12 ms·

How would I get started?

561 points by peteforde 14y ago

raganwald 14y ago
Here's a rule of thumb: If a new business isn't impossible, it isn't worth discussion on a web site with the word "hack" in its name.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Or at the very least, if a new business isn't generally thought to be impossible.
  - Mz 14y ago
    My assumption: He forgot the quotation remarks around "impossible".
  - raganwald 14y ago
    Very true! In my own case, I like to think "impossible," because I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that I have the insight to know the difference between actually-impossible and impossible-for-mere-mortals-to-conceive. So if something seems impossible to me, I try to consider the possibility that the problem is my lack of imagination.
robbiea 14y ago
I definitely agree with this article. We shouldn't be pessimistic about someone's grand vision. However, if you really wanted to start a cable company you probably wouldn't be asking hacker news on how to start a cable company. You would already have other resources that you can tap into and get started on it.
- Mz 14y ago
  Wow, what elegant hypocrisy. I want to change healthcare. I have spent twelve years getting myself well when the entire world says it cannot be done. I have a website. I have a mental model for how to proceed forward. I don't have the programming skills I need. I am deeply in debt from the process of accomplishing "the impossible". The specifics of my personal situation are unconducive to applying to Y-Combinator. I have a really huge credibility problem. I am generally equally dismissed, though my intent to do something potentially world changing is sincere and backed up by more than a decade of work. But, hey, feel free to join the legion of people who have already dismissed me for not currently having some successful business model in place while claiming you would like to see people like me get more support. Oy. Tldr: People seek feedback at different stages. Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    Can you link to your website?
    - Mz 14y ago
      Sure thing. Here is the original site: http://www.healthgazelle.com/oldsite/archive.shtml http://www.healthgazelle.com/oldsite/archive.shtml Here is the site I am trying to migrate everything to and trying to figure out how to better present what I know: http://www.healthgazelle.com/ http://www.healthgazelle.com/ Because most people do not believe me, I am up against a brick wall. I cannot get people to talk to me and it is making forward progress very challenging, to put it mildly.
      - atdrummond 14y ago
        What is the actual goal of the site/proposed business? A one sentence pitch would be great as it isn't clear to me from either version of your website.
        Mz 14y ago
        I will work on that. I don't currently have a one sentence pitch. (My background is not in business. I have a lot of room to grow in that regard.) The goal is to share the mental model that helped me get well when I was sentenced to death. It does not neatly fit with current mental models. Conventional medicine uses a disease model. This is a wellness model. I struggle to communicate it. People think something is deadly, thus we must nuke the body with something equally deadly. They miss that the body is the battlefield and they are turning it into a wasteland which cannot defend itself. Your body can produce its own army. You need to supply it the means to do so. Then support its effort to defend itself.
        illuminate 14y ago
        "Additionally, I make use of bits and pieces of info and advice I hear from people whom I consider "in the know" -- mostly moms who have found what works for a difficult kid that the medical community has written off." Sounds like a sincere version of the "one quick tip that moms found to..." ads.
spindritf 14y ago
> And yet Hacker News folk must be drawn at least somewhat by Paul Graham, who applauds frighteningly ambitious startup ideas. It wasn't a frighteningly ambitious start-up. It was the same old idea, done hundreds of times across multiple countries, with a minor adjustment in its pricing structure.
- jere 14y ago
  I believe the author is referring to Y Combinator and the startups it funds, rather than Viaweb. Though I'm sure you could argue many of those are rather unambitious ideas also.
  - JshWright 14y ago
    I believe the OP was referring to the cable company idea that started this whole discussion.
    - jere 14y ago
      Woops. I was quite confused by it.
funthree 14y ago
there is no shame in being pragmatic
jelleprins 14y ago
While I do find it interesting to read about the work involved to start such a company - I believe most here would be even more interested to read what steps it would take to start a disruptive company in such a market. A lot of these markets are either ready for disruption or have recently been disrupted. I would love to read an in depth-article about the work involved.
nhebb 14y ago
I didn't take part in the previous thread, but I kind of took umbrage with the question. It's really hard to take a question like that seriously when it appears that the OP has put zero effort into researching the subject. How can you not be pessimistic about that? If you're not the kind of person that can do even the most basic research of how cable companies operate, then I don't have one iota of confidence that you would be successful building one. I'm not trying to be mean - just realistic.
- elyasali 14y ago
  I agree with this. It reminds me of the guy who, when his family members would as him fix their computers, he would ask them to drop it off. The idea was that he had them "put some skin in the game." It seems that OP did not do that. Perhaps if OP worded it differently, he may have gotten different results.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  exactly. The ideas this guy cites, like Elon Musk, are completely unrelated. Elon Musk actually researched these markets, figured out what to do and did it. To equate that with asking a completely unresearched question on Hacker News feels like the author was really grasping at straws here...
  - kcbanner 14y ago
    I agree
  - suhastech 14y ago
    I'm just putting this as a data point to observe. Looking back to my limited experience, most of the wins in my life was mostly because I was too naive to think "it's probably not all that difficult to do".
- stevewilhelm 14y ago
  If you have a problem with a market, like the cable industry, your first question should be 'Why is it the way it is?' not 'How do I disrupt it?' Asking HN, for good sources that explain the economics of the cable industry or media distribution, or for a list of the key players in the space would have resulted in a much more positive response. Asking HN about how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. successfully competed against established cable industry would probably have resulted in current or former employees and/or investors in those companies providing some direct insight. But asking 'hey, how do I disrupt the cable industry?' is just lazy and resulted in the negative response it deserves.
tomasien 14y ago
HERE HERE! But I do always find myself needing to point out: Hacker News is the most constructive and positive community on the internet. Yes there are lots of dicks and know-it-alls with "why didn't they just do this?" syndrome, but you won't find another anonymous discussion based community of this quality anywhere.
- rada 14y ago
  Metafilter is equally as good.
nicholas73 14y ago
I think the issue isn't about how feasible the start up idea is in general, but how feasible it is for YOU. The comments may have been directing you to another idea for this reason. Using your example of Elon Musk, you can see even his start ups have a progression of ambition. That is, space travel and electric car companies are much less feasible than a payment system or news site. What is the difference between Musk and you today? Simple. Investors trust him with large sums of money since he has led successful companies before. There is a reason YC companies generally have low capital requirements. That is the lack of track record of the founders (and that business experience does matter). For your cable idea, the path towards that goal may very well be starting other companies first. Or be an industry insider who has the experience and connections to convince the incumbents to invest in you (like Pandora).
lnanek2 14y ago
So if someone says they want to jump off a cliff naked, should we all applaud and encourage them? I think it's better to tell them it isn't going to work out well and why. There was some interesting analysis and procedures in that thread about how to go about it, but the best post for the OP was really about how, as a company, he would be paying to license certain channels, and if users only subscribed to one or two instead of all of them, he wouldn't make enough money to keep in business. As a user he can whine and complain all he wants about a la carte being rare, but as a business, he has to make enough money to keep running and he didn't understand that. Pointing out big problems in his plan is doing him a favor because he can then change the plan or address them.
peripetylabs 14y ago
I didn't participate in the discussion because the question was so vague. "I want to colonize Mars. How would I get started?" The same way NASA got to the Moon -- they didn't log onto ARPANET and ask around, they got to work.
Geee 14y ago
