Ten years ago today, I had the idea for an app I thought was interesting
threadreaderapp.com
threadreaderapp.com
... if your rent/insurance etc. is magically paid for you by a fairy for the whole duration of your startup's early stage. Easy! If you don't get the lesson, read it again: You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a little money.
People seem to dismiss this factor too easily and assume that anyone can become an entrepreneur the moment they decide to become an entrepreneur. No, it's not that easy for the majority of people.
If, on the other hand, you share a cheap apartment, have parents or a partner who can support you, and are willing to skip the expensive vacation, you might get pretty far with little money.
I think that's the reason why so many startups are started by people just out of college -- they're used to a modest lifestyle, and they usually don't have a problem being dependent on someone.
It's amazing how quickly people think it's impossible to live on less money after a few years of having a regular job.
My personal experience coming from a low income family, i managed to pull off 16k i savings by 21. Individual experience is obviously a low sample size, but I know it’s a possibility.
Sacrifices have to be made to achieve anything. In Spain we say "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs".
Most people not doing remote jobs will also command a much lower income in the cheaper country negating any benefit.
Most people don't have so much in savings that they can just live off their savings for long even if its in a foreign country.
Move somewhere cheaper is just nonsensical advice for 99% of people.
And I don't disagree with the statement "You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a little money.", but I think it's missing an asterisk. (always exceptions though)
Remember that the median household income is 58k meaning half are making less than that.
This includes a LOT of people making 58k in expensive areas where jobs are concentrated and rent is high. A Family of 4 would in 2018 be paying about 10k for health insurance 5k for food 20k for rent 10k in taxes.
A lot of people don't have much savings not because they have expensive hobbies but because they can't afford to save.
For example, we moved in with my parents for some time when our first kid was born to save money on rent. Obviously that specific solution won't work for everyone, but I think that most times there's a way to make it work if you really want too.
I think it's hard to make sure your kids have a good environment conducive to doing well in school, or preparing for college, if they are also forced to make large living arrangement changes which may also change or eliminate good times and locations to study. I think there's a large difference between attempting that so the kids go from poverty to non-poverty (parents doing night school, etc) and parents wanting to go from middle class to upper/upper middle class by running their own business.
Putting your children in what is effectively poverty for a few years to gamble for wealth is what's happening. Sometimes. That's worth it, but sometimes it isn't.
But if you feel that reducing your spending means living in poverty, then maybe it's not for you, and you really need to leave entrepreneurship to other people.
I think at the point you can't afford to house yourself because your income has been reduced or reallocated so you need to live with relatives, you're in poverty, whether you want to think of yourself that way or not.
> then maybe it's not for you, and you really need to leave entrepreneurship to other people.
There are other ways to go about it, such as doing it in addition to a regular job. It's not always possible, and the type of business you want to start might not be amenable to this, and it does put a lot of strain on the individual, but it is another valid path. It's the one I've been taking for the last nine months.
If wealth is _all_ you want, you don't need to (and probably shouldn't) start a business to get it.
1. Instant Messaging Apps work for photos and contacts, but it's stupid that you need to transfer things via cloud (makes everything hellish slow when the network isn't fast)
2. Airdrop works only between Apple Devices, and when the stars are aligned just right. Other devices might appear, or they might not. If it works, it's fast.
3. USB drives are still the easiest way to share anything between computers. (SMB / AFS / NFS / SCP / rsync are all annoying to set up and always seem to fail for hard to debug reasons)
I think the opportunity for something like Bump is still there, but it seems that most people just don't care enough about the inconvenience....
I don't see how the act of physically bumping phones together to share content adds any value at all.
It's disturbing that the founder would then go on and write an article about the whole experience. This represents everything that's wrong with startup accelerators.
Not sure why you're picking on the accelerators.
I can guarantee 100% that if Bump was not associated with Y Combinator, they would not have been mentioned by Apple. It has more to do with business connections and network effects than actual usefulness to the consumer.
>> Not sure why you're picking on the accelerators.
Because often they create hype around products which aren't actually useful. In doing so, they take attention and funding away from other products that are actually useful.
Is there a libre alternative?
I would also prefer a libre alternative, but I could never find one. Some file managers have transfer, but none use Wifi direct or provide a simple way to connect, from what I've tried.
It is honest, but the developer is the one who put the "annoying" ads in in the first place.
That feels like a real slap in the face.
It does still suck, and once every few years I feel that. But that's a problem. Solving a minor, "kinda" pain point that people experience once in a while isn't that big of a win. I'm sure that other people want to do this more often than I do, but I'm also sure that this case is a small subset of the need to share stuff with others generally. I.e., you're always needing to share stuff, with people in Boston, LA, or Singapore, or your manager on another floor of the building, or wherever. You know how to do that. So while it seems silly that you can't share something more easily with someone sitting across the table from you, the methods you already use do work.
