You're Not Allowed to Criticize Startups, You Stupid Hater
minimaxir.com
minimaxir.com
I don't disagree at all that serious looks at what went wrong are very, very useful to everyone else, but I personally like that Silicon Valley is a sort of safe space for experimenting with dumb ideas where people won't make a big deal out of it if one or more of your ideas don't work out.
Back on startups. Sure, it's great that you can experiment. We can still experiment while calling bullshit when we see it. There's a huge gap between "They're trying something we think might be cool or make it but ton of risk here as prior examples illustrate" and "World-changing app here whose initial uptake indicates billions in making and any problems are just a hiccup! Get it today!"
A bit more of the former will at least let people spot problem areas and maybe avoid them more often.
There's all kinds of products that failed for specific, sometimes-lasting reasons. You should avoid them in your next startup if those reasons or contexts still apply. Otherwise, your startup's chance of failure just skyrocketed with little justification.
" If everyone acted in conservative manner because they don't want to make mistakes and be called an idiot by others, we will have much slower innovation."
That doesn't contradict what I'm saying. I'm saying people shouldn't act in an ignorant manner when confronted with data saying they'll have problems, are having problems, or totally failed. They can be conservative or risk-takers. They just better keep lessons of history and business reality of their market in mind when making their decisions. It's considered common sense in other aspects of life.
Yes. This is exactly what I am talking about. While most people won't bother to try, there will be some people who keep on trying. Most experts will say the same thing: "This and that company already tried this and failed you idiot". But here's why sometimes it works: Startups don't succeed purely based on their absolute value. It's all contextual and relative, which means the same model that didn't work last year may work this year because of how the situation has changed. But nobody knows that until it actually happens. The reason why a lot of disruptive startups are built by inexperienced people just out of college instead of experienced people is because experienced people already know too much and have seen certain models don't work and their thought process is just like you stated. Whereas younger people who have no idea will just try (and most of the times will fail) and sometimes it works because of the right context.
In fact your rhetorical questions I quoted above--which you probably meant cynically--are very interesting questions and I encourage that you seriously think them again. You seem to think they're idiotic but I think they are brilliant questions. YES, it is possible that a new model can arise that will make people want to pay for stuff that they usually get for free. Yes, there can be something that completely rethinks how we consume information (not our contemporary browser). Yes, there can be an entirely new device that can replace a smartphone.
"In fact your rhetorical questions I quoted above--which you probably meant cynically--are very interesting questions and I encourage that you seriously think them again. You seem to think they're idiotic but I think they are brilliant questions."
I agree. The point I'm making is you can sometimes know these things because they were obvious with 20/20 hindsight & market feedback. The questions weren't cynical so much as best examples I could squeeze out of my brain in a hurry that I could justify with examples. Glad you liked them. :) Let's look at them.
First, Gopherspace is gone in about every way you can think of. I predicted it could return on feature phones with a new implementation. There's a system in developing world that's essentially that & text-based. Yet, it's an inferior experience to both Web and native due to lack of rich content and network effects. Almost all growth happens due to network effects. So, deny the network effects, then you're almost guaranteeing no growth. An imitation of or improvement in Gopher model will fail unless it addresses this. Every company that I ever heard of that tried failed. Of course, modifying Gopher to have network effects basically turns it into Web 1.0. ;)
Second example is paying a lot for what they can get free. The exception where this works is luxury or coolness markets. I'm ignoring that here, which I should've mentioned, because it's the exception. You release an email client for personal, not business, users that cost $50 a month... you will fail. Even high-assurance security, my subfield, had a really hard time pushing messaging and email systems that baked in strong, endpoint and protocol security due to premiums charged for high cost. We saw same for usability, platform integration, etc. It had to have certain features and not be too much money. Even Apple, an outlier, went through hell trying to fight this rule until they acquired Next Computers and their I.P. that was worth extra money by being substantially different and cool. Even iPhone follows my rule because they had to basically put a Mac in a phone & hit coolness crowd to charge what they did. Try this stuff with a basic differentiator and too large a value? It will fail. Companies keep trying and failing on that.
Third example: "Do a mobile solution that requires a specific device rather than smartphone?"
Pagers. Mobile communicators. Briefcases for secure, satellite phones. Ultra-thin, netbook-like devices. GPS systems. PDA's. Tomagatchis. All sorts of things came before cellphones got good enough to do the same stuff with more convenience, low weight, etc. People kept trying to market the same kinds of stuff from there with 100(?) failure rate. Question mark as something successful might have slipped past me that wasn't an outlier. Browsers, productivity apps, note taking, telling time, games... all of that goes on mobile outside extremely nich markets (eg Garmin's). Smartwatch's might be an outlier that cleverly exploits that a watch is only other thing that's acceptable and semi-mandatory to carry. It doesn't break my rule: it replaces an existing, marketable category of product with added value. Otherwise, virtually everything like before is failing if it's not on a phone. Next one will too without compelling reason.