For most of those questions, the answer is capital. Elon Musk started from very low hanging fruits for him, whose success enabled him to move on with more ambitious goals. This model is easily replicable, so if you have ambitious goals, first build capital with something easier. Which, I think, most of people here are doing.
- ksikka 14y ago
  Encouragement which builds up from experience is also a sort of intangible capital. People are getting their feet wet for experience.
RyanZAG 14y ago
I'd say there is a big difference between 'asking for feedback' and 'fishing for ideas'. "I want to launch a new courier service. How would I get started?" This seems much more in the 'fishing for ideas' stage and hoping you can crowd source the process of creating your business while paying nothing for the privilege. Most people aren't going to help you. "I've started planning my new courier service. It will be mostly in the healthcare industry as hospitals are over-paying on delivery costs of fragile medicine. I've worked out some ideas on how I can better fit and transport fragile medicine. However, I don't know how I would get contacts in the medical industry to test drive the technology. Who should I try and talk to and does anybody know of any existing studies into this? Anybody work in the field of transporting fragile goods and know what certifications are required?" This is much more in the field of 'asking for feedback' and is very unlikely to be brushed aside.
- EwanG 14y ago
  I'm hoping you're actually working on the service you just described? Between the delivery of meds and labs, it is "interesting" how much hospitals pay just to get things from A to B - though the custody chain tracking certainly plays a part.
  - RyanZAG 14y ago
    Unfortunately not! It is something I've seen before and the charge goes straight to customers/insurance with even mundane things in healthcare - like paying $50 for a pair of plastic gloves as an extreme example. I don't actually have any new novel ways to transport medicine though, I was just making an example. More than likely the high charges are because of the very small number of providers of mobile, certified and absolutely secure cold storage devices. I think my guess on asking about the certifications is probably the right aspect to tackle first if considering this, because the certifications are no doubt extremely challenging to obtain. EDIT: Also want to add - if anybody finds the idea of cheaper medical transport appealing, please try and make it a reality! Decreasing the cost of medicine by any sort of factor is probably the single best thing that could be done for humanity as a whole at present, and will probably make you more money than some new social network.
napoleond 14y ago
A lot of those questions would get really good answers on Quora (and I agree, they should be welcomed here more openly). A really good story related to all of this is the way Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic: http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-atlantic/ http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-a... (couldn't find a better source, but I heard him tell the same story at an event)
polyfractal 14y ago
I don't understand your complaint...there were plenty of helpful posts in that thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 You asked for advice and received some great information. Just because the overwhelming advice is "This is not a great idea, you will need a lot of money to fight established, entrenched businesses" doesn't mean the advice was unhelpful. Did you want everyone to sugar coat their opinions with "Yeah! Go get them tiger! We believe in you!", or did you want serious advice that can lead you to making an informed, rational decision? If you were a CEO of a company, would you want your employees to tell you whatever you wanted to hear ("yes-men"), or would you want people who actually advised you and helped make an appropriate decision (even when it may be counter to your opinion)?
neurotech1 14y ago
The answer to most of these questions, is find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry, and ask them for advice. Most of the SpaceX senior staff have aerospace experience.
- gprasanth 14y ago
  > find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry, This, or actually get yourself into the field, work for some time. In a lecture(startupschool), Jessica Livingston(Partner, YC) talked about a guy who made app that allows users to order food from their phone. She said that he was an example of 'a good founder' because he actually joined a restaurant as a waiter just to learn how things worked. Take away? (Get your self involved in, know widely about, find spots which you should do better) in the field you want to start your company in[Joel Spolsky also said something of this sort in his lecture!]
chernevik 14y ago
Everybody already knows it would be great if we could get cable speed and reliability without actually laying cable. Building a business around that is easy. The hard part is actually achieving that. Asking people for the miracle upon which you'd like to build a business, that anyone could build given that miracle, isn't a request for constructive feedback. At its absolute best it is a request for an IP handout.
madsushi 14y ago
> However, why does everyone assume that the inquiring mind is an idiot? Because the inquiring mind did zero research and asked a question so broad and so vague that it was impossible for anyone to answer it without months of work and very specific knowledge. To quote Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I don't think anyone was wanting to sit and spend hours explaining to the author how to do something incredibly difficult and complex without the author putting anything forward. Why not just take that knowledge and do it myself?
jasonkolb 14y ago
I upvoted this so hard. I agree there is a very large snarky dick contingent on HN who pollute potentially productive conversations with "What a stupid idea" type of comments. (Unfortunately I think this is a symptom of the human race, not just HN.) However, there are some exceptionally bright people who hang out here who I would love to just brainstorm with--throw ideas out and see what happens. This site has an above-average level of these people I think. I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Even if I have no interest in starting a new courier service or whatever, I find it quite enjoyable to take the lessons and skills that I've learned and apply them in a new problem space. I especially love hearing feedback on those ideas from people who've worked in those spaces. The most promising ideas are the ones that might sound dumb to someone entrenched in tradition.
- SoftwarePatent 14y ago
  > I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Great idea! Something similar has actually happened, not with the HN community, but just a handpicked group of highly intelligent people put into a room together with the mission of coming up with innovative new ideas. It is described in this article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...
- robryan 14y ago
  I agree. To take the courier example, you may not be interested in actually starting a courier but in going through the thought process of how a courier operates you might find a problem that they have which you or others could solve. In my dealing from couriers I get the impression a lot are using outdated software and inefficient processes, might be some disruption in that space.
Chirael 14y ago
Nicely written!
SatvikBeri 14y ago
Many of my friends have a very interesting trait: pose any sort of problem in front of them, and they'll practically drop everything to work out a solution. Trebuchets using only materials in the office. Conquering South Africa. Lesbian strip clubs. Realistic world domination. What the world would look like if D&D rules actually applied. AI for storytelling. Etc. Regardless of how ridiculous the premise, they'll work on it until they have at least a plausible solution. Ignoring impossibilities and slim chances and jumping straight into brainstorming and crazy ideas is a lot of fun. I'd rather have more of those conversations.
SparrowOS 14y ago
Anyone of reasonable intelligence can tell the difference between a fraud and the real thing.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
And of course this thread fills up with more of the same negativism trying to justify itself. PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it. I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case. It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site. In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else. But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site. If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped. Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.
- daniel-levin 14y ago
  Speaking of ambitious ideas and 'middlebrow dismissal', I'd like to see the algorithmic dismissal detector that PG wrote about. I'm sure the denizens of HN know a thing or two about computational linguistics. Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of middlebrow dismissals) possible?
  - apl 14y ago
    > Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of > middlebrow dismissals) possible? I'll give you a middlebrow dismissal: No. Definitely not at the current state of the art. In fact, not many people agree on whether a given comment qualifies as a "middlebrow" dismissal; personally, I consider many of the examples that pg has labeled as such pertinent points. If in doubt, I prefer a good middlebrow dismissal to the shallow cheering of the overly excitable.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
