to connect with merchants" really isn't that important or useful in the scale of things. The problem has been artificially created so that it can be solved for profit. Solving problems that humanity really faces with tangible innovations rather than inventing slightly different ways to top slice cash using virtual real estate is much more important. A million shitty rails apps yet nothing which truly changes the human experience. My father once said (whilst slaving over PDS7.1 writing yet another payroll system in the late 80s): "I feel guilty sitting here taking money from people for this. It genuinely doesn't improve their lives."
  - mccr8 14y ago
    Getting paid improves my life...
brandoncapecci 14y ago
I think I'm going to write a counter-opinion post sometime called "Everyone poops" about how the advice given here scores an 11/10 on my trite-meter. Readers have by now heard their start-up isn't solving an important problem by now - that doesn't help them start something that does. "Advice" of this nature is just the author procrastinating from solving the same ambitious problems he seems so enthusiastic about. If your going to change the world, you need to stop giving a shit about the inevitable dogdating sites of others and just do it yourself.
awicklander 14y ago
This is terrible advice. When you decide to create something, the first thing....it's probably going to be crap. It's only by creating, and shipping, over and over again that you begin to learn how to create products. Often times, in fact most of the time, people are going to create a bunch of crap before they finally make the gem that's going to be awesome.
petenixey 14y ago
What a silly article. I read and re-read this article but couldn't detect that it actually gave any insight at all. All the article distilled down to was "make a startup that is successful and not one that fails". This is not something that I believe is opaque to those involved. The author finishes with the statement "The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants" which I think sums up exactly why this article is reactive rant. Speak to any merchant and they will tell you that there is one thing they care above above all else and that is customers. Those customers are hard and expensive to find and merchants desperately require scalable and efficient ways to find them. Eric Reis used to have a great piece in one of his talks in which he compared Ali G pitching his Ice Cream Glove (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs) to an advert for a blanket with sleeves. As Eric said, one of the two of those is a $50M/year company and the other is Ali G. Pitch them though and it's not immediately clear which would be which. Discovery comes from exploration and most lucrative discoveries tend to come from the most risky experimentation.
- spatten 14y ago
  Here's a link Eric's "Don't be the Ice Cream Glove" blog post: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cream-glove.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cre.... (I remember it well. It was one of the articles I used to test on of the iterations of our book generator when we were first producing http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned. I must have read this 100 times :).
ahc 14y ago
Says the guy making a Groupon clone...
nateberkopec 14y ago
TL;DR: "The solution to having bad ideas is to have good ones instead." What kind of advice is that? This is like telling kids to "be like Mike [Jordan]". Yeah, I guess it would be nice...but, that's not a strategy.
- notatoad 14y ago
  That's not the tldr I got from this at all. The solution to having bad ideas is to stop and ask yourself if an idea is bad before you pour months or years with of work into it. Everybody has bad ideas, and everybody has a few good ones. Filter your ideas, instead of jumping on the first idea you come up with just because you want to found a startup, any startup. Don't waste your time.
  - nateberkopec 14y ago
    What? Implying people work on ideas they know are bad?
    - klibertp 14y ago
      No. They work on ideas they never really tried to think through sufficiently to know if those ideas are good or not. And this is very, very common, at least in people I happen to know. It's hard to look at yourself objectively, we all know that - do you think that looking at your ideas objectively is easier?
fromdoon 14y ago
