Knowing When Your Baby is Ugly | Hacker News Reader

Knowing When Your Baby is Ugly

waynechang.com

90 pointsmarkbao19 comments

Wow, I read it twice. Things I thought about when reading that page:

1) The OP hasn't a clue about market research. There is scale, there is volume, and there is price.

2) Anytime there is a massive lack of standards, there is a huge complexity play. This was a surprise?

3) Two pivots that were not mentioned, really high end home theater setups, and custom remote construction framework.

4) Vision limited by an individual's capabilities. Its good to know what you can and cannot pull off but its important to be able to see a bigger picture so that if you could find someone who could do 'x' (missing piece) it would be a better play.

I wonder sometimes about the urge to move to a bigger thing than the current thing. The post on Entreporn touched on this as well.

Oh and I got to see a spam comment in HN comments, that was interesting.

just FYI, i suspect the OP and the blogger are two different people

Chuck, thanks for the comments. At the time I was enthralled by the possibilities of the iPad and wanted to hack together something that was both useful for me and others. I intended it as a side project (instead of a full blown startup).

I don't regret doing it and I'm happy that I spent that month exploring (and brushing up on my Delphi skills!). I'm thinking about open sourcing the project but would need to clean it up some. It's all spaghetti right now.

Oh, and would love to get your feedback on my next project :-)

(And yea, that spam thing at the bottom is kinda lame)

Here's a point for doing most of it in Delphi. :-)

phew I thought I was going to get flamed for using Delphi!

No, to get flamed on HN you would have had to use PHP :)

Sorry for the mix up vis a vis the OP.

It is a fabulous skill to be able to put together a fairly complete prototype in a month, it does let you start the process of analyzing an opportunity. My rule is that a working prototype is worth a thousand power point slides :-). Use what ever tools you are comfortable with.

That being said, I understand that you were not thinking of this as a 'career' so much as a cool project. In your write up you got to the first stage which was you had pinned down some of the technical unknowns (complexity mostly) and had some market feedback (moderate response). The next chapter would have been should be phase 2 which is "How can I make it simpler?" and "Given the limited appeal, what size market would I need to make it worth my time?" The alternative for a lot of folks is the Harmony One [1] which is $250 list / $150 street so that sets some boundaries around price and acceptance.

The first part of the question is an engineering exercise, brainstorming ways to simplify the who pipeline. The second part is a finance exercise, you have a 'day job' you make a salary and have benefits, vacation, etc etc. Take the total of what you'd "earn" (both tangible and intangible) as the 'don't do it' value of your time, vs your market research in terms of units sold vs price per unit as your 'return on investment' for doing it. Then factor in the uncertainty of your data with your 'future' return and you no longer have to ask whether or not your baby is ugly, you can ask "Is it worth my time to bring this one to term?"

Ideas that are well executed have a way of paying for themselves. You are about half way to something I could use as an operations guy, an iPad app which provides a framework for showing 'dashboards.' Web pages sort of do this but something designed to be a control console using the iPad's gesture capability would be much more powerful.

[1] http://www.logitech.com/en-us/remotes/universal-remotes/devi...

I was hoping this was about ugly babies...

That's pretty much an unsolvable problem.

If you tell someone their baby is ugly, not only do they don't believe it but they also hate you. You could anonymize it, but you're just back to even because they still won't believe you.

And to be fair, what would they do about it anyway? Trade it in?

All babies are ugly. They look like little aliens when they come out. After a couple months they plump up and get cute.

Sounds like the OP is just chasing after a lottery-ticket style product that is an instant success AND cheap to maintain AND manages to hold his interest for longer than a week.

Starting lots of different projects is just one tactic for possible, eventual success. Putting time, effort and a little patience into one project that you really believe in is another. Nothing is guaranteed.

I chase high-impact projects. They don't need to be lottery-style, but they do need to have degrees of widespread use. In this case, the market was premature. No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change the world overnight to use smart TV's! (Otherwise I would have stuck with it :)

"No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change the world overnight to use smart TV's!"

I think my point was that not everything needs to happen "overnight".

I guess he couldn't charge people money and then not support their system.

There have been a lot of attempts to consolidate the remote market. Woz tried. iRiver made an iPod mini competitor with an embedded remote. Then there's AppleTV.

It would take a lot of time to get everything consolidated. And when you are finally making a bit of money, the industry will consolidate itself and your competitors will just target the new, consolidated standard.

> Of course, the control interface itself had to be gorgeous to fit with Apple’s design ideology. The client I ended up with, as you can see above, used beautiful 3D effects, reflections, and animations to display the media options (watch the video). I didn’t get a chance to optimize for speed so the touch response is a little slow.

And this is how software comes to be that drives me absolutely nuts with its slow UI.

Every time I've had to use a UI that is whooshing things about in a slow and laggy way, a little part of me dies.

Like the article's first comment, I too abandoned a project I was very passionate about simply because an API was lacking. I attempted something similar with a HTTP interface remote application for VLC. I had it working to a "good enough" degree, but the lack of access to things as basic as album art via the API were incredibly frustrating.

Was ditching the project lazy on my part? Most definitely. Did I have the skill set to get work around the shortcomings? Probably not, and that's what it boiled down to. My baby was ugly, and I wasn't capable of fixing it.

There's a distinction between what you have right now, and the vision:

- ugly baby product: don't worry, keep improving it

- ugly baby project: give up (if it won't meet your needs); or pivot or something

For me, I've realized I don't need a huge market or revolutionary technology. Just enough to live on, doing work that makes a difference, is enough for me (though I like to leave the upside uncovered). Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.

Note: AppleTV itself is not a huge success for Apple, but Jobs keeps on with it, because he envisions that it can be (and the luxury of resources). Ugly duckling?

BTW: Woz also had a universal remote project, and it also had business (as opposed to technical) problems.

it really is difficult for builder/hackers to handle the paradox, to be tenacious yet realistic, because we love _all_ our children

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