The first thing one should do if you want to disrupt a market is learn as much as you can about the current state of that market. This doesn't mean reading it's Wikipedia entry. Ideally, it means spending several years working for the current market leader in that space. Barring that, reading as much as you can about the history, economics, mechanics, and current players in that space. If possible, become a customer of one or two of the market leaders. If that is not feasible, again get to know people who are customers (again they may become your first target customers). Befriend several people who do work in that space (they could become your first hires). The deeper your understanding and experience in a market, the more likely you will succeed in disrupting it.
jkaljundi 14y ago
Amen.
smoyer 14y ago
I missed that question and would be happy to help with the technical aspects of starting a cable company (though I'd like to see content delivery decoupled from the infrastructure). I have 25 years of experience in the industry if he gets that far. The hard part of the process (and I believe the limiting factor in a new company's success), is arranging the contracts with the content syndicators. Find my e-mail in my profile if you're serious.
- berkay 14y ago
  Actually even this tidbit (contracts) helps. Identifying the challenges/obstacles is very valuable as it opens it to creative solutions to those problems that may not occur to insiders.
  - smoyer 14y ago
    IIRC, ESPN is the most expensive and some of the channels are actually free. If there is information on the history of Telebeam (and how they started), it might be instructional with regards to picking a niche and starting small.
crazygringo 14y ago
I love this idea. Not as something to realistically help you get started, but purely educational. There's so much knowledge tied up exclusively among people "in the industry", that would be great to get out into the public. I would love to know all the things involved in starting an airline. How are planes actually bought? How are mechanics actually procured? What kind of safety regulations are followed? etc. I once read the book "Starting & Running a Restaurant for Dummies" just to find out how it's done. It's fascinating! But turning it into a Wiki, for anything, would be so much better. You can have summary sections, that link to fuller articles, you can cross-reference how to hire a chef (both for the restaurant, and for the airline catering), and so on.
- joonix 14y ago
  Yes! I hate how the really valuable knowledge is just tied up inside the walls of big industry. People making money are too busy to teach others how to do their jobs. I'm always in search of these types of answers, and rarely get them on the internet. I've looked up those questions about starting an airline in the past. Maybe we can't start an airline, I understand the barriers to entry, but if we got a look at the mechanics of the whole thing maybe someone could disrupt just a small segment of it. That person sells some software to the airlines and makes lots of money. That person then works as CTO for an airline. That person moves up to CEO. That person later leaves and creates an upstart airline that disrupts the industry as we know it. This is the way these things happen all the time, there's no reason for pessimism.
  - Mz 14y ago
    Oh no, they are not merely too busy. In most cases, the industry actively wants to exclude others and keep their info to themselves. When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, running my mouth on the internet about the industry could have gotten me fired. I say more these days, now that it is relatively safe. I still don't name the company, just the general industry.
- miles_matthias 14y ago
  I'm a developer that would be interested in helping this come to fruition. Maybe starting a github repo with the site's code would be a good start for others to pitch in. As for the domain, howdoistart.com returns: "This domain is for sale. Please contact Curtis Stock at curtis.stock@yahoo.com for more information."
spitx 14y ago
There is nothing "rude" about asking HN to chime in on your exploratory-stage ideas, especially when they are uncommonly ambitious and not your average badgeville startup ideas. Face it, Foursquare is not going to fetch you a mercenary if you ever needed one. Why can group-mulling of ideas, be a terrific endeavor? 1) It can stress-test your idea and expose the glaringly gaping holes you might have overlooked, in the very fashioning of the prospect itself. 2)Some ideas may not lend to "socialization" because of their inherent nature. Helps to have them flagged -- if not decimated -- before you even begin. Eg: A startup seeking to disrupt the litigation law market isn't very readily socialize-able as one targeting the fitness trainer market. 3) The group-mulling process need not be just one-way beneficial. The "mullers" stand to benefit from having their horizons broadened too. They might for once realize, that there are entire industries -- non-glamorous but nonetheless high gravity, real-impact ones -- waiting to be disrupted beyond the Mayorvilles and Filtergrams of the valley. This kind of mulling happens on Quora all the time. HN should encourage it. Again you are just being asked to mull. Not leak insights from the equity-research desk at Goldman Sachs. Chill with the dressing-downs.
huggah 14y ago
The problem with this is that for questions like "how could I build a cable company?", answers don't help". If you want to build a cable company, a payments system, a new government, or colonize mars there is no high level answer. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sub-questions that need to be answered. Eventually so many that you need to hire people to ask and answer them, and you won't even know what the question was. The truth is that if you really want to go to space, no one will help you. Not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't. We can speculate, and dig up research or law or economics---but at the end of the day, all you're doing is inviting us to help design your bikeshed. If you can break down the problem, figure out which questions to ask, what information you don't have, and who does, that person might be able to help you. By the time you've gotten that far, you're already on the verge of sinking your life into this---and if you want to build a cable company, that's what it's going to take.
tobyjsullivan 14y ago
This is exactly the mentality we need to see more of. Dismissing good ideas is not just unproductive but actually destructive to the overall progression of thought - which is why we're here in the first place.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Noel_Vock 14y ago
test
famo 14y ago
I didn't see the thread either, but I like this post. I think the best way to go about starting something large and ridiculous is to tell all your friends and family you're going to do it, to the point where it would become embarrassing if you didn't even try to make it a success. Friends and family are the best at calling you out on not living your dreams. "Hey Gaius, weren't you going to build a Cylon detector? You talked about it for months" "Yeah, but it was too hard and I didn't know how to start" "You suck" A more practical benefit of telling all the people you meet is that one of them might know or be associated with someone who is connected with the industry.
zehnfischer 14y ago
Sure, the internet can be a cynical place, remote communication seems to wake the worth in a lot of people. At the same time it is full of wonders. Maybe I can invite you to join a discussion about how it could impact in political decision making? Click along: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891571 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891571
ChuckMcM 14y ago
An interesting rant. I've observed that problem solvers also follow something like the inverse power law, which is to say it takes a certain kind of person to attack large problems and as the problems get larger the set of people willing to consider them seriously decreases logarithmically until it asymptotically approaches zero. In an analagous fashion the "quality" (using karma as a metric of quality) of comments on HN are also quite high and drop off steeply approaching zero. This is reflected both in the comments, and in the karma distribution [1]. The trick is to keep the noise floor high enough for quality reading and low enough that you don't miss out on new people making great comments. [1] http://www.mcmanis.com/karma-chart.html http://www.mcmanis.com/karma-chart.html
patio11 14y ago
Imagine, as a thought experiment, that HN declared a do-over and took another stab at answering the question. What, specifically, do you want in the new thread that was not present in the old thread, and what do you not want in the new thread that was present in the old thread? Some potential options: a) Keep all the facts. Remove conclusory statements which suggest that this is a bad idea. b) Remove the discouraging facts. Add new facts which tend to not be discouraging, such as "Monthly cable rates are high relative to many B2C products and lifetime values can easily hit the thousands of dollars, allowing you to spend a lot on customer acquisition." Add conclusory statements suggesting that this makes founding a cable company a good idea. c) Remove discouraging facts about the cable industry, replace with to-do action items which accurately describe the process of how one would set up a cable company (regulatory approvals you'll need, who to hire, how much to raise, etc etc), and very carefully attempt to phrase "Convince investors to stake you with $X0 million" in such a way that it does not sound discouraging. d) Remove everything about starting a cable company. Treat the question as a springboard about "How to disrupt the cable industry?" e) Something else?