So, it's not about experts or limited views. Even an average person will tell you they don't want to carry a 2nd device for your note-taking app. They want a pretty Web interface or good native one over manually navigating Gopher folders. That the app isn't worth a bunch of money if something else does almost same thing for free (also see "Worse is Better" for 90% rule). In all of these cases, someone should've stopped to interject these issues to steer the startup toward an offering that lacks these risks and has components of success. After all, the ones that succeeded mostly had those components and we're play the odds where we can right?
I'm for experimentation and risk-taking where context changes. It's just that many attributes keep showing up in both successful and failed products. So, making one or avoiding the other could benefit from those most of the time. That's all I'm saying. Past that, a proven thing that applied in the past might suddenly apply again in new circumstances seen only by a visionary. Go for it. Try it. After all, I am "that guy" (or one of them) on Hacker News that keeps reminding IT people they're always re-inventing stuff (good & bad) from the past without learning lessons from those that did it right. ;)
Now news sources like TechCrunch? Good luck. If a start-up is on the rise they'll publish whatever gives them more clicks. When a start-up is on the decline they'll still publish whatever gives them more clicks. If that means "not admitting they're wrong" then that's just how it'll be.
As for Peach I downloaded it to try it. I didn't "get it". Thought it was terrible because I couldn't share or do anything without finding people first. So I uninstalled. I don't have time to cultivate friends on yet another social network; it needs to essentially be done for me. Which yeah sounds super lazy but I don't think it's off the mark either.
Running a startup is difficult as hell, so IMHO, if an app manages to have a successful launch, then more power to them. At the end of the day, it boils down to capturing value to be able to make it. For some businesses Techcrunch/Buzzfeed/etc press may be a key factor in this process, for others, it is just vanity. Why do we even care?
But I also know a few people who are much closer to the money side of the business who don't ever shit-talk startups, no matter how crazy and dumb they are, or no matter how scummy their behavior.
I would say that the social acceptability of criticizing startups is proportional to your professional distance from a VC. Accordingly, the social acceptability of criticizing the meta-aspects of startups (fundraising, investing, etc) is the square of your professional distance from a VC ;)
There's definitely a "cone of silence" effect around VCs/incubators. Everyone walks on eggshells around them and criticism is extremely muted. Forget optimism/pessimism, even criticism of downright unethical/illegal actions is largely nonexistent.
This is something that scares me about Silicon Valley. That kind of attitude opens a market for respectability, and once that becomes accepted, the tech bro douchebaggery is going to get shunned, hard. The services they made so cheap will make it even easier for someone else to eat their lunch, and even pointedly NOT being a part of the Valley could be a point in a company's favor (privacy-centric consumers who see SV companies willingly send personal data to NSA dragnets). Then it becomes a matter of fashion. ("You're still using snapchat after X came out? What are you, 12? The government is reading all of your snaps by the way.")
But leave it to a society of nerds to forget the vital necessity of being cool.
Imagine if blind person was told about a bicycle and how it can transport a person from point A to point B. Then someone else presents him with a description of a car and how it has 4 wheels. The blind person might say, "but what the hell would I want 4 wheels instead of 2?!? That's twice the maintenance and replacement parts!" But then you explain that the 4-wheel can self-balance without a kickstand and can transport 5 people instead of just 2. Those kinds of conversations never happen because people can see the obvious differences between a bicycle and a car.
Unfortunately, the "shape" of software is amorphous. We can all be "blind" to the value proposition of unknown software. Software is described with "words". (Sometimes with screenshots too but then again, the screenshots themselves often have more "words" surrounded by GUI boxes or colors.) This is why so many "Show HN" threads have the question, "what exactly does this do?" or "how is this any different from X?"
As for your theme... I don't know about Techcrunch comments but on HN, there's a propensity to be skeptical & criticise rather than fawn & praise. (https://venngage.com/blog/why-you-need-to-stop-obsessing-ove...)
To me, "hater" is somewhat clickbaity but I think it originates from the "haters gonna hate" meme so if you want to riff on that, I get it.
Yes, it's a riff of that, and a term I've seen expressed by the startup crowd frequently. (That, and "anyone who criticizes my startup is just trolling," which is a related but different problem.)
That said, HN is the Mecca of all startup-wannabes. You're going to get a disproportionate amount of lashback here either for or against all-things-startup.
