Why Toys? | Hacker News Reader

Why Toys?

blog.ycombinator.com

468 pointscraigcannon200 comments

One of my favorite pg ideas: "When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think."

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

while working on our startup [1] this is one of the top pg quotes I like. However while talking to our customers we regularly face the "toy" critic as opposed to "feature rich". however approaching it as a toy keeps it simple , though for saas it appears as too simplistic sometimes.

[1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.

Do you have a site you can share? Sounds cool!

We're still in early beta phase - here's a quick showcase for some client here: https://partners.zestoy.com/showcase/home/ and the main website https://www.zestoy.com

Additional question - what is the value prop for clients? Why do they buy your service?

Lego's "Serious Play" is a good example of this kind of marketing done really well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play

Agree, Lego’s Serious Play is a great set of ‘starter toolkits’ for prototyping and design thinking sessions.

Somewhat pricey (as all Lego is), but worth it for many scenarios IMHO.

Yes, those starter kits are great, but the real value in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is the methodology.

As a trained facilitator in LSP methods and materials, I’ve seen the power of this methodology at work. It taps into emotion and gets people thinking with their hands, using more parts of their brains than they would just sitting around talking and writing.

The LSP kits are great because of the “curated” mix of LEGO® bricks they contain, specially chosen to help people build metaphors.

(And actually, if you were to assemble your own set of the same bricks “a la carte” it would be much more expensive, so though they cost a pretty penny, they’re actually a good deal.)

I think it’s about time we turn “feature rich” around and start considering it a criticism rather than a compliment. So many products I’ve loved as a consumer and worked on as a developer were eventually ruined by relentless feature cram and their never being declared “done”.

Interesting. I wanted to suggest an exact opposite.

I'd love to have seen those products of yours. In the alternate universe I live in, almost all the SaaS products I see are toys, never progressing beyond MVP phase.

SaaS can not interoperate. Thus feature-poor SaaS are useless.

Could you please elaborate?

If Google Docs provides featureset A,B,C and Office 365 provides features A,B,D; you can never have both C and D at the same time.

Is this specific to SAAS? Suppose Word 2003 has A,B,D and WordPerfect has A,B,C, can you ever have C and D at the same time?

You have a single filesystem, so maybe you can open the same document in both one after another to work on the parts that need D and the parts that need C. Of course this relies on having a common format, but in the local-apps world we mostly have those, whereas in the SaaS world we don't even have a filesystem to share.

Ooh, good point. Import/export kind of does the same thing, but much worse I guess.

UNIX tools can focus on solving a single problem well because they interoperate between themselves, so you can join tools that solve different problems and make something useful out of it.

SaaS has no such option. It either does every little thing you need, or it doesn't solve the problem.

IFTT, stitch and segment are some companies that try to solve this problem.

They're ultimately limited to which SaaS lets them, which is usually not much. For many, deep interoperability goes against the core objective of "engagement" (i.e. trapping the user in the service for as long as possible).

Interesting. What's an example of deep interoperability you'd to see that isn't currently available?

SaaS products interoperate through APIs.

I have always considered this the great tragedy of APIs. Their promise is so great yet there are few ways of actually working with them outside of explicit vendor integrations that account for the idiosyncracies between most software. Noting that most SaaS is just differing UI interacting with object models, and it's a bummer that we build this way. It's like we are collectively building a rail network, but every single town uses a unique guage of rails.

Ecommerce software is about as close to okay at it as I have seen, but still vendor driven and still full of idiosyncracies. I can at least create a product in a PIM and it pipes through to all the places it needs to go once it is set up.

Agreed in general, but services like IFTTT and Zapier offer a very decent way of integrating otherwise unfriendly APIs, and I think that this will become even more straightforward and common with the rise of conversational interfaces like Alexa

Problem is, most services seem to be designed to interact in the absolute minimum. I use IFTTT myself, but just look at the integrations available! So little of them. 90% of times I have a flow idea, it can't be done with what's available.

(Come to think of it, I have a spare VPS, maybe it's time to try out Huginn.)

RE Alexa, call me a whiner, but "Alexa, ask $BrandApp to XYX" ruins the immersion a lot :(.

Ultimately, the problem is control. On-line services control both your data and how you work with it - from the flow of actions to UI[0]. An interoperable world requires vendors to give up a lot of that control.

[0] - They control the entire experience. As if they were a fucking Disneyland, not just a hammer, from users' point of view.

My point exactly. Yet it's still the dominating model these days.

Do you have any examples of some products you see as missing features? No need for particular names.

It might mean there is room for a new product in their space that can cater to power users or enterprise clients.

In my view of the world "toys" and "MVP" are orthogonal. Imagine an actual toy that is a choking hazard. There are lots on the market, and they even usually say, "choking hazard" on the packaging. The choking hazard is a potential liability that you might have been able to fix with more design work upfront and is hard to fix now that you've made a product.

MVP is a kind of overloaded term because it can mean that it lacks user features, but it can also mean that it contains technical debt that is a potential liability in the future, just like the choking hazard on a toy.

A "toy" application can have a minimum set of user functionality, but be "complete" in terms that it doesn't contain any of that future potential liability. There are some really nice "toy" applications and services that fill a really small niche and do it extremely well, without trying to tackle bigger problems. However, I wouldn't consider them to be MVP because they actually have a considerable amount of design beyond the minimum necessary to get it out the door.

Or tl;dr: "Toys" are uncomplicated, but not necessarily minimal. MVP is generally incomplete and not necessarily uncomplicated (because reducing complexity requires effort).

Given enough time, most applications turn from "feature rich" into "feature bloat."

Feature Rich: Features I use.

Feature Bloat: Features I don't use.

I would say: almost. Features I don’t use, that are just kind of there but don’t get in my way aren’t seen as bloat, only the ones that complicate my workflow in some way. For example, I find Jira bloated, because it has loads of options and menus that I must consider when I want to do something, even though I will never use 90% of them, creating an issue has a huge form to fill in, but I only care about maybe 5 or 6 of the fields. These extra features that I don’t use cause cognitive overhead and therefore I consider them bloat. The feature that doesn’t interfere or cause overhead isn’t considered bloat, even if I never use it.