- marcamillion 14y ago
  Not sure who in the heck downvoted this, but I proposed a simple solution for the community that would help us explore these types of topics on each post. Called - "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started". You can find it in the New section - http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest Edit 1: For whatever reason, this comment seems to be a battleground. Been upvoted & downvoted so many times. Guess this comment symbolizes the struggle for those of us interested in preserving the quality of the community we have come to love, and with those that just love to downvote willy nilly.
  - belbn 14y ago
    I was under the impression you aren't able to downvote on this site. In the same way this site is Reddit except the fact you can't react negatively to anything (downvote), we now need to do the same for comments. You either upvote or you do nothing. You either comment positively or you don't comment. Excellent job patio.
xiaoma 14y ago
>"I’m really disappointed in the universally pessimistic and generally unhelpful answers this question received. Some people pitched some interesting ideas and helpful analysis, but most of the replies reinforced the notion that Hacker News readers are predominantly male know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks." This would have been both more convincing and shorter without the anti-male bit. I realize that western media is pretty insensitive to this variety of sexism, but a quick test is to try substituting "black", "female", or "Jewish" where you've written "male". If it sounds offensive, then it probably is.
- peteforde 14y ago
  I promised myself that I wasn't going to reply directly to any of the comments, but it's important to rebut this succinctly: so far as I can tell, 100% of the top 1oo contributors to Hacker News (by karma) are male. I am documenting my methodology and will publish my findings in the near future. Please remember that nobody has the right to not be offended. Meanwhile, if you can prove that HN has been taken over by Jewish black women with a collective chip on their shoulder, then I will stand corrected.
  - token_female 14y ago
    I'm glad you're studying this. I think it would be useful to look at the comment threads about articles that have anything to do with sexism or women in tech - they are quite telling. Here are a couple of examples, but really, it happens every time there is an article about women that acknowledges the possibility that there might be some sexism in hacker culture. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087811 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087811 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452516 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452516 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679005 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679005 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323091 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323091
  - xiaoma 14y ago
    I don't dispute that it's a mostly male site. The problem is that unless you're claiming that being male is a negative thing, there's no reason to include it along with your criticisms of "know-it-alls" or "bunch of snarky dicks". If, for example, you said that Hollywood producers were "predominantly Jewish know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks," then a lot of Jewish people would take offense and rightfully so... dispite the fact that the vast majority of producers are in fact Jewish. Similarly, the claim that elementary schoolteachers were "predominantly female know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky bitches," you would have offended a lot of women, and the fact that most elementary school teachers are female would be no defense. There's no need to bash men to make your argument. Bash the snarkiness or the know-it-all attitudes. That's my humble request to make the discussion a bit friendlier, and incidentally more focused on what actually matters.
marcamillion 14y ago
I just submitted a propsal for a new thread format on HN that would potentially solve this. Any upvote love would be appreciated - http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest It's called "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started".
miles_matthias 14y ago
I've setup a Wikispace wiki for this to begin. If people contribute and think this is a good idea, then maybe its own domain and custom design will be in order. I love this idea and I think we should run with it. Go to: http://howdoistart.wikispaces.com/ http://howdoistart.wikispaces.com/ and edit away!
AnthonyJoseph 14y ago
The biggest problem with forums like this, is the tendency for people to answer questions that the OP didn't ask.
pla3rhat3r 14y ago
LOVE this! I'm new to programming and it's the toughest thing to answer. How or where do I get started? I have some great ideas but not much in the way of skills to get it done. I know we all have different levels of "figure it out" skills but it's always helpful if you find someone who can at least show you how to open the door.
josephlord 14y ago
Criticizing what someone has made with middlebrow dismissiveness is one thing but pointing out that taking on a legally and commercially entrenched industry will be hard and here are some of the specific challenges is entirely valid. I think the original question is worth picking apart if the answers are being criticized. >Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started? > I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started? The original question is worse (by a long way) than most of the answers. Most of the answers pointed out the major challenges or suggested better ways to achieve the vaguely stated aims although there were some useless dismissals. The question indicates (possibly wrongly) a massive lack of understanding of the business "Basically, my understanding...[something basically right but oversimplified]". It is badly punctuated "fox" rather than "Fox", 'dont' rather than "don't". The question also fails to really be clear about what he wants to do. Does he really want to run a cable company maintaining wires in the ground and boxes in homes? Or is this mostly about securing more favorable and flexible content deals? Or is there an implicit assumption that he needs to own the cables to get the deals? What scale does he want to start on? A small town/city or national? I didn't see the original question while it was active but if I did I would have pointed out how hard such a business is to break into especially if top grade content is required due to the maze of exclusivity contracts and the value of them which means massive amounts of money are needed to make the sellers choose non-exclusive options. Even companies like Microsoft and Sony with massive deployed platforms (Xbox and PS3 in particular) need prolonged negotiations to get any content and aren't anywhere near being able to offer full cable replacements and even with their own content Sony can offer only what is not exclusively licensed elsewhere. However that doesn't mean that the video space can't be attacked as Netflix is showing but it will in my view need to be an indirect attack that builds audience until it can compete head to head for the major deals and content as a viable distribution platform and pricing model. Note that when the competition really starts costs may rise not fall as the platforms will compete for the most important content potentially driving up content prices for all the distribution platforms.
gizzlon 14y ago
This reminded me of Richard Branson (the Virgin guy) and a post by James Altucher. I think James' point is that to do something huge, like start a new airline, you always have to find the next step. Pretty basic really, break a big task into smaller pieces. But worth a read nonetheless, it really goes into OP's question. "Q: How do you know when you’re thinking too big or aiming too high (if that’s even possible)?" "A: In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with (...) My real problem was: I didn’t have confidence. And I didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff." http://www.jamesaltucher.com/how-do-you-know-when-youre-thinking-too-big-or-aiming-too-high-if-thats-even-possible/ http://www.jamesaltucher.com/how-do-you-know-when-youre-thin...
mvts 14y ago
Great article, an enjoyable read. Thanks.
nhangen 14y ago
I didn't read any of the comments in the original thread, but I can imagine why many of them were negative. Here is the question: ' I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started?' This, to me, reeks of laziness. The OP would have done better to say 'this is what I've done, research, and/or these are the ideas I have. Am I right, wrong, or close?' So problem #1 is that, from the looks of it, the OP didn't do any research before asking the question. Problem #2 is that the question is a lazy one. I can guarantee you that Elon didn't ask these type of questions, but instead presented lists of assertions and hypothesis which he was prepared to test and/or validate.