Everyone out there needs some kind of cult, with which they can associate. This happens in every sphere of life. After the information revolution, everyone is exposed to the major success stories in the current times. So it becomes really easy to fall in a cult associated with those success stories. This is not a weakness nor it is bad. It is just how we are. When you add above phenomena with easy access to development tools and free tutorials that can teach you how to make a simplistic app in a matter of days, then what follows is adaptation/modulation of currently successful ideas on a grand scale. This is what we're a seeing right now. Everyone thinks they can make a social app and make it big, because since the success of Facebook, even when many startups have failed to get going on the social front, there a still a few who've made it big and that is just enough to strengthen the cult. So as long as we don't see a real disruption, kind of a wake up call from the sleep, the prevalent cult of the time would sustain and keep sucking in a fraction of the intellectual talent on Earth at any given time. But we don't need to worry. As Scott Adams says, the advance of human civilization has always been due to a minority and not because of the majority. The majority will keep going through the motions of our current times. While a select few would lead us to new directions.
ZanderEarth32 14y ago
Start-ups are the new grad school, which was the new peace core. It's what you do when you don't know what else to do. That in between stage, where you don't have a next step planned but are anxious and need to do something. Back in the day, you'd join the peace core. It was something productive to do, noble and at least you weren't sitting on the couch collecting dust. Then when the peace core wasn't pleasing, people would go to grad school upon graduation from undergrad. You got your shiny new bachelors degree and no path, maybe no opportunities. So, you'd saddle up for grad school because it bought you more time. Now, all those would be peace core grad students are starting start-ups because it buys you time. They disguise it as 'wanting to change the world' but it's really just buying time until you figure stuff out. This is why there is abundance of shit in the start up world. Too many folks just buying themselves time.
momma-joe 14y ago
most accurate post i've read since 1999.
px1999 14y ago
How to: Stop producing shit 1. Produce 10 shit ideas each day 2. Throw them away 3. ??? 4. Profit! TBH I actually agree with these 4 steps, but they're exactly the reason people should continue producing shit. It may not make you rich this time around (it could have the opposite effect) and may not have a huge impact, but there's a basis to the 10,000 hours rule, and you're working off some of those hours (or, in oldschool parlance: you're learning from your mistakes). The value is in producing ordinary work, but being able to recognize why it's ordinary, and to improve upon your mistakes (in the idea, in the implementation and in the execution) the next time around. Usually, the first time painters pick up a brush, their work is shit; the first time musicians pick up an instrument, their work is shit; same goes for developers. It's not a reason to not pick up the brush - to tell someone to stop sucking and start being awesome isn't really advice. I think that this advice is better: Practice, practice, practice. It's much better to be constantly producing shit (and learning) than just to sit around and consume it, and it's not a case of deciding "oh, hey, maybe this time I'll make something good, just for the sake of it".
hnruss 14y ago
"Now imagine a world where instead of starting Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Elon Musk would have built a social media news aggregator." Good point
gfodor 14y ago
It's kind of hard to cite Elon Musk in an argument against building ways for merchants to connect to customers. How do you think Elon got the capital to make SpaceX and Tesla possible? Those are his second act.
joelrunyon 14y ago
I think there needs to be a differentiation between "stop producing sht and being happy with it as the final products" and "stop producing sht in general." The first is a cancer on all startups/businesses/etc. The second is a necessary step in evolving as a business, company and person. If you don't create something you're embarrassed about first, you'll probably never start at all. Very few people hit a grand slam their first day in the majors.
twillson 14y ago
I agree with pg, all possible ways of "connecting with merchants" have not been invented and will forever be evolving. That said, what new kinds of e-commerce problems could be solved for merchants from photos uploaded with smartphones?