I think toys have a simple/intuitive/familiar user interface (so kids can use them), are simple to create (to be purchasable for kids), and do something interesting or unexpected i.e. different which is really what makes them potentially valuable.

But, I'm not sure that all children's toys have immense commercial value (e.g. kaleidoscope). I always wonder this question for startup idea success rates: I wonder what the ratio is?

It's a good one.

I think it's also true that It's cool; users love it is valuable regardless of importance and that the internet tends to turn "big" into important, or at least impactful and profitable.

It's cool & users love it is an easier approach to big than "important." I think this explains why toys now turn into serious businesses.

Toys are relative -- the iPhone was not a toy compared to other phones but definitely a toy compared to a personal computer.

We built a stationary bike called Revvo (http://revvo.co) -- which does a lab quality VO2Max test but makes it a whole lot more fun. Not a toy compared to other exercise bikes but definitely a toy compared to a $45k metabolic cart used for lab tests.

Standard Oil actually did start out as a toy. They provided oil to burn in lamps. At the time most people thought that was a somewhat silly gimmick and a fad that would quickly pass. Oil in general was seen as something neat but not essential for years. But just like facebook, many people soon came around to the idea and it took over the world.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible detail, if it is something that interests you.

I wouldn't call lamp oil a toy. The defining feature of a toy is that people use it just for the joy of using it, rather than to solve a problem.

Having an abundance of light at night was a novelty and a luxury in the past. Definitely toy territory in my book.

I bought an LCD monitor in 2003. It was a novelty and a luxury to me at the time...but I bought it to solve the problem of not having space for a 20" CRT on my desk at school. I don't see how something being novel and luxurious necessarily means that it's also a toy.

I never claimed it did. Further, I don't think there is a dichotomy here.

You could have solved your problem in a dozen other ways. You were privileged enough to do it in the way that presumable pleased you most. There is a hint of toyness to it in that respect.

You certainly implied that it did.

> You could have solved your problem in a dozen other ways.

Hmm. And what ways would those be? First, I simplified when I said that "I" bought the monitor. It was a gift, bought for me, that I didn't have particular choice in. Second, I'm unaware of "a dozen" ways to solve the problem of displaying a computer's output. If you'd care to list the ones you're thinking of...

> You certainly implied that it did.

"in my book" is often used to cast a statement as opinion. So something "definitely" being X "in my book" is pretty clearly not meant to be any sort of argument (necessary! sufficient! proof! -- gag me with conversation killers) where I come from.

I don't think there's any good way to define a toy in any hard-and-fast way, so rubbing words like "necessary" on it is just not in play.

In the original discussion, lamp oil was interesting when framed as a toy. The background given was enough for me to think of it as such as part of the thought experiment. I gave a couple of dimensions that I think supported its toyness when some balked.

You could: 1) not have a monitor on your desk 2) use a smaller monitor 3) use a laptop 4) get a bigger desk

Each of these has a number of ways you might achieve them, easily meeting or exceeding the throw-away number I posited.

For example, with (1) you might use a school computer lab. Or you might eschew computer use altogether. Or you might borrow a computer when necessary. Or you might devise an alternate mounting scheme. Or you might get a lap desk, so you need less real-desk surface for other things.

Anyway, we're way off in some boring-ass woods. The woods that kept me from participating here for years.

Good day, human.

This is plainly wrong. Rockefeller started dealing in oil because the unit economics were excellent, and because he recognized that no dominant players had emerged in the market yet, opening it up to vertical & horizontal integration (both of which he executed flawlessly).

Furthermore, asserting that indoor lighting was a toy -- in an age where other light sources were dim, prohibitively expensive, or excessively smoky -- seems mistaken to me.

I don't see how desirable unit economics refutes GP's claim that the initial market was lamp oil.

It doesn't, but the lack of other good sources of indoor lighting refutes the claim that the lamp oil market is a toy.

> refutes the claim that the lamp oil market is a toy.

GP never made that claim. The point is that lamp oil was perceived as a toy before people realized the (blindingly obvious in hindsight) utility for indoor lighting.

What did they use lamp oil for then? I thought lamp oil was always for indoor lighting...

How about this: oil was being given to kids to play with when Rockefeller was getting started.

Yes the economics were excellent. But very few actually wanted it for years. Oil was fun to set on fire, but hadn't found mainstream use yet. Rockefeller created and dominated the market.

Many of Rockefeller's early writings were about his frustrations of oil not being taken seriously. And he definitely agreed with you that it was a mistake to see oil lamps as toys.

This is a bit skimpy on the details. I highly recommend every American adult to read The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. It will change the way you think about the world. It also shows how Rockefeller was able to pivot his business from kerosene lamps, which were on the way to obsolescence, to fuel.

Just curious: why only American adults? (I am Australian)

Well, anyone else can read it of course. Just that the history of America as a superpower and the history of oil are pretty well entwined.

Australians don't read, they wrestle crocodiles while drinking beer.

Americans don't read either, though, they are too busy eating sufficient quantities to double their body fat. (I am American)

Don't stop now! The English are too busy with tea and crumpets, the Irish with folk dancing, the Finns with sliding cars around on slippery roads, and the Norwegians with jumping off mountains in squirrel suits.

Excellent book. And recommended for the fine denizens of Altair IV (both of us) as well.

I'd also very strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History (1994) or the updated Energy and Civilization (2017). These describe history through the lens of energy sources, and the role of energy in that history.

Manfred Weisenbacher takes on much the same story in Sources of Power, which is a more comprehensive, if uneven, book. Excellently researched (and drawing heavily on Smil as well as many, many other sources), but could use some trimming and occasionally verges strongly to the polemical.