561 points by peteforde 14y ago

Here's a rule of thumb: If a new business isn't impossible, it isn't worth discussion on a web site with the word "hack" in its name.

unimpressive 14y ago
Or at the very least, if a new business isn't generally thought to be impossible.
- Mz 14y ago
  My assumption: He forgot the quotation remarks around "impossible".
- raganwald 14y ago
  Very true! In my own case, I like to think "impossible," because I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that I have the insight to know the difference between actually-impossible and impossible-for-mere-mortals-to-conceive. So if something seems impossible to me, I try to consider the possibility that the problem is my lack of imagination.

robbiea 14y ago

I definitely agree with this article. We shouldn't be pessimistic about someone's grand vision. However, if you really wanted to start a cable company you probably wouldn't be asking hacker news on how to start a cable company. You would already have other resources that you can tap into and get started on it.

Mz 14y ago
Wow, what elegant hypocrisy. I want to change healthcare. I have spent twelve years getting myself well when the entire world says it cannot be done. I have a website. I have a mental model for how to proceed forward. I don't have the programming skills I need. I am deeply in debt from the process of accomplishing "the impossible". The specifics of my personal situation are unconducive to applying to Y-Combinator. I have a really huge credibility problem. I am generally equally dismissed, though my intent to do something potentially world changing is sincere and backed up by more than a decade of work. But, hey, feel free to join the legion of people who have already dismissed me for not currently having some successful business model in place while claiming you would like to see people like me get more support. Oy. Tldr: People seek feedback at different stages. Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Can you link to your website?
  - Mz 14y ago
    Sure thing. Here is the original site: http://www.healthgazelle.com/oldsite/archive.shtml http://www.healthgazelle.com/oldsite/archive.shtml Here is the site I am trying to migrate everything to and trying to figure out how to better present what I know: http://www.healthgazelle.com/ http://www.healthgazelle.com/ Because most people do not believe me, I am up against a brick wall. I cannot get people to talk to me and it is making forward progress very challenging, to put it mildly.
    - atdrummond 14y ago
      What is the actual goal of the site/proposed business? A one sentence pitch would be great as it isn't clear to me from either version of your website.
      - Mz 14y ago
        I will work on that. I don't currently have a one sentence pitch. (My background is not in business. I have a lot of room to grow in that regard.) The goal is to share the mental model that helped me get well when I was sentenced to death. It does not neatly fit with current mental models. Conventional medicine uses a disease model. This is a wellness model. I struggle to communicate it. People think something is deadly, thus we must nuke the body with something equally deadly. They miss that the body is the battlefield and they are turning it into a wasteland which cannot defend itself. Your body can produce its own army. You need to supply it the means to do so. Then support its effort to defend itself.
      - illuminate 14y ago
        "Additionally, I make use of bits and pieces of info and advice I hear from people whom I consider "in the know" -- mostly moms who have found what works for a difficult kid that the medical community has written off." Sounds like a sincere version of the "one quick tip that moms found to..." ads.

spindritf 14y ago

> And yet Hacker News folk must be drawn at least somewhat by Paul Graham, who applauds frighteningly ambitious startup ideas. It wasn't a frighteningly ambitious start-up. It was the same old idea, done hundreds of times across multiple countries, with a minor adjustment in its pricing structure.

jere 14y ago
I believe the author is referring to Y Combinator and the startups it funds, rather than Viaweb. Though I'm sure you could argue many of those are rather unambitious ideas also.
- JshWright 14y ago
  I believe the OP was referring to the cable company idea that started this whole discussion.
  - jere 14y ago
    Woops. I was quite confused by it.

funthree 14y ago

there is no shame in being pragmatic

jelleprins 14y ago

While I do find it interesting to read about the work involved to start such a company - I believe most here would be even more interested to read what steps it would take to start a disruptive company in such a market. A lot of these markets are either ready for disruption or have recently been disrupted. I would love to read an in depth-article about the work involved.

nhebb 14y ago

I didn't take part in the previous thread, but I kind of took umbrage with the question. It's really hard to take a question like that seriously when it appears that the OP has put zero effort into researching the subject. How can you not be pessimistic about that? If you're not the kind of person that can do even the most basic research of how cable companies operate, then I don't have one iota of confidence that you would be successful building one. I'm not trying to be mean - just realistic.

elyasali 14y ago
I agree with this. It reminds me of the guy who, when his family members would as him fix their computers, he would ask them to drop it off. The idea was that he had them "put some skin in the game." It seems that OP did not do that. Perhaps if OP worded it differently, he may have gotten different results.
ryguytilidie 14y ago
exactly. The ideas this guy cites, like Elon Musk, are completely unrelated. Elon Musk actually researched these markets, figured out what to do and did it. To equate that with asking a completely unresearched question on Hacker News feels like the author was really grasping at straws here...
- kcbanner 14y ago
  I agree
- suhastech 14y ago
  I'm just putting this as a data point to observe. Looking back to my limited experience, most of the wins in my life was mostly because I was too naive to think "it's probably not all that difficult to do".
stevewilhelm 14y ago
If you have a problem with a market, like the cable industry, your first question should be 'Why is it the way it is?' not 'How do I disrupt it?' Asking HN, for good sources that explain the economics of the cable industry or media distribution, or for a list of the key players in the space would have resulted in a much more positive response. Asking HN about how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. successfully competed against established cable industry would probably have resulted in current or former employees and/or investors in those companies providing some direct insight. But asking 'hey, how do I disrupt the cable industry?' is just lazy and resulted in the negative response it deserves.

tomasien 14y ago

HERE HERE! But I do always find myself needing to point out: Hacker News is the most constructive and positive community on the internet. Yes there are lots of dicks and know-it-alls with "why didn't they just do this?" syndrome, but you won't find another anonymous discussion based community of this quality anywhere.

rada 14y ago
Metafilter is equally as good.

nicholas73 14y ago

I think the issue isn't about how feasible the start up idea is in general, but how feasible it is for YOU. The comments may have been directing you to another idea for this reason. Using your example of Elon Musk, you can see even his start ups have a progression of ambition. That is, space travel and electric car companies are much less feasible than a payment system or news site. What is the difference between Musk and you today? Simple. Investors trust him with large sums of money since he has led successful companies before. There is a reason YC companies generally have low capital requirements. That is the lack of track record of the founders (and that business experience does matter). For your cable idea, the path towards that goal may very well be starting other companies first. Or be an industry insider who has the experience and connections to convince the incumbents to invest in you (like Pandora).

lnanek2 14y ago

So if someone says they want to jump off a cliff naked, should we all applaud and encourage them? I think it's better to tell them it isn't going to work out well and why. There was some interesting analysis and procedures in that thread about how to go about it, but the best post for the OP was really about how, as a company, he would be paying to license certain channels, and if users only subscribed to one or two instead of all of them, he wouldn't make enough money to keep in business. As a user he can whine and complain all he wants about a la carte being rare, but as a business, he has to make enough money to keep running and he didn't understand that. Pointing out big problems in his plan is doing him a favor because he can then change the plan or address them.

peripetylabs 14y ago

I didn't participate in the discussion because the question was so vague. "I want to colonize Mars. How would I get started?" The same way NASA got to the Moon -- they didn't log onto ARPANET and ask around, they got to work.