Stop producing shit

107 points by mariusandra 14y ago

rocky1138 14y ago

Disappointed. I thought this was going to teach me how to avoid double-poop Mondays.

AznHisoka 14y ago
Double poop? I have to deal with quadruple poops most days I drink coffee =(
highace 14y ago
Not constructive, but I lolled.

grabeh 14y ago

I appreciate the sentiment but I don't think it is quite as simple as imploring people to focus on solving actual problems. The creative spirit isn't quite as straightforward as that nor is everyone capable of that 'Eureka!' moment. Also many people will focus on building clones of existing websites because it will help them to improve and develop their skills. Also, on a related note, would you say that cherry.ee is solving a real problem?

espadagroup 14y ago
While I understand the creative spirit isn't always normal, I'd guess the OP is saying if you can't think of a real problem to solve then don't put your (valuable) energy and time into crap.
- grabeh 14y ago
  True - although this does rather increase the irony of the OP being involved as co-founder of what appears on first glance to be a daily deals website. I'm not saying it's crap but I'm not sure it's solving a 'real problem' of the type alluded to in the OP's post.

ajuc 14y ago

Coming up with 10 ideas a day is simple. Knowing which one is good is hard.

mlvljr 14y ago
Let's start together with obviously silly ones: 1. Cat pic "aggregator" & search engine.
- ajuc 14y ago
  2. internet forum designed for convenient arguing. Looking different from traditional boards. There would be one huge (potentialy infinite) 2d plane, and people can place their opinions somewhere in a rectangle, others can place their counterarguments nearby and connect it with arrows, there are other kinds of relations like "supports", "contradicts", "example of", "counterexample", "implies", etc. People can only vote on arrows, not on nodes.
mindcrime 14y ago
True, but just the act of forcing yourself to come up with 10 new ideas, seems like something that could be valuable. In fact, that's probably the most useful part of this article. I might just give it a try, to see how it goes. I'll start a list of ideas, and try to add 10 new (unique) ones to it every day. I'm guessing after about day 2, it'll be hard to come up with 10 new unique ideas, that aren't just ridiculous. By day 3, it'll probably look like: 1) Start a service to let people launch the remains of their deceased pets into orbit. 2) an Android app that makes Farting noises (probably already exists) 3) a YCombinator clone 4) Something that combines the best elements of Slashdot, XKCD, 4chan, and Ebay. 5) An AS/400 compatible RPG environment, to let businesses move off of (expensive) iSeries hardware and onto commodity Linux boxes without expensive porting costs. 6) A bitcoin marketplace for cat pics

mindcrime 14y ago

So, how do these two statements jibe and form part of an sort of coherent argument? Some other guys had an idea, received validation from two potential clients, raised funding, hired a lot of people, built a product and discovered nobody really wants to pay for it. Why does it feel like the lean startup movement has given a lot of people the license to produce crap? The lean startup principles are pretty much specifically against going out, raising funding, hiring a lot of people, and then building something nobody wants. The whole point of Customer Development is to not do all of that until you've validated the market for whatever it is you are proposing to build. And then you have this statement: On the other side you have teams producing amazing products. Take for example the Pebble smart watch, the DoubleRobotics telepresence robots, Appfog free PaaS hosting, SmugMug photo hosting, SixthSense or any random project on Kickstarter. Where the author seems infatuated with a list of products with no commentary whatsoever on whether or not they are successful in the market. You can produce a great product and still fail to have a successful business. So what point is this article really trying to make? If you’re in a startup looking forward to your next pivot, please just stop. The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants or an app that adds double rainbows to blurry pictures. And again, we have to sentences that have absolutely no connection to one another. This article comes off as a mish-mash of interesting thoughts, jumbled together, when the author's point seems to reduce to "work on big, world changing ideas. Where's my flying car?" And that's not a bad sentiment, but this article just seems to ramble all over the place to get there.

AdamFernandez 14y ago
It's also important to note that SpaceX was not Elon Musk's first venture. I'm sure success with PayPal gave him the confidence, clout, and partial financing to take on such an ambitious endeavor.

programminggeek 14y ago

Producing something meaningful or awesome doesn't solve any of the problems the author describes. Plenty of people build outstanding things that nobody will pay for or care about. Building something "great" doesn't guarantee anything. Sounds like the author is advocating "if you build it they will come", which only works in Iowa if you are hallucinating about dead baseball players and abducting James Earl Jones.

agscala 14y ago

It seems like a lot of people are building a product just because it's cool to build a product and they somehow forget to actually provide value. Then they're surprised when it fails. I don't get it.

rprime 14y ago

Cool, but nothing new, people do what they can do best and if making a new rainbow fart app is what they can do best, that's it. Also seeing such an article coming from some one who co-founded an "another/similar/clone of X" is a bit of a disappointment.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago

Not actionable.