As a point of interest, I seem to recall from a documentary I once saw that Rockefeller was the person who invented the pipeline, because he was sick of paying railroads to move his oil around.

Pretty much. There were no long-haul pipelines as we know them prior to the 1860s. Part of that arose from the fact that there was no material particularly suited to pipelines.

Water tended to be transported in viaducts (or occasionally tunnels). Longer runs might be made of clay. Even firing that required tremendous amounts of fuel in a fuel-starved world.

The advent of Bessemer steel, machine tools, railroads (and steel rather than wrought-iron rails, far stronger and less prone to splitting), and mechanical pumps, allowed pipelines to be built.

The first that I'm aware of were deployed along Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania, home of the U.S. petroleum industry. Contemporaneous accounts discuss the development of those pipelines.

Long, interstate pipelines came out of World War II. The U.S. had been shipping oil from Texas to New Jersey via tankers, but German U-boats were sinking these by the hundreds. The U.S. government financed the construction of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines, which remain in use.

I don't know about oil, but I thought airplanes were rich people's silly toys at first? And then WW1 happened.

Another: fireworks were toys (well, not sure if for children at the time, but for entertainment).

The best dichotomy I've heard for this is:

Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]?

Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands).

[Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually building crap - just because you can play with it does not mean it has value.

Good point.

I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all.

Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue.

Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.

It is worth noting that Dropbox took a bundle of business problems that already had been solved in one small community and solved it for a much wider community. Specifically, the problems of "cloud" file storage were being solved by AFS in MIT's Project Athena. So, to argue at Dropbox's founding that it was a toy would require first arguing that businesses didn't have problems that resembled "All the folks working on this class project need to have one accessible and shareable place to store files".

> Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.

That's only from the perspective of the user. From the perspective of businesses using the data for marketing, the actual customers, social networks are definitely not toys.

The marginal cases can be debated, but it's still a useful framework.

Ex. Facebook obviously felt like a toy at the beginning whereas Salesforce has never been a toy.

Was Facebook a toy? It wasn't the first social network, and it was built to solve a problem on campuses for students.

What does it say about me that I'd rather build ice skates than ear muffs?

That you're probably more a designer than a pragmatic engineer.

That you are more interested in disruptive innovations than you are in sustaining innovations.

That you're taking the analogy too literally? Ice skating does sound more fun.

On the contrary you are taking ambicapter too literally; I can only assume they meant they'd prefer building ice skates in the metaphorical sense -- they'd rather build for a new desire, than create a solution for a known problem.

Why do I suspect that the global market for ice skates, which now includes ice skating rinks in many areas that don't get ice, and supports multiple sports, such as Hockey, Curling (not to mention the Olympic level sports), is actually (much) more than ear muffs.

I mean, I was honestly trying to figure out which way you were going with that analogy while reading is, because it seemed to cut against your point.

Perhaps instead of this false dichotomy or business vs toy, we should actually consider supply, demand, reach etc and many the other variables that have proven the test of time that they actually help define future success.

Here's a list of toys I can rattle off the top of my head, let me know whether they are crappy businesses to start if they didn't exist: Movies, Video games, Comic books, Frisbee.

Entertainment is a business.

You don't wear skates while curling? I'm not sure where your analogy is going

The grandparent post isn't making a value judgment, it's just pointing out that the two cases should be approached and marketed differently. (And should avoid deluding yourself into thinking you have ice skates when you actually have something nobody actually wants.)

You're right. I also either didn't read the end of the original comment correctly, or it was changed later. The end of it seems to be making some of the same argument I was trying to, so my comment doesn't make a lot of sense.

Eh, I should know better than to comment when I'm that worked up about something. It's too easy to get tunnel vision. :/

An extreme example would be porn industry.

No benefits but toys are really profitable to be simply let go.

> This trend does not fit with history either. Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys.

This is largely because "inventing a new thing" and "building a massive business from that invention" are more closely linked now than they have been, historically. Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. Boeing postdated the Wright Flyer by a few years, and even then mostly got off the ground due to the World Wars. (And the Wrights actually did try and make a business out of their invention, but that's another story.)

The Apple I was a toy computer designed in 1976. The Apple II was a mass-market personal computer designed in 1977 by the designer of the Apple I. There wasn't a World War nor any obvious military applications for the early Apple Computers, and the inventor who designed them (Woz) just happened to be close friends with someone who was just mercenary enough to try and make a business out of it (Jobs).

The Apple II was not a toy. It was what businesses used to run VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program. Huge productivity gain over doing spreadsheets with a big piece of ruled paper and a calculator.

That was parent's point. Apple I was a toy, and Apple II a serious product.

> Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries.

The first component of what was to become US Steel opened in 1857, only 2 years after the invention of the Bessemer process that made it practical to produce steel in industrial quantities.

Yep. And Rockefeller started refining oil soon after the discovery of subterranean oil.

>The first component of what was to become US Steel opened in 857

I'm such an idiot that I read that and didn't even think it was a typo. I was really impressed that the company had lasted that long, with that belief propped up by the fact that steel itself by far predates the Roman Empire. Sure, the steelmaking process we use now is pretty new, but battles in Ancient China and Rome were fought using steel weapons.

I mean, of course once you invent serious industrial scale processes, you can set up a serious business. But the lag time between "invention of steel" and "invention of the Bessemer process" was a lot bigger than the lag time between "invention of Apple I" and "invention of Apple II".

The rapid development of ICs was greatly influenced by their military applications, there wouldn't have been anything to make an Apple I or II out of without that.

Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company.

Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc.

(And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc).

A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike.

Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up.

hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course.

or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :)

// edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum

(Apologies for the poor formatting; time to brush up on my Markdown!)

> Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company. (...Nintendo, Lego, Minecraft)

I think you are stuck on 'literal' toys, which was not what was meant in the article.

This is a really good post but it is disappointing that nowhere in the post it mentions Chris Dixon's post on this: http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...

Eight years on and I'm not sure that essay, while confident, has been borne out by time.

