12 ms·

Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before?

93 points by eladgil 13y ago

jacoblyles 13y ago
A market with a successful competitor can be a good sign of consumer demand. However, a market with dozens or hundreds of failed/stagnant startups and no standout winners is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad.
- vbl 13y ago
  cough Smartphone-based loyalty cards cough
  - thrush 13y ago
    Have you heard of Belly?
  - jacoblyles 13y ago
    I had four or five examples ready to go, but I didn't say them because I know people working on each of them :) The startup fad that caught me was a phone app that helps you meet strangers near you. I thought I was being unique and clever, but then a hundred other startups came out in the space and failed spectacularly. The only one that survived was grindr.
    - thrush 13y ago
      Hardly. Highlight is pretty active still.
- mikecane 13y ago
  >>>is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad Or a good sign that everyone else is doing it wrong and there's still room for someone to do it right. He cited the iPod. Nuff said there.
joshbaptiste 13y ago
yep, HN'ers especially are very well aware of this.. the only critiques I usually see on "Show HN" is how does your X product differentiate from already existing Y product, not oh this was done before don't bother etc...
primo44 13y ago
In his title, he needs to use "It's" as a contraction of "It Has". "its" is the possessive for "belonging to it" -- always.
- narsil 13y ago
  Its not that important.
sunnybunny 13y ago
Saying that it's possible to nail a business that has been tried and failed before is fine, but you had better understand why things are different now. What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing, and an opportunity has opened up now?
alexqgb 13y ago
In the early part of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon said (in essence) "Man cannot do what has never been done, except by means not yet tried." There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily be the key to new varieties of failure. What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.
obviouslygreen 13y ago
If it's been tried before, you should absolutely care. The successes or failures of those that have tried or done it before should be your first lessons and they should inform your decisions (probably not define, but definitely inform). No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about why it didn't work is your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.
- chacham15 13y ago
  Its not just about working or not. E.g. yahoo vs google. They both work, just google works better. Myspace worked too, just facebook worked better. Even in the cases where things have failed in the past, it can be difficult to figure out why. Do you think that the iPhone was the first smartphone?
  - kristopolous 13y ago
    Reminds me of Youtube. On-demand video was the "flying car" of Silicon Valley before them. And what about Skype? The notion of a usable video-phone was pure fantasy for years prior to them. And now, Tesla is doing this again. I can walk into my grocery store, use their smart-phone app to get discounts on things I want to buy and then wave my phone at the self-checkout station to pay for it all. What a nice future. Reminds me of these commercials: http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will . They seem so quaint now.
    - chacham15 13y ago
      I dont understand what point you are trying to make and how that may relate to what I said. Are you trying to state that new things are invented? If so, I think you missed my point which was that determining why things work now can also be a difficult question.
      - kristopolous 13y ago
        I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples. There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in that are now ubiquitous. It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid. For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said would never come. Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g., http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_recall http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...). And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty impressive.
stcredzero 13y ago
An important way to evaluate others, especially prospective colleagues, is to observe how much information they use to come to a decision, and note what they do with it. Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know? Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.) However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.
thetrumanshow 13y ago
+1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of times before. :) I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small. And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.
jacquesm 13y ago
The only important factor in 'it's been tried before' is the 'before' bit, the timing. If the timing was off and that's why the venture failed then re-doing it makes sense. If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. But 'tried before and failed' will stick for everything where timing wasn't a factor. During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means do a re-run.
- chacham15 13y ago
  >The only important factor I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but rather execution.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    Way to pull 'that part of my statement' out of context. It says (and I think that's a pretty clear bit): > If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. Clearly, if your execution sucks then timing wasn't the factor.
    - chacham15 13y ago
      > If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count Thats a misleading idea because it suggests that execution and timing are separable. Who is to say that some company failed because the timing was wrong or because their execution was bad? Furthermore, couldnt it be both? As Drew Houston said, he had to convince people that he was solving a problem that they didnt even know that they had! What I am trying to show here is that Drew created his market, he didnt wait for the right time when people had this problem that they so desperately needed solved. He made them realize it himself. Chalking things up to just timing belittles the efforts put forth by the founders.
nnq 13y ago
There are two kinds of founders-inventors: 1. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with semi-successes 2. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with truly new ideas that create markets for themselves, that bring solutions that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and "poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before" market If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why they failed, you know...).
mindcrime 13y ago
I wish I could find this blog post now, but it seems to have disappeared... but there's one by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that I found very influential some time ago. It goes something like (paraphrased) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else". Now, this may not always be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products, better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys and you at least have a shot.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else." I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes. His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.
pbreit 13y ago
I'm going to start posting this to all the HN bozos who comment to the affect "hasn't this already been done" (after downvoting them, of course).
EternalFury 13y ago
This post has already been done before under the title "On the value of a better mouse trap".
thatthatis 13y ago
It matters greatly if you're entering a thriving market, or a graveyard market (one littered with tons of failed attempts and no reasonable success stories). If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's probably a reason they all failed too. The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.
Millennium 13y ago
Smart people care if it's been tried before. The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from someone else's mistakes.
dlss 13y ago
anyone who cares about base rates.
wcdolphin 13y ago
" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS)." Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows. I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.