TravisLS 14y ago

I think it's useful to think of ideas you could pursue in kind of a 2x2 matrix. You have revolutionary ideas and evolutionary ideas. You have high-capital ideas and low-capital ideas. If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing revolutionary, high-capital ideas. That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market, or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of potential acquirers in the existing market participants.

wamatt 14y ago
That's a pretty nice way to think about these things, Kudos! A visualization of the concept, would make a great blog post.
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
Further, I think typically there is a 'ramp up' over time from the low-capital evolution => high capital revolutionary ideas. Elon's first major success Zip2 was a company that provided "Internet platform solutions for media companies and local e-commerce merchants"[1] 1 - http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.html http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm...

munin 14y ago

I love to rip on 'social startups' as much as any good hacker, and I basically start my day with a cup of coffee and the 'startup guys' video. reading this article, though, something clicked for me. why does it matter that there are startups out there that are constantly pivoting or not producing real products? what is the loss? one statement I've seen put forward is that the startup energy would capture smart people who could be our next Feynman or Shannon and instead of having them do real science, we figure out how to get them to click on ads. I can appreciate this fear, however, I've spent a lot of time on university campuses lately and I've met a very large number of very smart and very motivated young people who are getting educated in real science and have a passion to go into the world and change it. They won't go figure out how to get people to click ads. is the fear that these little pivoting media startups will seriously suck all of the spare cash out of the economy and we will wind up doing nothing but producing Twitter clones? if you produce this analysis, in my opinion, you should step back and consider that maybe you're too close to the bubble. so what's the harm with having the brogrammers produce products that no one wants to use? do you have a backlog of awesome work that you wish was being done, could be done by these constantly pivoting wunderkinds, but isn't? maybe you should start a company!

rjzzleep 14y ago
Well it depends a bit when you pivot. I'm guessing most people pivot before actually coming out with their product, simply because they don't know what they really want and they have no idea how to do it either. Pivoting is good when you're already out there with your idea and then understand that you need to adjust to your customers needs. It is not when you don't really know what to do and just experiment with other peoples money to find out what YOU want.

rjzzleep 14y ago

thank you, thank you, I've been wanting to write something similar for a while now, but have been advised not to, because of my tone. I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not. There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie, i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three simple questions they all fail to answer: 1. where is the value? 2. what's your competitive advantage? 3. who's your target and how are you planning to make money. just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really care, as i just need to build up some funds." let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential to make a shitload of money. But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones. But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.

subsystem 14y ago

I think he's forgetting how Elon Musk got started. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zip2 http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zip2

jerf 14y ago
I've gotten to the point that any article that decries people making startups because they don't copy Elon Musk is an instant bozo-bit flip for me. It is not possible for some guy on the street to start a rocketry startup. Only an idiot would hand some guy on the street the requisite billions. There's some bite in the "photo sharing" accusations, but that doesn't generalize to all low-capital network-based startups, and trying to imply otherwise is definitely weak thinking. You have to start somewhere if you want to accrue capital to take on those sorts of challenges.
- dsirijus 14y ago
  But you need not start at photo sharing. There's plenty of problems troubling humanity that need not rocket scientists to solve.
  - jerf 14y ago
    Sorry, that was my point, but upon re-reading I agree I was not clear. There are many little computer/network/internet startup niches where one can build good businesses still out there.

pg 14y ago

Actually the world probably does need "another way to connect with merchants." The way you can convince yourself of that is to ask: have all the ways of connecting with merchants been invented? "Connecting with merchants" is such a large category that the answer is surely no. In fact it takes some effort to find sentences of the form "All the ways of doing x have been invented" that one can feel certain are true. It's certainly not true for photo-sharing applications, because that's not even a real category. Images are a fundamental medium, like text. We don't lump Twitter, email, and blogging together as "text-sharing applications." The only reason we do with photos is that it's only recently that smartphones have brought a lot of photos online. But a huge number of what we would now call "photo-sharing applications" remain to be invented. Ditto for text-sharing applications incidentally.