You could add substance to your comment by listing some things that became big after 2010, and saying whether or not they seemed like toys early on.

One example: Bitcoin (2009, but few had heard of it before 2010), cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I think these support cdixon's claim.

Another: Snapchat (2011) and other ephemeral messaging apps. These certainly seemed like toys.

Beanie Babies looked like toys early on, too.

Just because something found a market doesn't mean it's not still a toy.

How about battery powered quadcopters with camera feeds and remote control? The Parrot AR.Drone was introduced in 2010, the first (AFAICT) consumer-priced drone to offer this kind of functionality. It was just a toy. Today similar low cost drones are used in film and TV production, wind turbine blade inspection, mapping, surveying... Consumer drones have even been weaponized by ISIS with small droppable grenades. Not that the latter is exactly a positive development, but it's not a toy use either.

This reminds me a lot of a chapter in Jesse Schell's awesome book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.[1][2]

He recommends occasionally thinking about a game as a toy.

"The Lens of The Toy: To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/012369...

[2] PDF version (see book page 90 // PDF page 119): http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf

I actually just bought this book and it is arriving Friday. Funny to see the pdf now, but I think in the end this is a case I'll appreciate having a physical copy.

Interesting; I'm surprised to see this comparison made, even though in retrospect (thanks to 'ujeezy for pointing it out), I recognize the PG quote about things "described as a toy".

The funny thing is; they've drawn a mostly different comparison using the same dichotomy ("toy" vs "serious") that I use for occasional rants on this site. I say mostly different, because here's the intersection:

If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user.

What I loathe about current startups and SaaS companies is that they seemingly can't - or don't want to - progress past the stage of a toy. I agree that when I see a random toy on the net, I'll have a positive reaction of curiosity. But then, at some point, I'll have an actual thing I want to get done efficiently. Suddenly, the toy becomes borderline useless, because it either can't help me with the task at all, or the help is very weak.

What I mean is: if you're trying to show that something entirely new is possible, by all means, make it a pretty little toy. But when your site is full of advertising copy around "helping users" and "making world (of niche thing X) a better place", then for the love of $deity, make your product functional and efficient.

The reality is, most SaaS startups seem to be toys in that sense, to the point (or because of) it infected the modern UX trends! UX people will tell you about uncluttering, removing functionality, "your user doesn't need that", "this is confusing", "put this in 'advanced options'", "actually, 'options' are confusing, drop it entirely"... For example, observe how, over the years, Google dumbed down its products from actual tools to pretty Material Design toys with a fraction of original functionality. And then people treat Google as role model...

So yeah, startup founders: don't treat yourself seriously, but please, try to actually work on the value you're saying you're providing to your users.

</rant>

This brings me back to a recent conversation on advertising not being informational.

If the makers of $tool also said what their greatest deficiencies were then buyers would be much more able to decide. Instead they're motivated to hide their flaws and make the sale, hoping -- if it's profitable to do so -- to fix those errors/flaws/shortcomings later.

In a slightly related note it grieved me to see the presenters/producers of the SpaceX launch hide the partial failure of landing the core (I swear you can see one of them set up to tell us, then they get a message in their ear). I thought it was a more progressive endeavour - targeting the end goal rather than media gloss.

RE SpaceX, I agree. You could clearly see that the presenters got the info that the center core landing failed, and they were just about to tell so. I understand the rationale behind that decision - the 'media gloss' is still important to the success of their core goal - but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

For me one example of a toy that became a tool after a few design/development iterations is Postman. It started out as a basic browser extension that let a person make HTTP requests to an API endpoint and displayed the JSON/XML output for you in a pretty formatted result section.

Then after a few iterations it has become a very useful and capable tool for API exploration, testing, and design.

They key for me is to have a tool which hides its advanced features behind a sliding door, where you can reach for the complex feature when needed, but not be bothered by it when you don’t.

That's the approach I like. Advanced features don't have to clutter the interface. They can be hidden; they just have to exist, and be discoverable.

Also, by "features" I don't even mean new things to do - ones improving ergonomics are also important. For instance, having every action in GUI also exposed as a discoverable keyboard shortcut goes a long way towards making life easier for people who have to do lots of work in an application. A trivial thing, but seemingly forgotten in the era of "web browser as a desktop".

I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand?

It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-localized, and offering its own personality and levity.

It seems to me like the founders of the future are coding games today.

> What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand?

Likely Wordpress or Wix... as unfortunate as that is the more interesting question is what form the lemonade will take.

Many businesses were launched from Wordpress, and I know more than a few bespoke technology products where the MVP was Wordpress with a few plugins. I don't think you're too far off-base here.

has a lemonade stand ever evolved into serious business? I am of the impression they get abandoned

No, but the lemonade stand _operator_ has evolved into a serious entrepreneur. OP was trying to identify business ideas that take very little when it comes to skill and capital.

Actual lemonade stands (run by children)? They're usually shutdown by the police, at least in the U.S. [Tho my sources severely skew my sample so as to entirely neglect counterexamples.]

Metaphorical lemonade stands are almost always abandoned too. But that seems obviously fine anyways.

I think "usually" is an exaggeration. I've seen plenty of lemonade stands and I've never seen one shut down by police. I've seen news stories about it happening, but the fact that it makes national headlines says something about how rare it is: https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/lemonade-stand-shut-...

Yes, I think you're very likely correct.

> Actual lemonade stands (run by children)? They're usually shutdown by the police, at least in the U.S.

I can't tell if you're joking or just completely distorted by media coverage. I ran lemonade stands throughout my childhood and consistently see them run by children today.

It was both mostly joking and because of distorted media coverage. I can't remember seeing one tho anytime recently.

I think the simple realtime competitive "io games" that cloud computing, nodeJS, SVG / Canvas have allowed to explode in recent history are probably one playground for fledgling entrepreneurs.

Look for things that don't scale. At all.

