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Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve seen and worked on some projects where the founders take 2 - 3 months to launch the first version of their product. That’s too much time and effort sunk into a project that may not work.

Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? Imagine if Elon Musk took this approach with Tesla/SpaceX/Boring/Neuralink, or Steve Jobs took it with the iPhone.

The best class of startups is where the key risk is not "is there a market?" but "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" For example, if in 2002 you had asked a random smart person "suppose I build a reusable rocket at 1/100th the cost of a normal rocket; do you think there's a market for this?" The answer would be "of course, but could you really build that??"

(With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots).

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You are talking about markets that already exist - if you can build a cheap rocket, clearly there is already a market, because people use expensive rockets. Cell phones existed before iPhones. Cars existed before Tesla.... you get the point. In those cases, yes, the startups of interest are changing what is possible. But for many startups, it is something so new that you really do not know if people would pay for it because people are not already paying for a similar product.

> You are talking about markets that already exist

No I'm not. Suppose I told you my business idea was this: build a time machine. There's no time machine market right now. But do you think if I built one, people would be interested in it? Answer: hell to the yes. There is zero market risk in this idea.

The problem, of course, is that I have no feasible way of building a time machine. But thinking along these dimensions is better for entrepreneurs/VCs/the world. It forces you to work on things that actually matter/will move the needle. When they work, the VCs will appreciate it quite a bit and the world will appreciate it quite a bit. You also get to transfer your time from working on marketing problems/science experiments to working on engineering problems/real science experiments. I think this is probably a more fulfilling way to live as an entrepreneur than otherwise.

There is zero market risk in this idea.

Not necessarily. Interest alone does not create a market. You need potential customers who have the means to buy what you're offering under conditions that make it worth selling to them.

For example, I might be interested in a time machine, but if it's going to cost you a trillion dollars to make one and I'd need 5kg of unobtainium to power each jump, I do not represent a (viable) market.

Your premise in this discussion seems to be that the best startups (in some sense that isn't entirely clear yet) are the ones that are aiming to be game-changers. However, I expect that in practice that vast majority of successful startups are not doing something truly profound, but rather something much more mundane that either has not been done before or can be done significantly better in some way by the startup.

The OPs constraint is better though.

Not "rockets" but "rockets at 1/100th of the price" which sort of takes into account your point.

> You also get to transfer your time from working on marketing problems/science experiments to working on engineering problems/real science experiments.

That right there is my goal. At the moment I'm solidly the first. Any tips for moving the needle?

OK, lets roll with your example. You want to build a time machine. Cool.

What limitations will you end up with? Once it is built, what will the user experience be? Can you change history? Can you travel to the past or only the future? Can you return? It is interactive or view-only?

Without actually spending the money to do the R&D and see what you can achieve, you have no idea what price people would be willing to pay for the experience, because you cannot tell us what the experience will be. So you have no idea whether the price point would be sufficient to recover the R&D costs. Sure, it gets you thinking of how to "move the needle". But... what needle? What problem are you trying to solve? Who has that problem? Can they afford the solution?

Your example falls into the exact trap that people try to avoid by creating a quick MVP - jumping to conclusions about ideas that the founders are 100% sure people will buy, and assuming that people will pay for it, without actually doing the work to prove it.

It’s possible that you can wait for the time traveler to arrive from the future with his time machine.

Then you can eliminate him, and take his time machine, and reverse engineer it to figure out how it works. Then you can travel further into the past, to meet your younger self, and give your younger self the theory and the blueprints to build such a time machine. Then, your younger self can patent it, and claim all legal intellectual property rights to it for the next 100 years.

And you can also tell your younger self to buy certain stocks in specific companies, that will enable your younger self with the financial capital to build such a time machine.

Thus, in the end, who invented the time machine? You did.

How I built my time machine MVP in 3 weeks.

First I developed a box. I used existing box designs as inspiration. No frills on the first go, just a normal cubic shape. I started with cardboard but plan to iterate further on the material selection. Currently the time machine only goes forward at 1x speed but that's the challenge of being first to market. I tested with users and they said the box is uncomfortable so I made a bigger box and put a cushion in there. Now, users report a more comfortable experience. You have to understand as a founder, any new technology is going to have some rough edges.

After this 3 week period, I learned a lot about time machine prototyping and the desired user experience. My next steps are to take this to VCs, funded by pensions of dock workers, and raise a $100M round to further development. I'm confident with this funding, we'll be able to disrupt the time machine market entirely.

Actually this gives me an idea.

How about a series of weekly podcasts,videos or blog which does exactly that: take a 'real' situation (in this case meetbutter) and then simply go full throttle and pushing the reasoning to it's outer limits, until LOL occurs.

I would subscribe to that. Let me know if that becomes a thing.

I also love Monty Python, so this is just the type of humor I truly enjoy!

How I built my time machine MVP in 10 seconds flat.

First I spent my whole life building the time machine.

