Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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There's two competing lenses of thought that bookend your struggle:

On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on "Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate users rather than lots of lukewarm users, because there's an activation energy to building a habit and if you're only lukewarm you're not going to get over it. As PG put it, "Sum that reaction over a whole population, and you have no users."

On the other hand, you have Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" [2]. This has the critical observation that early adopter & mainstream populations are different. About 10% of the population has an early-adopter mindset: they will try anything because it's new and cool. Those are the people Sam says you should be hanging out with in this article. But your experience with them doesn't generalize, because most people don't think like that. Most people are self-interested and have short attention spans: if it doesn't deliver clear value to them with minimal hassle, they aren't interested.

The set of world-changing products really exists in the intersection of these two worldviews. Products that had lots of passionate early adopters but failed to cross the chasm include Lisp, LiveJournal, RSS, VR (both times), and cryptocurrency. Products that aimed for too mainstream a market and only had lukewarm users include WebTV, grocery delivery, and smartwatches. In between are products like the iPhone, where the PDA market had been sitting in early-adopter limbo since 1991 but technological changes finally made it practical, or YouTube, where streaming video had been in early-adopter limbo since RealAudio in 1997 (?) but cell-phone video, Flash, and easy web uploads made it practical in 2005.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

>grocery delivery

I think the USA implementation is poor not the idea is bad. Here Finland K-ryhmä[1] did really nailed implementation and it is like 10x better than going to the supermarket. My mom and aunt both in their 70 started using this separately and both are saying they are not going to back in supermarkets after covid19.

[1] https://www.k-ruoka.fi/kauppa

That's interesting - I live right next to a K-Market and I'm not in a risk demographic so not had the need, but when I moved from the UK to Finland some 10 years ago one thing I missed was that the UK supermarkets at the time had excellent online delivery systems (they're buckling under the strain of the current crisis due to surge in demand, but back then they worked well enough). Finland didn't seem to have anything equivalent until recently, which I thought was more due to geography, population density and other factors that just didn't make it economical for the K and S chains.

Supermarket delivery in the UK has been fantastic, much better than Finland. I think you are right about the population density, and also the amount of competition between 8 large supermarket chains in the UK, vs the near cartel like situation in Finland.

Another example would be automated checkouts - that came much later in Finland compared to the UK. I think there's a good point there that the duopoly stifles innovation, plus there's just a much smaller market and less pressure to scale up.

For folks in the Bay Area, I constantly recommend Good Eggs (goodeggs.com). They’re serious farm-to-consumer folks and have small producers and fishmongers that you wouldn’t see otherwise (many of the names will be familiar from restaurant menus).

After having gone through CSAs, our various decent grocers, and then realizing there were “no” retail fishmongers, a friend had recommended Good Eggs and we’ve never gone back. It’s not for everyone, as it’s basically only the priciest things you’d find at Whole Foods, but it’s also delivered to your door and without a large-scale grocery chain in between.

Covid-19 has obviously strained their availability, but overall they’ve still been amazing.

In Hamburg Germany they have Grüne Kiste (The Green Basket), which deliver high quality foods on weekly basis. Other services are also growing, but I have nothing but positive to say about Grüne Kiste.

Seems to me things that "come out of nowhere" switch from one to another. So if you optimize for either, you get neither.

I think that we lose a lot from a mentality that isn't adaptive, that prescribes in advance whether something is going to become popular or not. Because then something that is currently a niche gets killed off before it finds the mass market. I feel like whenever I find something new I like in the supermarket it disappears a short time later, presumably because of greedy optimization.

I digress, but I think the real turning point that helped YouTube was Apple requiring data plan for iPhone and convincing AT&T to offer unlimited data plan. So sometimes help will come from your rival :o

I thought YouTube's turning point was when users could make money.

> Most people are self-interested and have short attention spans

Interesting way to judge those who don't hop on every new fad. Maybe they have a longer attention span and are filtering out the noise. They don't get caught in new gadgets and apps because they may be pursuing something larger scale in their life, like building stability for their family or studying deep for college or helping out the local community or training for athletic performance or whatever.

Its only in the start-up bubble that someone who is not an early adopter of Uber or Airbnb or Dropbox or whatever "huge" thing is seen as just selfish and ignorant.

Seen from a wider perspective, yeah these apps have significance but not that much in the daily lives of people. Yeah now I sometimes book my vacation through the airbnb app, instead of booking a hostel or hotel, but it doesn't radically change my vacationing habits. Sometimes I call an Uber instead of a taxi. Has upsides and downsides but it's not some new age of mankind.

Perspective, people.

Man I still miss LJ so much sometimes.

(Yes I know about Dreamwidth, I also miss having my friends all there and getting them writing essays again when Twitter is so tempting is an uphill climb.)

From a VC's point of view, for early startups, only pre-chasm matters. If many don't cross, well, it's a numbers game.

Oftentimes the VC cash is needed to actually cross the chasm. One of the difference between early and mainstream adopter populations is that a lot more product polish, and oftentimes explicit sales or advertising outreach, is needed to please the mainstream audience. That all costs money.

I wouldn't say that only pre-chasm matters, though. VCs usually refuse to invest in startups that have zero chance of crossing the chasm. The prototypical example of this is say an app for D&D players. You could have the most passionate userbase, and the app could be critical to their experience, but your total addressable market maxes out at the 13.7M D&D players worldwide and it's unlikely they'd spend more than say $10 each on it, which makes it unattractive to all but the smallest VC firms.

There's a ton of D&D apps out there. Why do you need VC funding to make a D&D app anyways? Making $137M on a single app (using your numbers) sounds amazing for an indie dev.

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