sophacles 14y ago
I think there is a good question in here somewhere: Is it better for startups to monte carlo (and/or) genetic algorithm style variations on a theme to find the best way, or is it better try find something truly different to create and push the state of the art into a new area? And of course, that brings up the meta-question: did I just propose a false dilemma, are the two things really different?
eckyptang 14y ago
I think you miss the point. I think the point is more that "finding another way to connect with merchants" really isn't that important or useful in the scale of things. The problem has been artificially created so that it can be solved for profit. Solving problems that humanity really faces with tangible innovations rather than inventing slightly different ways to top slice cash using virtual real estate is much more important. A million shitty rails apps yet nothing which truly changes the human experience. My father once said (whilst slaving over PDS7.1 writing yet another payroll system in the late 80s): "I feel guilty sitting here taking money from people for this. It genuinely doesn't improve their lives."
- mccr8 14y ago
  Getting paid improves my life...

brandoncapecci 14y ago

I think I'm going to write a counter-opinion post sometime called "Everyone poops" about how the advice given here scores an 11/10 on my trite-meter. Readers have by now heard their start-up isn't solving an important problem by now - that doesn't help them start something that does. "Advice" of this nature is just the author procrastinating from solving the same ambitious problems he seems so enthusiastic about. If your going to change the world, you need to stop giving a shit about the inevitable dogdating sites of others and just do it yourself.

awicklander 14y ago

This is terrible advice. When you decide to create something, the first thing....it's probably going to be crap. It's only by creating, and shipping, over and over again that you begin to learn how to create products. Often times, in fact most of the time, people are going to create a bunch of crap before they finally make the gem that's going to be awesome.

petenixey 14y ago

What a silly article. I read and re-read this article but couldn't detect that it actually gave any insight at all. All the article distilled down to was "make a startup that is successful and not one that fails". This is not something that I believe is opaque to those involved. The author finishes with the statement "The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants" which I think sums up exactly why this article is reactive rant. Speak to any merchant and they will tell you that there is one thing they care above above all else and that is customers. Those customers are hard and expensive to find and merchants desperately require scalable and efficient ways to find them. Eric Reis used to have a great piece in one of his talks in which he compared Ali G pitching his Ice Cream Glove (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TR0vUPQCs) to an advert for a blanket with sleeves. As Eric said, one of the two of those is a $50M/year company and the other is Ali G. Pitch them though and it's not immediately clear which would be which. Discovery comes from exploration and most lucrative discoveries tend to come from the most risky experimentation.

spatten 14y ago
Here's a link Eric's "Don't be the Ice Cream Glove" blog post: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cream-glove.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/09/dont-be-ice-cre.... (I remember it well. It was one of the articles I used to test on of the iterations of our book generator when we were first producing http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned. I must have read this 100 times :).

ahc 14y ago

Says the guy making a Groupon clone...

nateberkopec 14y ago

TL;DR: "The solution to having bad ideas is to have good ones instead." What kind of advice is that? This is like telling kids to "be like Mike [Jordan]". Yeah, I guess it would be nice...but, that's not a strategy.

notatoad 14y ago
That's not the tldr I got from this at all. The solution to having bad ideas is to stop and ask yourself if an idea is bad before you pour months or years with of work into it. Everybody has bad ideas, and everybody has a few good ones. Filter your ideas, instead of jumping on the first idea you come up with just because you want to found a startup, any startup. Don't waste your time.
- nateberkopec 14y ago
  What? Implying people work on ideas they know are bad?
  - klibertp 14y ago
    No. They work on ideas they never really tried to think through sufficiently to know if those ideas are good or not. And this is very, very common, at least in people I happen to know. It's hard to look at yourself objectively, we all know that - do you think that looking at your ideas objectively is easier?