After this life long period, when I finally finished it at a really really old age, I went back in time, to 10 seconds after I had decided to build a time machine, and I handed the time machine to my past self and then I died, but the past me lived on, with a time machine that from his point of view was built by him in 10 seconds flat. It was a great success and all rejoiced, including past me, future me and present me.

> With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots

Both the technology and the market side of this project seems to be well-understood.

This seems to be focused on design & UX innovation and uses a tech stack which is very front-end leaning.

With this in mind it absolutely makes sense that they used a rapid-prototyping and MVP approach. UX heavy projects are very feedback and iteration oriented.

I would say that both their tech and methodology choices are spot on.

Moonshots are not an option for most founders because they require a massive amount of capital and many years to find out if they'll work or not.

In a best-case scenario, you have something like SpaceX that was founded 18 years ago and raised $3.2B, including the first $100M from Elon Musk himself. Almost a decade in, they came very close to failing after the first three Falcon 1 launches didn't reach orbit.

In a less good scenario, Magic Leap spent $3B and 10 years trying to make their technology work, but ultimately failed to deliver on their original technical promise.

Most founders don't have $100M lying around or the option of walking into a VC firm and saying, "Hey, there's a market here. I don't know if I can do it, but if you give me a few billion, I'll try."

As a result, the vast majority of founders have to take the MVP approach. There's nothing wrong with that. If founders insisted on only taking moonshots, the outcome wouldn't be more moonshots. There would just be fewer incremental improvements.

Regarding reusable rockets, according to an EASA study I lost since, the answer to that, actually asked, question was: Yes, we could build it, but the there are not enough launches to make it financially viable.

The issue for the really tough things, as in "things that cannot be solved by VC-backed marketing", is to ask random smart people. There is a lot of domain knowledge and industry experience behind them. Still no guarantee tfor success, so. It also has the potential to block these experts from trying something "risky".

> The best class of startups is where the key risk is not "is there a market?" but "can this be technologically pulled off right now?"

I worked for a group of assholes in 2011 or so who basically had Zoom'ish host-guest videochat working by 2012 and they wound up petering out. These were big-exit veterans making a kind of moonshot for the time, but for whatever reason ran out of gas (it certainly wasn't a money issue given the history of the founders).

The market can't be counted on to rise to the occasion.

I'm not sure that "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" is the right question to ask if you are trying to create a successful business. "Is there a market?" is way more important as it means you can actually actually make a profit one day. It also leaves you open to adjust what your business is to find a market. Focusing on technology may lead to a myopic viewpoint that never materializes anything of value to consumers.

3 weeks is laughable. It takes a few days to get a project properly configured with linting, CI, version control, database on front and back.

3 weeks is the reason that innovative projects usually die on the vine at established companies. PM's and bean counters never want to spend more than a few weeks on a "sprint task" that might not work out. The exact opposite of the mindset you want in a startup

Hey, Adam from MeetButter (the OP) here!

It took us 3 weeks in total from inception, prototyping, to setting up a full project like you said (linting, CI CD, AWS containers, database).

To be more accurate, the breakdown is more like this:

• 5 days of discussing, investigating the problem, and design thinking. We took our sweet time here :p

• 2 days of creating a prototype (in the article I mentioned a weekend, using Firebase and React)

• 5 days of reiterating prototype and design within a closed group of testers (family and friends)

• 5 days of MVP design (landing page, branding, etc) and proper project and infra set up (migrating to AWS, database, CI CD, staging and production environments, etc).

So that's about 3 weeks (minus two weekends).

Hope that made sense!

> Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots?

Could you elaborate on that? I believe it is a very interesting hypothesis, but I don’t fully understand it

I read it as the idea that a great company needs to have an MVP within a few weeks discourages people from taking moonshots.

So, something like Magic Leap?

Steve didn't start with the iPhone, and Elon didn't start with Tesla.

1976: Wozniak built Apple I in 16 months, but he actually started selling the schematics for the computer before that.

1981: Gates bought QDOS for $75k and hired Paterson to modify it into MS-DOS; that’s what he licensed to IBM within months.

1995: Musk built Zip2 in less than a year, selling it for $305M just 4 years later.

2004: Zuck built v1 of Facebook in 2 weeks.

If some startup wants to prove quickly that there is a market, only for some massively resourced competitor to eventually take notice and copy them, that’s their prerogative.

Big companies are interested in high tech too. It’s not so black and white. But it is still all about defeating incumbents.

Or another way to put it is, do what your competitors won’t do, not can’t do.

He did, in a way, just on a much larger scale. First Tesla was a low volume Lotus with an electric engine. First SpaceX was a small single booster rocket launching from the Pacific Islands.

No the approach is why successful moonshots come from certain markets and not others

> Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots?

I think you are experiencing a bias. The developed world takes a lot of moonshots. Very few succeed. Many last decades. Here are some currently active moonshots.

* Novel Coronavirus vaccine

* Self driving cars

* Delivery drones

* SETI

* Commercial fusion

* General Purpose AI

* Quantum Computers

* "Quiet" supersonic airplanes.

* The search for a Theory of Everything

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