A lemonade stand makes sense because it captures people who want lemonade now, but not enough to get in a car and drive to the closest store. In practice, no single shop can scale itself to address this time/location limitation[0].

Similarly, an "e-Lemonade stand" has to be something that just can't scale beyond local level. Anything that a single entity could do for customers from around the country, or around the world, is out of the picture. So such "lemonade stand" would have to be something either with strong time/location constraints, or something unique to a very specific subgroup of people, that just can't be trivially copied to a different subgroup.

[0] - Except people putting out vending machines; this is real life, there are exceptions to every heuristic.

Isn't this generally building a no-art mobile game? Something like 2048 which doesn't require hiring an artist. Actual amount of money to be made, if any, is too small for larger shops to make it worth their engineering time.

Yeah, that seems to work too.

This nicely highlights one of the huge distinctions between consumer startups and enterprise startups, and perhaps provides some reasoning behind why these two types of startups are run differently and have different results in the market.

If I'm at an enterprise startup, ideally we've identified a business problem, and created a widget to address it. This falls very much in to the tool category, and anything I do to make it 'fun' is of marginal value.

Unfortunately, in the Valley I see a lot of devs who want to work on the toys because they're fun, which means the pool of talent for the 'serious' startups is that much smaller. This is too bad, because in my experience the likelihood of having any startup equity attain significant value is much better in the enterprise startup world.

Closely related is the adage that great ideas often look like bad ones. I think it's worth thinking about all these nuggets of wisdom in terms of efficient markets:

Given that there are so many entrepreneurs building startups the best sounding ideas are already taken and what's left are the bad and seemingly bad ones. The market-economy is very good at picking low-hanging fruit. If you dropped a $20 bill in Grand Central station chances are it'll be taken in minutes, while if you dropped it in a random alley somewhere, you can probably go back the next day and find it.

So for you to find a good idea that the market hasn't picked up yet it needs to be somehow hidden in plain sight -- a crumbled $20 bill that looks like a piece of garbage.

A similar concept that I've been thinking a lot about in the context of my startup is a "scaling bottleneck". For you to get big and service everybody you have to first service a demographic that is often thought of as a dead-end in terms of making money. Say kids, or a hobbyists in a certain field. I think the Facebook example applies here too: it was hard to see how this toy could scale beyond college students. Worded as a statement about efficient markets: good ideas for startups that will initially service and grow on a potentially non-monetizable demographic will not attract entrepreneurs and therefore will be available for ones that have that insight.

I think Tesla is a great example of toy-first strategy. The roadster is comically niche. But: the electric drive train is super torquey so makes a great sports car, it's not an every day car so the lack of charging infrastructure is less critical, nor would the inevitable reliability problems dissuade that use, quite a few investors were Roadster owners first.

I remember when the first iphone was released in 2007. I had several friends working at Blackberry at the time and they were dismissive of the iphone as merely a "toy". I always quiped in response "who doesn't love toys?".

Had Blackberry taken the threat of the iphone more seriously, the smartphone market would look very different.

I think it’s way more complex than that. Blackberry made attempts at touch screens but they were all crappy.

Some engineers might have been dismissive, but as a company I think it tried its best to live in the future. It just didn’t have the insight to take the right tradeoffs with the more efficient tech.

Japanese phone makers had the same issue. As early as 2005 some maker tried to have touch screens, some with really innovative interfaces to compensate for the technology, but it stayed niche devices.

I don’t think anyone really dismissed touch interfaces as non threatening. It was just damn hard to have anything that was remotely useful.

i'd love to see more examples of SMB software that started either as "toys" or with "toy-like" features. the only one i can think of off hand is wufoo, but im sure there are others

im working on a product that (hopefully) will address an important need, but developing the solution to that need will require pretty robust software and a services component that will take some time. to get users excited about going on that journey id like to help them have some fun and get their imagination stirring. they are used to crappy dry software and have tough jobs, so lightening their day a bit and inspiring them about the future would make them happy

that kind of gamification does not alter the nature of your product though. it s still some kind of tool and not something people use almost exclusively for fun/leisure

Let's not forget perhaps the biggest toy to turn serious business in the past century or so: the microcomputer itself. Without which there wouldn't even be a Facebook, or a Y Combinator.

Pretty expensive to call it a toy. The Altair 8800 was $2000 in current dollars for the kit, $3000 assembled. The Apple II would be $5K now, the IBM PC $8K.

It strikes me that SW is a key reason for any shift toward a toy-first mentality. Most of the arguments in the article make sense when a (SW) product can be rapidly iterated. Physical products likely tend to be harder to start too toyish... well, except for when they are toys.

The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins. While these things are important in the long run, focusing on them too early injects an impossible set of things for an early startup to do.

How is this not in direct contradiction to http://paulgraham.com/aord.html?

Can somebody shed some light on this? I don't necessarily disagree with Aaron but its tough to make any sense of it when one YC person tells you one thing and another YC person tells you pretty much the exact the opposite.

One of the fun things about advice is that you'll find things that seem in direct opposition, even from people who generally agree.

In this case, though, context is critical. PG's point here is around startups that have been around for a while, on which people are working full time, that are meant to be businesses. I'm trying to get at the part that comes before that stage.

In this case, the additional context I'd look for would be around what the creator/founder is trying to do and how successful they've been at doing that.

From the PG page you link:

> It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.

There's a point at which you have to worry about profitability, and that point can be earlier than you think, but at the same time it's not something you should be doing right at the start.

Depending on the definition of the word startup, most (if not all) successful open source communities started off as a toy. The Ethereum foundation is a recent example of this.

I also personally think that "toys" are great for building and sharpening one's skills, much like Lego in the real world. This can be everything from you trying to "sell" your toy so other kids will come play with it, all the way up to learning how to glue software components together and make it work. Some technical toy projects have steep learning curves, and as an engineer myself, I see it as an opportunity to learn things I otherwise wouldn't working on a "serious project".