Geee 14y ago

For most of those questions, the answer is capital. Elon Musk started from very low hanging fruits for him, whose success enabled him to move on with more ambitious goals. This model is easily replicable, so if you have ambitious goals, first build capital with something easier. Which, I think, most of people here are doing.

ksikka 14y ago
Encouragement which builds up from experience is also a sort of intangible capital. People are getting their feet wet for experience.

RyanZAG 14y ago

I'd say there is a big difference between 'asking for feedback' and 'fishing for ideas'. "I want to launch a new courier service. How would I get started?" This seems much more in the 'fishing for ideas' stage and hoping you can crowd source the process of creating your business while paying nothing for the privilege. Most people aren't going to help you. "I've started planning my new courier service. It will be mostly in the healthcare industry as hospitals are over-paying on delivery costs of fragile medicine. I've worked out some ideas on how I can better fit and transport fragile medicine. However, I don't know how I would get contacts in the medical industry to test drive the technology. Who should I try and talk to and does anybody know of any existing studies into this? Anybody work in the field of transporting fragile goods and know what certifications are required?" This is much more in the field of 'asking for feedback' and is very unlikely to be brushed aside.

EwanG 14y ago
I'm hoping you're actually working on the service you just described? Between the delivery of meds and labs, it is "interesting" how much hospitals pay just to get things from A to B - though the custody chain tracking certainly plays a part.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Unfortunately not! It is something I've seen before and the charge goes straight to customers/insurance with even mundane things in healthcare - like paying $50 for a pair of plastic gloves as an extreme example. I don't actually have any new novel ways to transport medicine though, I was just making an example. More than likely the high charges are because of the very small number of providers of mobile, certified and absolutely secure cold storage devices. I think my guess on asking about the certifications is probably the right aspect to tackle first if considering this, because the certifications are no doubt extremely challenging to obtain. EDIT: Also want to add - if anybody finds the idea of cheaper medical transport appealing, please try and make it a reality! Decreasing the cost of medicine by any sort of factor is probably the single best thing that could be done for humanity as a whole at present, and will probably make you more money than some new social network.

napoleond 14y ago

A lot of those questions would get really good answers on Quora (and I agree, they should be welcomed here more openly). A really good story related to all of this is the way Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic: http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-atlantic/ http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-a... (couldn't find a better source, but I heard him tell the same story at an event)

polyfractal 14y ago

I don't understand your complaint...there were plenty of helpful posts in that thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378 You asked for advice and received some great information. Just because the overwhelming advice is "This is not a great idea, you will need a lot of money to fight established, entrenched businesses" doesn't mean the advice was unhelpful. Did you want everyone to sugar coat their opinions with "Yeah! Go get them tiger! We believe in you!", or did you want serious advice that can lead you to making an informed, rational decision? If you were a CEO of a company, would you want your employees to tell you whatever you wanted to hear ("yes-men"), or would you want people who actually advised you and helped make an appropriate decision (even when it may be counter to your opinion)?

neurotech1 14y ago

The answer to most of these questions, is find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry, and ask them for advice. Most of the SpaceX senior staff have aerospace experience.

gprasanth 14y ago
> find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry, This, or actually get yourself into the field, work for some time. In a lecture(startupschool), Jessica Livingston(Partner, YC) talked about a guy who made app that allows users to order food from their phone. She said that he was an example of 'a good founder' because he actually joined a restaurant as a waiter just to learn how things worked. Take away? (Get your self involved in, know widely about, find spots which you should do better) in the field you want to start your company in[Joel Spolsky also said something of this sort in his lecture!]

chernevik 14y ago

Everybody already knows it would be great if we could get cable speed and reliability without actually laying cable. Building a business around that is easy. The hard part is actually achieving that. Asking people for the miracle upon which you'd like to build a business, that anyone could build given that miracle, isn't a request for constructive feedback. At its absolute best it is a request for an IP handout.

madsushi 14y ago

> However, why does everyone assume that the inquiring mind is an idiot? Because the inquiring mind did zero research and asked a question so broad and so vague that it was impossible for anyone to answer it without months of work and very specific knowledge. To quote Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I don't think anyone was wanting to sit and spend hours explaining to the author how to do something incredibly difficult and complex without the author putting anything forward. Why not just take that knowledge and do it myself?

jasonkolb 14y ago

I upvoted this so hard. I agree there is a very large snarky dick contingent on HN who pollute potentially productive conversations with "What a stupid idea" type of comments. (Unfortunately I think this is a symptom of the human race, not just HN.) However, there are some exceptionally bright people who hang out here who I would love to just brainstorm with--throw ideas out and see what happens. This site has an above-average level of these people I think. I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Even if I have no interest in starting a new courier service or whatever, I find it quite enjoyable to take the lessons and skills that I've learned and apply them in a new problem space. I especially love hearing feedback on those ideas from people who've worked in those spaces. The most promising ideas are the ones that might sound dumb to someone entrenched in tradition.

SoftwarePatent 14y ago
> I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Great idea! Something similar has actually happened, not with the HN community, but just a handpicked group of highly intelligent people put into a room together with the mission of coming up with innovative new ideas. It is described in this article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...
robryan 14y ago
I agree. To take the courier example, you may not be interested in actually starting a courier but in going through the thought process of how a courier operates you might find a problem that they have which you or others could solve. In my dealing from couriers I get the impression a lot are using outdated software and inefficient processes, might be some disruption in that space.

Chirael 14y ago

Nicely written!

SatvikBeri 14y ago

Many of my friends have a very interesting trait: pose any sort of problem in front of them, and they'll practically drop everything to work out a solution. Trebuchets using only materials in the office. Conquering South Africa. Lesbian strip clubs. Realistic world domination. What the world would look like if D&D rules actually applied. AI for storytelling. Etc. Regardless of how ridiculous the premise, they'll work on it until they have at least a plausible solution. Ignoring impossibilities and slim chances and jumping straight into brainstorming and crazy ideas is a lot of fun. I'd rather have more of those conversations.