93 points by eladgil 13y ago

A market with a successful competitor can be a good sign of consumer demand. However, a market with dozens or hundreds of failed/stagnant startups and no standout winners is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad.

vbl 13y ago
cough Smartphone-based loyalty cards cough
- thrush 13y ago
  Have you heard of Belly?
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  I had four or five examples ready to go, but I didn't say them because I know people working on each of them :) The startup fad that caught me was a phone app that helps you meet strangers near you. I thought I was being unique and clever, but then a hundred other startups came out in the space and failed spectacularly. The only one that survived was grindr.
  - thrush 13y ago
    Hardly. Highlight is pretty active still.
mikecane 13y ago
>>>is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad Or a good sign that everyone else is doing it wrong and there's still room for someone to do it right. He cited the iPod. Nuff said there.

joshbaptiste 13y ago

yep, HN'ers especially are very well aware of this.. the only critiques I usually see on "Show HN" is how does your X product differentiate from already existing Y product, not oh this was done before don't bother etc...

primo44 13y ago

In his title, he needs to use "It's" as a contraction of "It Has". "its" is the possessive for "belonging to it" -- always.

narsil 13y ago
Its not that important.

sunnybunny 13y ago

Saying that it's possible to nail a business that has been tried and failed before is fine, but you had better understand why things are different now. What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing, and an opportunity has opened up now?

alexqgb 13y ago

In the early part of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon said (in essence) "Man cannot do what has never been done, except by means not yet tried." There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily be the key to new varieties of failure. What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.

obviouslygreen 13y ago

If it's been tried before, you should absolutely care. The successes or failures of those that have tried or done it before should be your first lessons and they should inform your decisions (probably not define, but definitely inform). No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about why it didn't work is your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.

chacham15 13y ago
Its not just about working or not. E.g. yahoo vs google. They both work, just google works better. Myspace worked too, just facebook worked better. Even in the cases where things have failed in the past, it can be difficult to figure out why. Do you think that the iPhone was the first smartphone?
- kristopolous 13y ago
  Reminds me of Youtube. On-demand video was the "flying car" of Silicon Valley before them. And what about Skype? The notion of a usable video-phone was pure fantasy for years prior to them. And now, Tesla is doing this again. I can walk into my grocery store, use their smart-phone app to get discounts on things I want to buy and then wave my phone at the self-checkout station to pay for it all. What a nice future. Reminds me of these commercials: http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will . They seem so quaint now.
  - chacham15 13y ago
    I dont understand what point you are trying to make and how that may relate to what I said. Are you trying to state that new things are invented? If so, I think you missed my point which was that determining why things work now can also be a difficult question.
    - kristopolous 13y ago
      I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples. There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in that are now ubiquitous. It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid. For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said would never come. Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g., http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_recall http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...). And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty impressive.

stcredzero 13y ago

An important way to evaluate others, especially prospective colleagues, is to observe how much information they use to come to a decision, and note what they do with it. Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know? Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.) However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.

thetrumanshow 13y ago

+1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of times before. :) I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small. And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.

jacquesm 13y ago

The only important factor in 'it's been tried before' is the 'before' bit, the timing. If the timing was off and that's why the venture failed then re-doing it makes sense. If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. But 'tried before and failed' will stick for everything where timing wasn't a factor. During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means do a re-run.

chacham15 13y ago
>The only important factor I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but rather execution.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Way to pull 'that part of my statement' out of context. It says (and I think that's a pretty clear bit): > If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. Clearly, if your execution sucks then timing wasn't the factor.
  - chacham15 13y ago
    > If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count Thats a misleading idea because it suggests that execution and timing are separable. Who is to say that some company failed because the timing was wrong or because their execution was bad? Furthermore, couldnt it be both? As Drew Houston said, he had to convince people that he was solving a problem that they didnt even know that they had! What I am trying to show here is that Drew created his market, he didnt wait for the right time when people had this problem that they so desperately needed solved. He made them realize it himself. Chalking things up to just timing belittles the efforts put forth by the founders.

nnq 13y ago

There are two kinds of founders-inventors: 1. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with semi-successes 2. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with truly new ideas that create markets for themselves, that bring solutions that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and "poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before" market If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why they failed, you know...).

mindcrime 13y ago

I wish I could find this blog post now, but it seems to have disappeared... but there's one by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that I found very influential some time ago. It goes something like (paraphrased) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else". Now, this may not always be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products, better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys and you at least have a shot.

nitrogen 13y ago
"Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else." I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes. His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.

pbreit 13y ago

I'm going to start posting this to all the HN bozos who comment to the affect "hasn't this already been done" (after downvoting them, of course).

EternalFury 13y ago

This post has already been done before under the title "On the value of a better mouse trap".

thatthatis 13y ago

It matters greatly if you're entering a thriving market, or a graveyard market (one littered with tons of failed attempts and no reasonable success stories). If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's probably a reason they all failed too. The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.

Millennium 13y ago

Smart people care if it's been tried before. The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from someone else's mistakes.

dlss 13y ago

anyone who cares about base rates.

wcdolphin 13y ago

" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS)." Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows. I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.