His example of a company that's built from a toy is Facebook. His example of companies that aren't are all enterprise.

A simpler explanation of the value of a toy is just that being "fun" matters much more for consumer products.

I have been trying to spin up projects for years since my early teens and the best project I've have had traction on so far is my open source Tetris Attack-like clone.

I think it has come the farthest then any of my previous projects because I didn't take it seriously which made the barrier to entry for contributors easy since I set my standards very low.

I'd normally try to build something to scale with a monetization plan from day one, and I was so burned out on failed projects I thought I'd just work on something I wanted to do, without care of generating money. I figured if I got one of my serious for cash projects going it would free up time for such a project but I got tired waiting.

The seriousness has scaled with the project. Some team members stick around, some sunset, but this is fine because my project keeps attracting people who are suited for the current stage.

Will my project go from toy to business? I don't care. I'll just ride the project for as long as I can, and its possible I will sunset from my project where people better than me will take it somewhere I can't.

https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop

"The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins."

This is of course only true if you're playing the Silicon Valley VC game, a lot of healthy businesses has been built by focusing hard on turning profit early. For an example from recent news, look at IKEA.

Building toys probably requires the VC game. Ikea was never a toy.

Huh; I was thinking exactly the opposite, i.e. every cool new project with but a GitHub repo to its name is a 'toy'.

Bitcoin is a good example of a toy. It didn't really solve an immediate problem at the time.

It still doesn't. But I'll grant it's turning out to be tech's single best attempt at hastening the climate change and cooking us all on this planet.

Bitcoin gives us a way to transfer value which is censorship-resistant. That is BIG.

Which isn't really "an immediate problem" right now for anyone. Also, the "solution" isn't particularly good.

Or it's more an "an immediate problem" for people doing illegal stuff that it should be a problem for.

Toy analogy mostly makes sense for online media where attention is valuable. If a “toy” is loved/used by tons of people, then it has their attention, and this attention can be monetized. Most likely through the usual advertising surface that it presents.

Also the usual startup lifecycle: shinier toy -> faster user acqusition -> your chances of getting acquihired increase.

While interesting, I felt the essay didn't make a distinction on end users who eventually decides if the toy product would succeed or not. In an enterprise world, the end users are not looking for fun and often they want solutions to boring problems solved in a boring way (any fun way to solve might come across as being not serious). I can see in a consumer play where the end users are looking for fun, such toy projects could become a viable business when you acquire lot of customers (Facebook for example).

Even so, toy projects are a great negative test (does anyone care?). Even when built for fun, if there are no takers, it's time to quit.

Toys are the stuff of life. What's the point of living if you're not having fun?

A lot of "serious" things started out as toys. They just became ubiquitous and expected. The fabric of society becoming the fabric of reality. Especially if you had strong social needs.

Religions for example started out as stories. philosophy itself is considered by some people to be toyish.

Serious things often involve money. That their end use case is to eventually buy some sort of toy is often forgotten. Only with the positive and the negative electrode do Sparks fly.

"There are plenty of mathematicians and engineers who write great papers. There are fewer of them who, like Shannon, are also jugglers, unicyclists, gadgeteers, first-rate chess players, codebreakers, expert stock-pickers, and amateur poets."

https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shan...

> Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys.

Arguably, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft all started out as toy companies. I don't buy the basic premise of this article. How a company starts out often has very little to do with how it ends up. But, I suppose the real goal here is to whip the incubator into line.

My favorite example for this is Lego.

It started as a small startup making toys and it became a multi-billion, multi national business and one of the worlds most loveable brands.

It can happen to you too!

Q.E.D.

There is a book about this that they don't seem to mention:

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30798471-wonderland

It's not bad. It pushes the hypothesis to breaking point but there is something in the idea.

Ironically, it's overloaded.

Text only, cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QrUx_pA...

Huh. Guess you guys don't understand the word 'Ironically'.

Irony: "happening in a way contrary to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this."

The site is a ycombinator.com site, and ycombinator is all about helping tech startups, yet the site was offline due to too much traffic.

Hence, the irony.

Pretty tired of startupland using this idea as a shibboleth. Eventually, you're going to have to answer the charge of "Silicon Valley is just building a bunch of useless bullshit" with something that actually is not. Moving money from one industry to another doesn't count.

Maybe because entrepreneurship is not the path to solving humanity's pressing problems? For many USians, health care is a pressing issue but maybe the best chance at improvement is through "EU-style" socialized medicine? My main problem is being afraid to lose my job and therefore my home -- could this be solved by a combination of basic income, better training schemes, and a general reduction in working hours? Other than that, my main issues are noise and pollution -- I guess cleaner and quieter cars would help but fewer cars would be a lot better. How do you make a profitable company around that?

http://archive.is/ivZCA

This is funny, because of the half dozen or so startups that I tried to get off the ground, the couple of random projects where I actually made some money were 100% toys that I made just for fun with no intention of monetizing at first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

I think theres a typo. "A startup’s early and heavily engaged users are it’s only real bse of strength and chance for growth."

Should it be 'base'?

and its not it's.

It might be helpful to have a case study of a "toy company" that became a "real company." I'd certainly love to read that.

:-D I'm working on Magnus-effect flying machines right now, starting with toys, for pretty much the reasons in this article.

Cute title but this is actually just an extension of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”.

Facebook had TIME to be a toy because Mark Zuckerberg had a rich family, and plenty of skills to get a job if it didn’t work out.

“Making a toy” is only possible with the resources of money and time.

People who need to make money need to focus earlier on making money, which stunts growth in the long run.

This is true not only for startups but for individuals, and in nature as a whole.

It often feels like 99% of “startup wisdom” comes down to “have a rich family that supported you emotionally and then paid for your college, and then let you start a company at their house for free”

YC should give a talk at some underprivileged schools in crime-ridden areas to tell people to “just make toys for like 9 years guys”

As much as I disagree with his thesis here, the entire point of it is that YC wants to and does fund toy companies. So they're trying to solve the exact problem you're railing against.