- receiving appointment info at a doctor's office (in lieu of a physical appointment card)
- exchanging links/addresses/numbers with strangers in any kind of conversational interaction ("call this number", "go to this address", "here's a brochure" etc.) without divulging personal identifiers
Phone-to-phone, anonymous, exchange-and-forget type interactions. Can use bluetooth, wifi, or data connections (or even just qrcodes). I've always thought that there would be usefulness for something like this (key being simplicity and anonymity).
Imagine all the things we can do with these new iphones, and so cheaply too! -> no that world didn't happen -> working for the BIG 4.
[...] “Let me tell you what the worst thing would be. The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year. So far, they only lost one.”
[...] All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.
No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush by Gideon Lewis-Kraus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902
- I agree with the notion but I don’t think it’s only because it’s cheap. It’s also about speed. Some projects take ages at large companies no matter how much you throw at them
- that’s the reason they havin PMF before you get funding is key. Show the models works and then get money for scaling the business
- I imagine getting VC money for a moonshot is great though when you don’t need to get rich anymore. See Musk
I believe one thing that really kills (software) projects is throwing too much resources (people) at them too soon in the anticipation of growth and success.
Cure cancer? Maybe. Build a cute app? No thanks
He was never going to work in a biochem wetlab to cure cancer. I feel safe saying he would have gone into investment banking or management consulting, prestigious jobs with high pay. Where people also regularly pass out from working long hours and don't take holidays.
Everyone is claiming credit for Google Photos it seems!
Like a lot of Google products, Photos has a lot of forebears. Picasa was one of them, as was Google+ (IIRC, the Picasa team was folded into Google+ when Larry refocused the company on Social in 2011). Sounds like Bump was also aquihired into it, and I think there was also a lot of cross-pollination between Image Search, Research, and Google Photos around some of the search & content recognition features.
You'll get notifications telling you that you had an important event a year ago and can see the most relevant photo from that day.
It creates then and now photos, so I can see how my kids have changed from exactly a year or exactly five years ago.
It automatically shares my photos of the kids with my wife.
All this happens without any interaction other than snapping photos freely. For a busy parent, this can't be understated.
Compared to Facebook, I don't have to put up with the noise. And, it only shares with a very limited set of people.
Of course "it" does now know my kids'names. It's pretty amazing and scary to see how it knows my infant daughter's face is the same one as she has four years later. I'm not sure I would see the similarly if she weren't my own.
Lightweight interactions with powerful AI and massive processing power behind it makes for an incredible app. The reviews are not lying.
Almost all features in Google Photos for the first 1.5 years of its existence already existed in Google+. Further, the infrastructure that the Google+ team created runs a very high percentage of Google servers today (excluding Search), and ships in a lot of Android and iOS apps by Google. For insiders, I am referring to Boq, BoqWeb, Wiz, Tiktok, and Service Registry.
This was an email chain in October 2008? The iPhone had only been out for a little over a year, the official SDK for 8 months, and the store for 3 months.
The iPhone SDK was very simple to pick up with that background because it was basically a simplified AppKit where you get a single tiny window instance.
Some of those considerations are interface design on a much smaller screen, syncing, dealing with a semi connected state, much more resource constrained hardware (especially in 2008), a much more restrictive permission system, etc.
I worked with a startup for a while on a couple variations of this problem, and it's very much a classic chicken and egg problem. The angle that I was a bit more intrigued with taking was not about 'friends', and more just about the geo part. In other words, having your pics be available publicly by geo info. This conflicted a lot with the use cases of "share party pics with family/friends", but it seems there's dozens of ways to do that (facebook has a whole separate dedicated app that, to this day, few people I know knows about, but they all use facebook).
Airdrop is the kind of tool that follows Metcalfe's law (with "network" being "people who can Airdrop to each other"). In places where Android is the dominant market player, you'll have little luck trying to use Airdrop to exchange data with other people. This is not dissing Airdrop, just calling out that there's a huge market segment that still has this problem.
all your pics would go to others, and all the pics from others would go to you. (think concerts/events)
If multiple bumps happen at the same time, the server would probably use approximate geolocation or something like that additionally, but the better the resolution of the time stamp, the lower the probability of collisions between bumps.
It was pitched as a Business Card / Contact info exchange app back then and I do remember getting a demo of it where 2 guys bumped their phones to exchange professional contact info. I thought it was funny, didn't think I'd use it.
Interesting how their story played out. Looks like the Google acquisition was more of an acqui-hire and less for IP...
EDIT 1: Found a demo video from 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOpFuOP6_k
EDIT 2: Another video from the founder in 2010. https://youtu.be/2Ir2bg253ag?t=7