6 ms·

5 ways to break past the San Francisco echo-chamber

24 points by rams 19y ago

brlewis 19y ago
I would call these ways to understand that you need to break past the echo chamber. They might open your eyes to the idea that people are different. To actually break past the echo chamber you need extensive interaction with other people.
imsteve 19y ago
There should be a "techcrunch" that reviews sites with numbers/features that speak for themselves instead of the bull* publicity process that now occurs.
- Kaizyn 19y ago
  Great idea. What would the site's revenue model be if not taking money from startups to hype their offerings?
  - mattmaroon 19y ago
    You don't pay to be featured in TechCrunch.
    - imsteve 19y ago
      You pay, one way or another, to get publicity - it's not automatically a result of success or innovation - which is what many regular people think it is. And this is why it sucks.
- pg 19y ago
  This already exists: it's called the print media. It's easy to write about startups once they have numbers. The catch is, they may not have meaningful numbers for months. What makes Techcrunch unique is how early it judges startups: often the very day they launch. At that point there are no numbers, only features, and features don't speak for themselves. Considering how hard it is to judge startups that early, it's surprising Techcrunch isn't wrong more often.
  - imsteve 19y ago
    wrong.
mattmaroon 19y ago
Ha, I'd heard of just about everyone at the top of the Quantcast list, which, btw, is highly suspect. I clicked on four sites I hadn't heard of, and two of them were porn.
paul 19y ago
There seems to be a common assumption that building things for people in SF is a mistake. Targeting early adopters is not bad -- almost by definition, your first users will be early adopters. The important question is: Is this something that can grow to include the larger population, or will it remain forever niche? If it's something that will eventually spread to the rest of the world, then living in the SF "echo-chamber" is actually a big advantage -- you get a clearer view of the future. This also one of the reasons why many innovations come out of universities -- they also have a "future world" aspect to them (for example, I was using the web in 1994, but "regular" people had never heard of it and had no use for it). Unfortunately, answering that question is very difficult. Early cell phones provide a wonderful example of this -- the market predictions were off by orders of magnitude.
- brlewis 19y ago
  I thought this article was about your important question. When it comes to hitting a wall after the early adopters, the first thing I think of is photo sharing. Wouldn't you think that would be one of the most widely-used services? Yet on Quantcast flickr shows 1/10 the monthly unique visitors of yahoo.com. In the top 100, only flickr, photobucket, and (arguably) facebook are photo-sharing sites. Shouldn't photo sharing have a wider appeal than blogging?
iamelgringo 19y ago
I think that part of the issue is that there are many problems that technology can solve, that aren't really faced by people in San Francisco. For instance, my family back East is into scrapbooking and crafting. I never really thought about it much, though. But, after reading one of Andrew's posts, I started looking into it. From the Craft Trade association's website, crafting is a 30-40 Billion dollar industry. That's almost the same size as the movie industry. That is a huge market that your average 20 year old male founder living in San Fran just isn't going to think about. That's the context that Andrew is talking about. There are precious few people in fly-over country that have heard of twitter, but there are millions of women in the South and Midwest who get together on weekends and scrapbook. That's the echo-chamber.
staunch 19y ago
I know people who are in various parts of the world and generally disinterested in technology and the internet. I frequently ask them questions to see what they've heard of and what they haven't. It's informal and unscientific, but it definitely helps me get some idea of what the view is like from the outside.

24 points by rams 19y ago

I would call these ways to understand that you need to break past the echo chamber. They might open your eyes to the idea that people are different. To actually break past the echo chamber you need extensive interaction with other people.

imsteve 19y ago

There should be a "techcrunch" that reviews sites with numbers/features that speak for themselves instead of the bull* publicity process that now occurs.

Kaizyn 19y ago
Great idea. What would the site's revenue model be if not taking money from startups to hype their offerings?
- mattmaroon 19y ago
  You don't pay to be featured in TechCrunch.
  - imsteve 19y ago
    You pay, one way or another, to get publicity - it's not automatically a result of success or innovation - which is what many regular people think it is. And this is why it sucks.
pg 19y ago
This already exists: it's called the print media. It's easy to write about startups once they have numbers. The catch is, they may not have meaningful numbers for months. What makes Techcrunch unique is how early it judges startups: often the very day they launch. At that point there are no numbers, only features, and features don't speak for themselves. Considering how hard it is to judge startups that early, it's surprising Techcrunch isn't wrong more often.
- imsteve 19y ago
  wrong.

mattmaroon 19y ago

Ha, I'd heard of just about everyone at the top of the Quantcast list, which, btw, is highly suspect. I clicked on four sites I hadn't heard of, and two of them were porn.

paul 19y ago

There seems to be a common assumption that building things for people in SF is a mistake. Targeting early adopters is not bad -- almost by definition, your first users will be early adopters. The important question is: Is this something that can grow to include the larger population, or will it remain forever niche? If it's something that will eventually spread to the rest of the world, then living in the SF "echo-chamber" is actually a big advantage -- you get a clearer view of the future. This also one of the reasons why many innovations come out of universities -- they also have a "future world" aspect to them (for example, I was using the web in 1994, but "regular" people had never heard of it and had no use for it). Unfortunately, answering that question is very difficult. Early cell phones provide a wonderful example of this -- the market predictions were off by orders of magnitude.

brlewis 19y ago
I thought this article was about your important question. When it comes to hitting a wall after the early adopters, the first thing I think of is photo sharing. Wouldn't you think that would be one of the most widely-used services? Yet on Quantcast flickr shows 1/10 the monthly unique visitors of yahoo.com. In the top 100, only flickr, photobucket, and (arguably) facebook are photo-sharing sites. Shouldn't photo sharing have a wider appeal than blogging?

iamelgringo 19y ago

I think that part of the issue is that there are many problems that technology can solve, that aren't really faced by people in San Francisco. For instance, my family back East is into scrapbooking and crafting. I never really thought about it much, though. But, after reading one of Andrew's posts, I started looking into it. From the Craft Trade association's website, crafting is a 30-40 Billion dollar industry. That's almost the same size as the movie industry. That is a huge market that your average 20 year old male founder living in San Fran just isn't going to think about. That's the context that Andrew is talking about. There are precious few people in fly-over country that have heard of twitter, but there are millions of women in the South and Midwest who get together on weekends and scrapbook. That's the echo-chamber.

staunch 19y ago

I know people who are in various parts of the world and generally disinterested in technology and the internet. I frequently ask them questions to see what they've heard of and what they haven't. It's informal and unscientific, but it definitely helps me get some idea of what the view is like from the outside.