I think OP has a point. MZ was comfortable enough leaving school for a semester, and that too after being put on academic probation for violating serious codes of ethics. Despite all that, he still managed a $500k seed investment from Peter Thiel. Students who grow up in poverty and put the work in to get into college, let alone a prestigious one like Harvard, are usually fighting to do everything right just to make it through, and many don't because they can't make financial commitments (and yes, despite tons of scholarship money) or personal commitments with family.

People like Mark always had the security of their family's relative wealth and security on top of their general status in society. That's not a luxury afforded to most, and certainly not those from low-income backgrounds.

I think the point is only 'locally' right. If you consider a long enough period of time, effectively no one has ever been able to afford the luxury of 'building a toy'.

And yet, at least some people do now have that luxury. It certainly isn't impossible for lots and lots of people to afford some degree of something pretty similar tho.

What you're saying is partly true, but what do you think YC should do?

To solve inequality?? I don’t think that’s the business YC is in.

But we can do a lot. We can drastically reduce the potential financial rewards for extracting value from millions of people.

We can set a max income of $300k per person and the rest goes to elevating the poor.

It would pretty much destroy the VC industry though.

I don't understand why are you complaining they aren't solving inequality, then.

Let's rephrase that: it would destroy capitalism.

Somehow I don't think you'd have a problem with that.

I don't know if maybe you think capitalism is the only reason people don't just lie in bed all day, but theory has been soundly disproven.

The theory that non-capitalist societies can have thriving long-lasting economies that produce new innovations and lift their people up is pretty questionable so far.

I can't think of a single example where there's not at least a core nugget of capitalist incentives driving things.

Sure, let's layer on some socialist policies, I'm all in favor of turning that dial quite a bit further, but that's turning a dial, not blowing up the whole machine because it's not working quite as well as we'd like it to.

Fine by me

What would be a good way of promoting social / socialist policies in today's current environment? Also, while the idea of an earning cap does not seem to grab you, what about enforcing a cap on a given individual's ecological footprint?

Remember being kids and going to the amusement park with your friends? They had those booths where you could win a cool price, if you successfully hit the bullseye.

The middle-class kids had the pocket money to try a few times, usually in the games which seemed the best match for their skills. The rich kids went around and picked the booth with the coolest prices, then simply tried again until they won the price they wanted, or got bored. The poor kids were manning the booths, helping their parents sell popcorn and keep the show running.

Things haven't changed much as we've grown up. If you come from a wealthy background, you can keep on trying seed ideas until you find traction. With a more middle-class background, you can put in a small number of attempts, spread between long stretches of saving more money. If you're poor, you'll never have the ability to even try.

Yes. And clubs like YC reward those who have had extra chances for their whole lives. While the lower-class kids help their parents, the better-off kids are getting tutoring, music classes, and expensive toys to grow their skills and do better later on.

> Things haven't changed much as we've grown up. If you come from a wealthy background, you can keep on trying seed ideas until you find traction. With a more middle-class background, you can put in a small number of attempts, spread between long stretches of saving more money. If you're poor, you'll never have the ability to even try.

This is pretty much correct (though I don't think lower than middle class = poor, but I digress). Some people have better opportunities growing up. Some people can stay in mummy and daddys comfortable house for free while they try and make it big with a startup.

Are you implying that the rest of us shouldn't even bother trying? I really don't want to use "not growing up as rich as mark zuckerburg" as an excuse.

But, on a long enough time horizon – at least more than several decades anyways – it's not true that the poor have gotten poorer.

It's not even obvious that the rich today are relatively wealthier than in the past because, e.g. there's no obvious way to compare having running water and owning an iPhone to being the highest status person in your area and owning lots of slaves.

> It often feels like 99% of “startup wisdom” comes down to “have a rich family that supported you emotionally and then paid for your college, and then let you start a company at their house for free”

Or perhaps more to the point, "the best ideas to try are the ones you need investment to try, and oh hey that's what we do here. Don't go building a business that's profitable from the start, where YC can't own part of it. All that internal pressure to make money early on isn't good for you; what you want is external pressure to make LOTS of money later on, assuming your social network for pigs didn't fail."

HN should ban the adjective "cute" from all posts. Does using this adjective make you feel superior?

Also, it's kinda amazing how this issue gets brought up so many times on HN and is proven to be false (there are tons of examples where extremely successful entrepreneurs came from poor upbringing, and in many cases the bad condition was what motivated them to push further) and yet you keep seeing the same argument over and over. For gods sake there are even people who used to serve in prison make a great business that you will never be able to create in your whole life if you keep thinking that way.

Sure, it would be great if the world was more fair. But it's not.

You can either bitch about it on HN like this like a sour social justice warrior, Or, you could go do something.

Bitching and doing something are not mutually exclusive activities.

Some successful people being from poor upbringings does not make it commonplace.

If your claims were true, by definition we would not have inequality.

Except that your narrative is exactly trying to paint it as "only rich people get to succeed", which will lead to the "not rich" to give up trying, which will only make things worse.

You probably think you're doing justice to the world, but you're actually doing the opposite.

The real successful people succeed DESPITE their perils and in many cases BECAUSE OF their perils, and these people should be encouraged to pour all their passion into whatever they want to achieve and succeed. Instead I see people like you always saying "doesn't matter how hard you try, the world is fucked up because only the rich get richer, so don't tell people to work hard, it's just exploitation". That probably makes you feel better about being "woke", but your argument does nothing but convincing people to give up.

These people who come from bad background, when they do succeed, they they give back to the alienated community they came from. These are the people who actually make progress with inequality, not some guy on HN and Medium.com bitching about how the world is unfair and all the successful companies are shit because of that.

Your narrative only gives people excuse to complain and get distracted from actually building valuable things.

