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"increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales" This is true to a point, but if your strongest suite

by jiggy2011 13y ago

"increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales" This is true to a point, but if your strongest suite is your raw technical ability then it may be best for you to pursue problems that have remained unsolved because of technical challenges that have put others off. A significant technical barrier is also nice to have if it means you can get the market before your competition catches up. Even a mediocre implementation of something "impossible" can make a lot of impact. See bitcoin.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Even a mediocre implementation of something "impossible" can make a lot of impact. See bitcoin. Bitcoin was perhaps the worst possible example you could have chosen... The implementation was the opposite of mediocre; its code predicted and solved implementation problems that no one realized were problems, except Satoshi. And on a technical level, the client has only experienced one problem that had to be rolled back. There are few other implementations of anything that have that kind of track record. A better example of a mediocre implementation of something would be the original Quake engine. Ha, got you, just kidding. Actually, I can't think of anything that's made "a lot of impact" while also being both a mediocre implementation and very difficult on a technical level. Even Minecraft wasn't mediocre. Difficulty and mediocrity seem to be opposites, the way magnetic poles are.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  I should clarify. By "mediocre implementation" I didn't mean "the code sucks" I was talking more about "can my grandma use this?". Going from zero to "working cryptocurrency" is a massive leap even if only the relatively geeky can understand and use it. It does open the door wide for someone to build a "bitcoin for grandma" but that will probably involve a somewhat different skillset to that of Satoshi.
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  Obviously what counts as mediocre is up for debate, but I think you could argue that the first mobile phones were a mediocre implementation of a very difficult technical problem.
- fibbery 13y ago
  Would Twitter v1 count?
  - ForHackernews 13y ago
    No. Figuring out how to post short bits of text on a website is not a difficult technical problem. All of the "hard" problems twitter has solved came later as a result of scaling up to millions of users and hundreds of millions of bits of text.
tetrep 13y ago
i believe the author was referring to artificially inflating the technical challenge of a problem. e.g. if you were imgur.com, you most likely should not be implementing your own machine language for use on an FPGA in order to serve cat pictures more efficiently.
kowdermeister 13y ago
I argue with that point too :) My biggest problem now is getting money. After that another and another, but not he mentioned.
shas3 13y ago
There is a correlation between the success of a product/service and the difficulty of the technical problem you solved to create the product/service. There are hard technical problems that don't result in profitable products and there are profitable businesses that result from non-difficult problems. But there are several examples of companies which solved super-hard problems (e.g. PageRank and Google, Blackberry and messaging, Apple's UIs, TI-Intel-etc.'s transistors and ICs, IBM's early mechanical computers, Edison's invention of the light bulb, Ford's assembly lines, etc. etc.) I think the mistake many people make is that they treat marketing as a problem divorced from technical development. They should really be the two sides of the same coin. It is wimpy and inexcusable for entrepreneurs to say "I'm good at one and not the other".

sillysaurus2 13y ago

Even a mediocre implementation of something "impossible" can make a lot of impact. See bitcoin. Bitcoin was perhaps the worst possible example you could have chosen... The implementation was the opposite of mediocre; its code predicted and solved implementation problems that no one realized were problems, except Satoshi. And on a technical level, the client has only experienced one problem that had to be rolled back. There are few other implementations of anything that have that kind of track record. A better example of a mediocre implementation of something would be the original Quake engine. Ha, got you, just kidding. Actually, I can't think of anything that's made "a lot of impact" while also being both a mediocre implementation and very difficult on a technical level. Even Minecraft wasn't mediocre. Difficulty and mediocrity seem to be opposites, the way magnetic poles are.

jiggy2011 13y ago
I should clarify. By "mediocre implementation" I didn't mean "the code sucks" I was talking more about "can my grandma use this?". Going from zero to "working cryptocurrency" is a massive leap even if only the relatively geeky can understand and use it. It does open the door wide for someone to build a "bitcoin for grandma" but that will probably involve a somewhat different skillset to that of Satoshi.
GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
Obviously what counts as mediocre is up for debate, but I think you could argue that the first mobile phones were a mediocre implementation of a very difficult technical problem.
fibbery 13y ago
Would Twitter v1 count?
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  No. Figuring out how to post short bits of text on a website is not a difficult technical problem. All of the "hard" problems twitter has solved came later as a result of scaling up to millions of users and hundreds of millions of bits of text.

tetrep 13y ago

i believe the author was referring to artificially inflating the technical challenge of a problem. e.g. if you were imgur.com, you most likely should not be implementing your own machine language for use on an FPGA in order to serve cat pictures more efficiently.

kowdermeister 13y ago

I argue with that point too :) My biggest problem now is getting money. After that another and another, but not he mentioned.

shas3 13y ago

There is a correlation between the success of a product/service and the difficulty of the technical problem you solved to create the product/service. There are hard technical problems that don't result in profitable products and there are profitable businesses that result from non-difficult problems. But there are several examples of companies which solved super-hard problems (e.g. PageRank and Google, Blackberry and messaging, Apple's UIs, TI-Intel-etc.'s transistors and ICs, IBM's early mechanical computers, Edison's invention of the light bulb, Ford's assembly lines, etc. etc.) I think the mistake many people make is that they treat marketing as a problem divorced from technical development. They should really be the two sides of the same coin. It is wimpy and inexcusable for entrepreneurs to say "I'm good at one and not the other".