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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

> almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times

I strongly disagree with the implied defeatism here. There have been many attempts and many failures with many popular ideas for non-obvious reasons, and it is worth being #11 if you can A) identify why the previous attempts failed, and B) find a different angle that avoids the issues.

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The original poster is a college student looking for a side project to do in their spare time. It's not defeatism to suggest that they should probably look for side project ideas first in low-competition areas rather than in very competitive areas where multiple teams of experienced people have already failed.

Of course if they have a specific insight into a business that has failed ten times that they think is a major differentiator, then of course they should investigate that first. But then they wouldn't be posting on a forum for business ideas :)

100%.

Google wasn't the first search engine. But they were effectively the last. First to market is only important insofar as it's correlated with making sticky products, building a moat, and not dying. That's what you actually want.

Hmm. I switched successfully to duckduckgo...

Fair enough, but Google has made their mission about making the world's information accessible, moreso than being the best search engine; I assume you still use YouTube, perhaps you use Google Maps (although there are plenty of good navigation alternatives), perhaps you use Google Translate, etc.

> I assume you still use YouTube

An aside, but funny enough, one thing I like about DDG is how much better it is at finding YouTube videos. I assume Google is encumbered by antitrust fears or something when it comes to video search.

I’m not sure it’s a complete aside. What you’re describing is the general recipe that business school warns against for entrenched industries. That is to say, if you give up low margin products, you give an inroad for competitors to gain competancy and scale. Rebar in the steel industry is sort of the hallmark example. Even though search is still an important part of their ad income, I don’t see google’s dominance in search lasting another 100 years, since there will continue to be smaller competitors who excell in some small low margin area and it will slowly chip away at their brand.

When you put it like that, suddenly it starts to make a lot more sense to me why Google seemingly relinquishes projects to their graveyard; they probably have a lot of competitors for each abandoned project that do the same thing as well, or better. It would be nice if Google had a default policy of allowing exports of stored data to said competitors, though..

I don't think it's defeatism because what GP seems to point out is OP needs to expand his experience pool to see the low hanging fruits that reside outside of the software world.

I think there is also a C) You might just be lucky when the other guys weren't. Sometimes, luck is as much a factor as hard work.

Also, there are tons of VC backed startups that "failed" because they couldn't squeeze enough profit out of their niche to pay for their exorbitant and lavish burn rate. A one-man, or very small team can find great profit where some of these bloated startups have failed.

del.icio.us vs pinboard.in

the mistake is to think that others have failed because they were not good enough. If 10 people tried before and failed, you can be darn sure that there's a good reason for those failures, and it's not lack of ability. When it comes to online software products, businesses always fail due to 2 problems: #1 no one wanted the product (or not enough) or #2 cost of acquiring customers was too high. These aren't going to be solved with better code.

Key word: product market fit

The product has to be good enough to solve the problems of the market. #2 is also a downside of this - you can't dump marketing money to get around PMF.

Facebook is an interesting company which had a poor market (people are fine without it) but they managed to improve the product, the economics, the scale, just enough, and ended up one of the biggest companies in the world.

But, we're in established markets now. People have been using FB and many other sites for many years now and those behaviors are very much ingrained in people. There are only so many hours in a day someone can be online, so to some degree all new applications are competing with FB and the other incumbent apps. It's much much harder today than 10 or 15 years ago.

Established markets still need PMF. And existing sites/apps can lose their PMF.

There's a large demand for, say, a more privacy based social networking website. Or a gaming based social networking site, like what FB-Zynga used to be.

Google has a large blind spot too. Yelp is filling one, Pinterest covers their image search weakness, tons of travel apps/sites are filling another. But there's many, many things that can be more localized or made into a niche.

I'm not sure if it is harder, as technology has significantly improved. I think we're at the stage where less of the effort is building/designing an app, and more of it is in better product development.

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