Like I said, the world IS unfair, and nothing will stop it from being unfair for unforeseeable future. The most efficient way to make sure we get out of this situation is to encourage the alienated people to succeed instead of getting them into "me vs. you" mindset, because that mindset is a loser mindset which only leads to wannabe activism, instead of actually creating something valuable.

If you want to prove me wrong, just tell me a single successful person who built a valuable business or product, who spent most of their time playing gender/sex/income/inequality/whatever activist. Unless your business itself is a consulting business to sell to these classes, I have never seen one.

Sure, some people have the opportunity/time/money to run an unprofitable startup for awhile and some people don't. Wealthy people can try again when their first idea doesn't take off. They also generally don't have to sell as much equity (especially in the early stages) as a middle-class person would.

Still, starting businesses is something that people (who have at least some amount of free time and spare money) do, and it's usually desirable for those involved that they succeed rather than fail. Talking about startup strategy is a useful endeavor for anyone interested in such things, and that isn't exclusively wealthy people. Plenty of rich people try to start businesses that fail, and many don't have any interest in running a startup.

I wish there were more opportunities for people who aren't from at least middle-class backgrounds to succeed in these kinds of things, but unfortunately that's not how society is currently structured. I think wider access to healthcare, education, food, and affordable housing would help.

I've heard the toy analogy with the iPhone or Facebook before. When you look at the front page of YC, most of the successful companies are either 1) Enterprise (Dropbox) or 2) Consumer Facing (Instacart, Airbnb, etc.)

It's actually quite rare, Aaron, that they end up like Twitch or Reddit but I get your point.

the ability to build something lasting

Anyone can elaborate on that?

Typo: 'The first is thing that goes wrong'

Spelling mistake: "real bse of"

I call bullshit. The economy has run on toys ever since we figured out how to grow food with machines.

I don't quite agree with this analogy.

This blog seems to be written by someone who had a deadline to meet.

Why proofread?

Toys are on demand because people have become more childish in a way. Avoiding responsibility, seeking protection, hiding behind the groupthink, having more time to engage in juvenile/schoolyard behavior. That is not considered in the article.

Looks like you didn't get pass the title.

"Unless you are doing cutting-edge research in your daily job, you are not much different from those indies working on "superficial crap", apart from the fact that being "part of a company" gives you the illusion that it's more legitimate. Was google search or skype superficial and trivial? They started as programmer toys. The point of the article is that a programmer can start with $0 and build the whole product."

You, 6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202808#3203672

"Show HN: A cryptocurrency portfolio simulator game"

You, 28 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122873

This is not the sense of the word "toy" that the article discusses about. He brings up facebook as a primary example of a toy project, not in the sense that it was fun for the programmer (aren't they all?) but in the sense that it was fun for the end user, not serious business. Google for example was not trying to be fun from the get-go, maybe skype was, i m not sure. Facebook is a tool that brings adults back to high school, with all the ensuing drama of the glass house that schools are. In that sense it was a toy, even though from the get-go it pretended to be the more serious counterpart to myspace (look, real names!). The article also implies that facebook somehow turned more serious after growth, which is simply not truth, the sillyness has just moved from pokes to the collective comment cringe.

now thanks for digging my ancient comments , but it's obvious that i meant "programmer's toys", in the sense of a fun project back then. Also my crypto simulator game is indeed a toy in both senses, its a fun side project that a few people found fun to try.

Amazing quotes. You're a gifted commenter.

Many large tech businesses start out as "toys" because its easier to build a new technology to pursue something trivial than something essential. That's just how development works.

Hobbies will pay more for something that might be a novelty than an improvement in efficiency.

Tesla started with Luxury cars for the same reason, and those cars could be considered "toys" of a certain type.

The next Microsoft or Google could very well be developing a "candy crush" style game in VR right now, because that is the market that pays for experimentation.

VRChat is just a toy right now, but could become the gold standard for online interaction by the next decade.

There is also the very real danger of investing in things just because they look toyish in an attempt to follow the pattern. it doesnt always pay out.

I'm curious. Why do you believe those statements to be true? Looking back through history there is a constant pattern of each generation decrying the immaturity of the generations that follow it. Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia, or the same mistake was being made again and again in drawing that conclusion. How do you know your conclusion isn't due to the same mistake?

> Either maturity has been on a constant decline for millennia

personal responsibility has been declining with the aid of comforting technology and it has led to the constant extension of state goverment reach. it's very possible the complaints are valid, and that's simply how history advances.

I'd be interested in citations saying personal responsibility has declined. More likely that your exposure to everyone else's responsibility has increased.

We 'd need a personalresponsibilitymeter for that. However we can consider trends, such as the use of death penalty only for heinous crimes, its abolition in most of the world, and constant increases in government welfare.

Are you really equating the abolishment of the death penalty with a decline in personal responsibility?

But... you are the one asserting there is a decline in personal responsibility. How are you asserting that?

There's a third possibility: The definition of maturity is constantly shifting over generations. Each new generation is not "less mature" than the previous, but it's not an illusion either. There really is a change in the mindset of what it means to be an adult, it's just not a strict one-dimensional scale.

I'd be surprised if we are truly more childish than historical periods. Indeed, just going off of naive views of life expectancy, we used to spend more of our living time as children.

Now, leisure time has certainly increased. To an extent. We now have to spend far less time preparing food/clothing/etc. At least, for the average person. Upper classed people probably had more leisure time in the past, since they had other people to do this work for them.

I saw a number recently on how much less time people spend doing laundry. It is impressive.

> we used to spend more of our living time as children.

not really, children used to work as soon as they were able to, agriculture or industry from very young ages and get married young. People marry a lot later now. IF for example we assume that ppl married at 18 when life expectancy was 60, and at 32 when life expectancy is 80, they spend a larger fraction of their life unmarried.

Working age is different than child age. Even today. My point was more on the description "childish." There are childish ways of acting that persist even in work for folks. The way my children "clean" their room, for example, is a lot less deliberate and effective than how I would do it.

Which is really missing my main point. The leisure time aspect is much more relevant.

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