Like anything, if you're going to post a comment, or a product, expect a lot of dumb negative feedback and ignore the haters. Take the good negative feedback and internalize that, though.
Plus this is area that is crowded with apps and probably not the best place to focus your efforts.
IMO it seems like Peach did everything they possibly could and the execution was in broad strokes excellent, but a messaging app in 2016 is the Hail Mary of Hail Maries.
Firstly, there are no "new users" to messaging. Literally everyone is already using something for messaging - Hangouts, Messenger, Line, WhatsApp, etc etc. Unlike other areas of tech, social messaging is a zero-sum game where every user you gain means someone else loses a user. This is hard environment for any new product with no existing traction.
Messaging is also one of those things that is used so much that it's driven heavily by habitual behavior. Which also means you have to break a user's muscle memory/habits before you can have a shot at keeping them in the long term. The default for a competent messaging app is that people try your app out, think you're cool, and then promptly go back to whatever they were using before, because you haven't broken their old habit and/or haven't formed a new one. 14-day cohort retention is going to be nearly zero in the default case.
Habit-formation within users is really, really, really f'ing hard.
To be honest, it's a lot like a religion. Creating, pouring energy into, praising, and not blaspheming startups is the religion of Silicon Valley. They need more reason and less religion.
Many people have an incentive to write "Startup X launched!"
If Startup X never raised significant funding, no one has an incentive to write "Startup X died."
Max seems like a smart guy to me (and apparently also to Apple, where he's worked for multiple years). I find his comments to be amusing, and writing them is clearly just a fun activity for him, just like posting on hacker news is for us.
I'm not sure why the fact he comments all the time on TechCrunch causes you to stick your fingers in your ears and shout "lalala I can't hear you."
I'm a fan. Keep at it!
Some say it’s dumb, some say it’s great, and a lot say something in between
What do I feel about it? It feels fresh
Mind you, it’s on a massive hype-train right now so take it all with a grain of salt
That doesn't sound like you're not allowed to criticize a startup.
Fresh? What exactly is fresh about it?
Generally I don't bring much of any philosophy into the skepticism approach. Every once and a while though, it does play a role. I'm not really proud of it, but I'll publicly admit that I was so utterly repulsed by the Aurous concept that I did a little happy dance when market forces (i.e. the RIAA) took on Aurous, shut it down fast, and moved on from the dead carcass. Am I happier for its demise? Yep.
Perhaps the point here, which we could explore more, is that startups backed by tons of money typically push relatively unoriginal ideas to the forefront that are simply "marketed better" because of $.
Sometimes if you focus on the wrong thing, you die (and get made fun of). The press coverage the author seems to have such an issue with is famously fickle.
Make an electric car that looks like a toaster and a fish and market it to the general consumer. You die. Make an electric car that looks like a luxury sedan and market it to the top end of the market. You become Tesla.
Obviously, in the latter case he backed up that market selection with world class engineering. The two then get inextricably linked. You have to look past the predilections of the establishment to get there though.
There must be some sort of pro version of the Hype Cycle circulating in the Valley (http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hyp...). "Okay marketeers, we need to begin the 'underdog' portion of our marketing campaign. If that doesn't work, then we may need to engineer a scandal to boost traffic".
"Any publicity is good publicity" is another fallacy I'd like to take a closer look at.
It's a story about the launch of the app, the reactions to it and its course in the app charts.
It doesn't get any much more about "the app itself" -- except if by that you mean he should only be allowed to review the app and/or write about its feature specs, menus and gradients used in the UI...
>There must be some sort of pro version of the Hype Cycle circulating in the Valley. "Okay marketeers, we need to begin the 'underdog' portion of our marketing campaign. If that doesn't work, then we may need to engineer a scandal to boost traffic".
I don't see any iota of proof (or even a hint) that he wrote the story to build hype about the app.
This accusation borders on tin foil conspiracy theories...
Some critics are just sniping at their competition. Many critics are just trying to show off and look smart. Many critics have the crab bucket mentality. A few critics are the kind of people who entertain themselves by pulling the legs off of animals.
That is why we have the word "haters" to describe those kinds of critics. It's a useful word.
Fucking what? Would you say nobody in Hollywood should ever judge a movie script because the place is about making movies? "Well, whoever wrote this script obviously put a lot of effort into it, so here $50 million"
While I'm not "in" SV I do interact with many who do. I think SV it's more "cool" to give honest and direct feedback above anything else.
Though my observations are purely anecdotal as are yours (I'm assuming). But I don't think it's healthy to encourage if you think the app is stupid. Feel free to refrain from commenting at all but let the people who really like / use the app be the cheerleaders.