The One Thousand Hour Rule
yongfook.com
yongfook.com
Gladwell based his quotable theory on some research, and it wasn't a new idea.
In terms of a thousand hours to viable product, there are just far too many examples of products that have become successful in less time for it to be a theory. eg.
* first version of Facebook was ~2 weeks of code
* chatroulette
* Inviteshare - built in 24 hours and sold to Techcrunch the next day
* First version of Crunchbase we built in 48 hours
* all the 24 hour hackathons that have released products
* you can pull together various bits of open source software with some glue and a stock template and have a product in 24 hours
There are heaps of other examples of products launched with 10-200 hours of work that became hits, I am sure others can suggest more.
While you may have come to this conclusion by looking at your own two examples, it definitely does not apply across a broader spectrum.
It's easy to glue something together from various templates, open source libraries and modules. But apart from a few outliers it takes years to achieve an overnight success.
It is crazy to suggest that 1000 hours is some sort of benchmark. It leads to crazy thinking where on one hand it could be 'only 800 hours to go until this is a success' and on the other 'well i have put 2000 hours into this and it is going nowhere, according to what I read on HN I should have given up 999 hours ago'
He arrived at Harvard in sept 2003 and the next week started to write code for "course Match" and then went on with Facemash...
1000 hours is around 20 weeks if you put 50h/w, less than 6 months.
TheFacebook launched on feb4 2004. So 1000 hours that may well be it or even more in the case of Facebook.
Search for ZuckNet: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_...
What he created was a decent web app that began superbly positioned and then expertly skippered it into the true golden market position.
The genius ranged from business to social to UI with programming ability being a distant if important factor.
And that in many ways does contradict the 1000 hour thesis - he could have had experience in building great web apps beforehand. He could not have gotten experience building billion dollar companies before hand - but he did well (however much I might find Facebook unfortunate on various levels).
RISC?
I am less than 10,000 hours in developing my MVP and with little experience in building web app.
If you are in exactly the right place at the right time, you can gain huge traction with a 24-hour project.
If you are in a workable place at a workable time, 1000 hours may well be a good benchmark.
If both time and place are working against you, there's no telling how long it might take. You might never get traction. It's just you and your tenacity.
as many of us here who have built multiple products / services, building it is about 10% of the battle :) not everyone launches under the TechCrunch umbrella - surely you can see that those are extraordinary circumstances.
It promotes the idea of a magic number, and that hard work and time leads to returns (not true for the majority of startups). It encourages thinking like "Man I'm at the 950 hour mark, I'm almost there!", or even worse, planning one's product milestones around time spent.
One of the main attractions of the 10k hour rule is that there are few external stimuli that can negatively affect your learning/training.
If I decided to invest time in taking up the trumpet, I don't have to worry about competition with other budding trumpeters or whether BrassCrunch or Spitter News have effusive posts on my latest performances. I won't have to determine which percentage of the public 'gets' trumpets and plan how my playing should appeal to them.
With proper practice one hardly ever goes backward -- ability increases monotonically give or take a few plateaus. With startups you often go backward as you try to figure out your product-market fit and so on. Userbase size or revenue would not increase over time the way ability does when it comes to personal improvement.
1. I haven't actually read Outliers but I'm familiar with its thesis. If it's anything like Gladwell's other books, I recommend The Talent Code for better treatment of the subject matter. Norvig's http://norvig.com/21-days.html is also great reading.
He did not mean it that literally. He's proposing a rule of thumb.
Edit the link to Airbnb 1000 days Customer development odyssey ;) http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383
Isaac Newton, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie* could not have accomplished what they did without devoting themselves in outmost sincerity to their ideas. The point is that to have a truly lasting impact on improving the world for the better, you need to devote at least 10,000 hours to something great and be smart about how you devote those 10,000 hours.
Galdwell's point, from my reading of his book, is the hypothesis that the vast majority of people don't achieve Greatness because they don't begin to devote that kind of time to one aspiration, not because they are somehow inherently limited in their mental capacity. In other words, the world is full of unmotivated genius, and you're very likely one of them. Study hard, work hard, and strive for the stars, etc., etc. ;)
* having recently met Larry Page for the first time during an internal Q&A session, I can assure you his intelligence is quite limited by human capacity, as well. Yes, he's a lot better at answering sensitive and badly phrased questions (my own) candidly and to-the-point than anyone I've known, but he's also had more experience with it than anyone I've known, also. However, he didn't seem inherently talented in any way than the smarter of my professors (I was once told by one who knew him that neither was Einstein).
In essence, there are two points we sometimes lose in overly simplified metaphors:
1) there are a lot of really intelligent people changing the world for the better that aren't famous. A lot of the time, they don't want to be famous because it would get into the way of their work.
2) there is a big difference between famous people who publicize themselves as an a means to an end (their ideas), while others publicize themselves out of ego. We're all prone to the latter (at least I am), and should make a conscious effort to "unit test" that behavior every once in awhile.
[maybe this is better as a blog post...]
I believe the question is, "what is the mean and standard deviation of the time investment at the point when a sustained positive feedback loop is achieved?"
For example, look at YC companies' varying degrees of progress at demo day. They usually have at least two founders -- if they are working 80 hours/week, they would roughly be putting in 1,000 hours per founder after 3 months.
So, read Seth Godin's "The Dip".
So I think I agree with the camp that believes in putting the time first and only then being able to judge results.
Before you fly those first 1,000 hours you haven't learned a thing, and after you flew them you discover again every 1,000 a bunch of new things.
Also, we should never forget that these X hours rules are speaking to X hours of deliberately stretching practice/work. They don't mean, try randomly for X hours and you'll automatically become awesome/successful.
If its an innovative and useful idea users "get it" almost immediately.
If it's not as innovative and you're building an app that is improving another idea it will take more time for users to see it, try it, and switch.
I don't think there is a magic number.
Assuming that "meaningful" return means profitable, some companies will be able to get a return in < 1000 hours. Some it might > 1000 hours. It's going to depend on the market, your customers, the problem you're trying to solve, and your work ethic.