fromdoon 14y ago

Everyone out there needs some kind of cult, with which they can associate. This happens in every sphere of life. After the information revolution, everyone is exposed to the major success stories in the current times. So it becomes really easy to fall in a cult associated with those success stories. This is not a weakness nor it is bad. It is just how we are. When you add above phenomena with easy access to development tools and free tutorials that can teach you how to make a simplistic app in a matter of days, then what follows is adaptation/modulation of currently successful ideas on a grand scale. This is what we're a seeing right now. Everyone thinks they can make a social app and make it big, because since the success of Facebook, even when many startups have failed to get going on the social front, there a still a few who've made it big and that is just enough to strengthen the cult. So as long as we don't see a real disruption, kind of a wake up call from the sleep, the prevalent cult of the time would sustain and keep sucking in a fraction of the intellectual talent on Earth at any given time. But we don't need to worry. As Scott Adams says, the advance of human civilization has always been due to a minority and not because of the majority. The majority will keep going through the motions of our current times. While a select few would lead us to new directions.

ZanderEarth32 14y ago

Start-ups are the new grad school, which was the new peace core. It's what you do when you don't know what else to do. That in between stage, where you don't have a next step planned but are anxious and need to do something. Back in the day, you'd join the peace core. It was something productive to do, noble and at least you weren't sitting on the couch collecting dust. Then when the peace core wasn't pleasing, people would go to grad school upon graduation from undergrad. You got your shiny new bachelors degree and no path, maybe no opportunities. So, you'd saddle up for grad school because it bought you more time. Now, all those would be peace core grad students are starting start-ups because it buys you time. They disguise it as 'wanting to change the world' but it's really just buying time until you figure stuff out. This is why there is abundance of shit in the start up world. Too many folks just buying themselves time.

momma-joe 14y ago

most accurate post i've read since 1999.

px1999 14y ago

How to: Stop producing shit 1. Produce 10 shit ideas each day 2. Throw them away 3. ??? 4. Profit! TBH I actually agree with these 4 steps, but they're exactly the reason people should continue producing shit. It may not make you rich this time around (it could have the opposite effect) and may not have a huge impact, but there's a basis to the 10,000 hours rule, and you're working off some of those hours (or, in oldschool parlance: you're learning from your mistakes). The value is in producing ordinary work, but being able to recognize why it's ordinary, and to improve upon your mistakes (in the idea, in the implementation and in the execution) the next time around. Usually, the first time painters pick up a brush, their work is shit; the first time musicians pick up an instrument, their work is shit; same goes for developers. It's not a reason to not pick up the brush - to tell someone to stop sucking and start being awesome isn't really advice. I think that this advice is better: Practice, practice, practice. It's much better to be constantly producing shit (and learning) than just to sit around and consume it, and it's not a case of deciding "oh, hey, maybe this time I'll make something good, just for the sake of it".

hnruss 14y ago

"Now imagine a world where instead of starting Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Elon Musk would have built a social media news aggregator." Good point

gfodor 14y ago

It's kind of hard to cite Elon Musk in an argument against building ways for merchants to connect to customers. How do you think Elon got the capital to make SpaceX and Tesla possible? Those are his second act.

joelrunyon 14y ago

I think there needs to be a differentiation between "stop producing sht and being happy with it as the final products" and "stop producing sht in general." The first is a cancer on all startups/businesses/etc. The second is a necessary step in evolving as a business, company and person. If you don't create something you're embarrassed about first, you'll probably never start at all. Very few people hit a grand slam their first day in the majors.

twillson 14y ago

I agree with pg, all possible ways of "connecting with merchants" have not been invented and will forever be evolving. That said, what new kinds of e-commerce problems could be solved for merchants from photos uploaded with smartphones?