SparrowOS 14y ago

Anyone of reasonable intelligence can tell the difference between a fraud and the real thing.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

And of course this thread fills up with more of the same negativism trying to justify itself. PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it. I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case. It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site. In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else. But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site. If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped. Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.

daniel-levin 14y ago
Speaking of ambitious ideas and 'middlebrow dismissal', I'd like to see the algorithmic dismissal detector that PG wrote about. I'm sure the denizens of HN know a thing or two about computational linguistics. Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of middlebrow dismissals) possible?
- apl 14y ago
  > Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of > middlebrow dismissals) possible? I'll give you a middlebrow dismissal: No. Definitely not at the current state of the art. In fact, not many people agree on whether a given comment qualifies as a "middlebrow" dismissal; personally, I consider many of the examples that pg has labeled as such pertinent points. If in doubt, I prefer a good middlebrow dismissal to the shallow cheering of the overly excitable.

stevewilhelm 14y ago

The first thing one should do if you want to disrupt a market is learn as much as you can about the current state of that market. This doesn't mean reading it's Wikipedia entry. Ideally, it means spending several years working for the current market leader in that space. Barring that, reading as much as you can about the history, economics, mechanics, and current players in that space. If possible, become a customer of one or two of the market leaders. If that is not feasible, again get to know people who are customers (again they may become your first target customers). Befriend several people who do work in that space (they could become your first hires). The deeper your understanding and experience in a market, the more likely you will succeed in disrupting it.

jkaljundi 14y ago

Amen.

smoyer 14y ago

I missed that question and would be happy to help with the technical aspects of starting a cable company (though I'd like to see content delivery decoupled from the infrastructure). I have 25 years of experience in the industry if he gets that far. The hard part of the process (and I believe the limiting factor in a new company's success), is arranging the contracts with the content syndicators. Find my e-mail in my profile if you're serious.

berkay 14y ago
Actually even this tidbit (contracts) helps. Identifying the challenges/obstacles is very valuable as it opens it to creative solutions to those problems that may not occur to insiders.
- smoyer 14y ago
  IIRC, ESPN is the most expensive and some of the channels are actually free. If there is information on the history of Telebeam (and how they started), it might be instructional with regards to picking a niche and starting small.

crazygringo 14y ago

I love this idea. Not as something to realistically help you get started, but purely educational. There's so much knowledge tied up exclusively among people "in the industry", that would be great to get out into the public. I would love to know all the things involved in starting an airline. How are planes actually bought? How are mechanics actually procured? What kind of safety regulations are followed? etc. I once read the book "Starting & Running a Restaurant for Dummies" just to find out how it's done. It's fascinating! But turning it into a Wiki, for anything, would be so much better. You can have summary sections, that link to fuller articles, you can cross-reference how to hire a chef (both for the restaurant, and for the airline catering), and so on.

joonix 14y ago
Yes! I hate how the really valuable knowledge is just tied up inside the walls of big industry. People making money are too busy to teach others how to do their jobs. I'm always in search of these types of answers, and rarely get them on the internet. I've looked up those questions about starting an airline in the past. Maybe we can't start an airline, I understand the barriers to entry, but if we got a look at the mechanics of the whole thing maybe someone could disrupt just a small segment of it. That person sells some software to the airlines and makes lots of money. That person then works as CTO for an airline. That person moves up to CEO. That person later leaves and creates an upstart airline that disrupts the industry as we know it. This is the way these things happen all the time, there's no reason for pessimism.
- Mz 14y ago
  Oh no, they are not merely too busy. In most cases, the industry actively wants to exclude others and keep their info to themselves. When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, running my mouth on the internet about the industry could have gotten me fired. I say more these days, now that it is relatively safe. I still don't name the company, just the general industry.
miles_matthias 14y ago
I'm a developer that would be interested in helping this come to fruition. Maybe starting a github repo with the site's code would be a good start for others to pitch in. As for the domain, howdoistart.com returns: "This domain is for sale. Please contact Curtis Stock at curtis.stock@yahoo.com for more information."

spitx 14y ago

There is nothing "rude" about asking HN to chime in on your exploratory-stage ideas, especially when they are uncommonly ambitious and not your average badgeville startup ideas. Face it, Foursquare is not going to fetch you a mercenary if you ever needed one. Why can group-mulling of ideas, be a terrific endeavor? 1) It can stress-test your idea and expose the glaringly gaping holes you might have overlooked, in the very fashioning of the prospect itself. 2)Some ideas may not lend to "socialization" because of their inherent nature. Helps to have them flagged -- if not decimated -- before you even begin. Eg: A startup seeking to disrupt the litigation law market isn't very readily socialize-able as one targeting the fitness trainer market. 3) The group-mulling process need not be just one-way beneficial. The "mullers" stand to benefit from having their horizons broadened too. They might for once realize, that there are entire industries -- non-glamorous but nonetheless high gravity, real-impact ones -- waiting to be disrupted beyond the Mayorvilles and Filtergrams of the valley. This kind of mulling happens on Quora all the time. HN should encourage it. Again you are just being asked to mull. Not leak insights from the equity-research desk at Goldman Sachs. Chill with the dressing-downs.

huggah 14y ago

The problem with this is that for questions like "how could I build a cable company?", answers don't help". If you want to build a cable company, a payments system, a new government, or colonize mars there is no high level answer. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sub-questions that need to be answered. Eventually so many that you need to hire people to ask and answer them, and you won't even know what the question was. The truth is that if you really want to go to space, no one will help you. Not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't. We can speculate, and dig up research or law or economics---but at the end of the day, all you're doing is inviting us to help design your bikeshed. If you can break down the problem, figure out which questions to ask, what information you don't have, and who does, that person might be able to help you. By the time you've gotten that far, you're already on the verge of sinking your life into this---and if you want to build a cable company, that's what it's going to take.

tobyjsullivan 14y ago

This is exactly the mentality we need to see more of. Dismissing good ideas is not just unproductive but actually destructive to the overall progression of thought - which is why we're here in the first place.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Noel_Vock 14y ago

test

famo 14y ago

I didn't see the thread either, but I like this post. I think the best way to go about starting something large and ridiculous is to tell all your friends and family you're going to do it, to the point where it would become embarrassing if you didn't even try to make it a success. Friends and family are the best at calling you out on not living your dreams. "Hey Gaius, weren't you going to build a Cylon detector? You talked about it for months" "Yeah, but it was too hard and I didn't know how to start" "You suck" A more practical benefit of telling all the people you meet is that one of them might know or be associated with someone who is connected with the industry.

zehnfischer 14y ago

Sure, the internet can be a cynical place, remote communication seems to wake the worth in a lot of people. At the same time it is full of wonders. Maybe I can invite you to join a discussion about how it could impact in political decision making? Click along: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891571 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891571

ChuckMcM 14y ago

An interesting rant. I've observed that problem solvers also follow something like the inverse power law, which is to say it takes a certain kind of person to attack large problems and as the problems get larger the set of people willing to consider them seriously decreases logarithmically until it asymptotically approaches zero. In an analagous fashion the "quality" (using karma as a metric of quality) of comments on HN are also quite high and drop off steeply approaching zero. This is reflected both in the comments, and in the karma distribution [1]. The trick is to keep the noise floor high enough for quality reading and low enough that you don't miss out on new people making great comments. [1] http://www.mcmanis.com/karma-chart.html http://www.mcmanis.com/karma-chart.html

patio11 14y ago

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that HN declared a do-over and took another stab at answering the question. What, specifically, do you want in the new thread that was not present in the old thread, and what do you not want in the new thread that was present in the old thread? Some potential options: a) Keep all the facts. Remove conclusory statements which suggest that this is a bad idea. b) Remove the discouraging facts. Add new facts which tend to not be discouraging, such as "Monthly cable rates are high relative to many B2C products and lifetime values can easily hit the thousands of dollars, allowing you to spend a lot on customer acquisition." Add conclusory statements suggesting that this makes founding a cable company a good idea. c) Remove discouraging facts about the cable industry, replace with to-do action items which accurately describe the process of how one would set up a cable company (regulatory approvals you'll need, who to hire, how much to raise, etc etc), and very carefully attempt to phrase "Convince investors to stake you with $X0 million" in such a way that it does not sound discouraging. d) Remove everything about starting a cable company. Treat the question as a springboard about "How to disrupt the cable industry?" e) Something else?

marcamillion 14y ago
Not sure who in the heck downvoted this, but I proposed a simple solution for the community that would help us explore these types of topics on each post. Called - "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started". You can find it in the New section - http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest Edit 1: For whatever reason, this comment seems to be a battleground. Been upvoted & downvoted so many times. Guess this comment symbolizes the struggle for those of us interested in preserving the quality of the community we have come to love, and with those that just love to downvote willy nilly.
- belbn 14y ago
  I was under the impression you aren't able to downvote on this site. In the same way this site is Reddit except the fact you can't react negatively to anything (downvote), we now need to do the same for comments. You either upvote or you do nothing. You either comment positively or you don't comment. Excellent job patio.

xiaoma 14y ago

>"I’m really disappointed in the universally pessimistic and generally unhelpful answers this question received. Some people pitched some interesting ideas and helpful analysis, but most of the replies reinforced the notion that Hacker News readers are predominantly male know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks." This would have been both more convincing and shorter without the anti-male bit. I realize that western media is pretty insensitive to this variety of sexism, but a quick test is to try substituting "black", "female", or "Jewish" where you've written "male". If it sounds offensive, then it probably is.

peteforde 14y ago
I promised myself that I wasn't going to reply directly to any of the comments, but it's important to rebut this succinctly: so far as I can tell, 100% of the top 1oo contributors to Hacker News (by karma) are male. I am documenting my methodology and will publish my findings in the near future. Please remember that nobody has the right to not be offended. Meanwhile, if you can prove that HN has been taken over by Jewish black women with a collective chip on their shoulder, then I will stand corrected.
- token_female 14y ago
  I'm glad you're studying this. I think it would be useful to look at the comment threads about articles that have anything to do with sexism or women in tech - they are quite telling. Here are a couple of examples, but really, it happens every time there is an article about women that acknowledges the possibility that there might be some sexism in hacker culture. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4238254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087811 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087811 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452516 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452516 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679005 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679005 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323091 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323091
- xiaoma 14y ago
  I don't dispute that it's a mostly male site. The problem is that unless you're claiming that being male is a negative thing, there's no reason to include it along with your criticisms of "know-it-alls" or "bunch of snarky dicks". If, for example, you said that Hollywood producers were "predominantly Jewish know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks," then a lot of Jewish people would take offense and rightfully so... dispite the fact that the vast majority of producers are in fact Jewish. Similarly, the claim that elementary schoolteachers were "predominantly female know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky bitches," you would have offended a lot of women, and the fact that most elementary school teachers are female would be no defense. There's no need to bash men to make your argument. Bash the snarkiness or the know-it-all attitudes. That's my humble request to make the discussion a bit friendlier, and incidentally more focused on what actually matters.

marcamillion 14y ago

I just submitted a propsal for a new thread format on HN that would potentially solve this. Any upvote love would be appreciated - http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/newest It's called "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started".

miles_matthias 14y ago

I've setup a Wikispace wiki for this to begin. If people contribute and think this is a good idea, then maybe its own domain and custom design will be in order. I love this idea and I think we should run with it. Go to: http://howdoistart.wikispaces.com/ http://howdoistart.wikispaces.com/ and edit away!

AnthonyJoseph 14y ago

The biggest problem with forums like this, is the tendency for people to answer questions that the OP didn't ask.

pla3rhat3r 14y ago

LOVE this! I'm new to programming and it's the toughest thing to answer. How or where do I get started? I have some great ideas but not much in the way of skills to get it done. I know we all have different levels of "figure it out" skills but it's always helpful if you find someone who can at least show you how to open the door.

josephlord 14y ago

Criticizing what someone has made with middlebrow dismissiveness is one thing but pointing out that taking on a legally and commercially entrenched industry will be hard and here are some of the specific challenges is entirely valid. I think the original question is worth picking apart if the answers are being criticized. >Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started? > I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started? The original question is worse (by a long way) than most of the answers. Most of the answers pointed out the major challenges or suggested better ways to achieve the vaguely stated aims although there were some useless dismissals. The question indicates (possibly wrongly) a massive lack of understanding of the business "Basically, my understanding...[something basically right but oversimplified]". It is badly punctuated "fox" rather than "Fox", 'dont' rather than "don't". The question also fails to really be clear about what he wants to do. Does he really want to run a cable company maintaining wires in the ground and boxes in homes? Or is this mostly about securing more favorable and flexible content deals? Or is there an implicit assumption that he needs to own the cables to get the deals? What scale does he want to start on? A small town/city or national? I didn't see the original question while it was active but if I did I would have pointed out how hard such a business is to break into especially if top grade content is required due to the maze of exclusivity contracts and the value of them which means massive amounts of money are needed to make the sellers choose non-exclusive options. Even companies like Microsoft and Sony with massive deployed platforms (Xbox and PS3 in particular) need prolonged negotiations to get any content and aren't anywhere near being able to offer full cable replacements and even with their own content Sony can offer only what is not exclusively licensed elsewhere. However that doesn't mean that the video space can't be attacked as Netflix is showing but it will in my view need to be an indirect attack that builds audience until it can compete head to head for the major deals and content as a viable distribution platform and pricing model. Note that when the competition really starts costs may rise not fall as the platforms will compete for the most important content potentially driving up content prices for all the distribution platforms.

gizzlon 14y ago

This reminded me of Richard Branson (the Virgin guy) and a post by James Altucher. I think James' point is that to do something huge, like start a new airline, you always have to find the next step. Pretty basic really, break a big task into smaller pieces. But worth a read nonetheless, it really goes into OP's question. "Q: How do you know when you’re thinking too big or aiming too high (if that’s even possible)?" "A: In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with (...) My real problem was: I didn’t have confidence. And I didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff." http://www.jamesaltucher.com/how-do-you-know-when-youre-thinking-too-big-or-aiming-too-high-if-thats-even-possible/ http://www.jamesaltucher.com/how-do-you-know-when-youre-thin...

mvts 14y ago

Great article, an enjoyable read. Thanks.

nhangen 14y ago

I didn't read any of the comments in the original thread, but I can imagine why many of them were negative. Here is the question: ' I want to build a cable company that centers around viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the majority of my cable costs centers around channels (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build a system that let customers limit this, where would I get started?' This, to me, reeks of laziness. The OP would have done better to say 'this is what I've done, research, and/or these are the ideas I have. Am I right, wrong, or close?' So problem #1 is that, from the looks of it, the OP didn't do any research before asking the question. Problem #2 is that the question is a lazy one. I can guarantee you that Elon didn't ask these type of questions, but instead presented lists of assertions and hypothesis which he was prepared to test and/or validate.