Why is what you're building only possible or necessary today? | Hacker News Reader

Why is what you're building only possible or necessary today?

euwyn.com

20 pointsnewy9 comments

I think this is often not true, and the examples in the post show that.

People had already been willing to put their real names online. Friendster launched 1-3 years earlier, grew very fast, and if they hadn't been alienated their users and been hamstrung by technical problems, they might have gotten to be Facebook.

Airbnb is a great company, but VRBO.com had been around since 1995 and is now going public (as part of HomeAway) -- they did pretty well through the real estate boom. There was also Couchsurfing, founded about 5yrs before Airbnb. Could they have been Airbnb? They succeeded at getting users, so I think they were only missing two key pieces: they hadn't realized that if you charged people to stay you had a great business (or didn't want to do that), and they weren't very good at making backups.

Of course Dropbox had a whole forest of competitors. I don't think Box.net or Xdrive or whoever failed to become runaway successes because people didn't have enough devices - there were millions of geeks with multiple computers and there had been for years. And there was plenty of broadband: YouTube had already been around for 3 years. Dropbox succeeded because they made syncing easier to use, and because they marketed that better than anyone else.

There are definitely some startups that couldn't have succeeded a few years earlier, (like the Zynga example which needed the FB channel to exist). You couldn't have made AdMob any earlier because a lot of people needed to go buy smartphones. You might have been able to build YouTube in 2004, but not in 2002, because you needed broadband penetration, fast computers, and a Flash player that could stream video.

Sure, riding a wave or exploiting market trends can be helpful. I think a lot of great products could have been built much earlier though, and the limiting factor is often simply that it's difficult to know what's important, and difficult to get the important things right.

Good article, but I think the reference to Dropbox is a bit out of place.

Online backup/sync, which is what Dropbox does, was readily available when they arrived. The thing was, nobody was using these services because they were not straightforward enough to set up, or were too costly, etc. Dropbox "got that right", so to speak.

Good point. I was focused on how I use Dropbox today, which is to sync media between my various devices (this seems to be where the company seems to be heading). But Dropbox did win largely because of flawless product execution, and IIRC was initially focused on the backup problem.

Another, related, question: "If what you are building has been necessary and possible for a long time, why hasn't anyone done it?"

Or, alternatively, "Which temporary economic disequilibrium are you arbitraging? What are its properties?"

This actually wouldn't be a bad question for the YC application.

Is this a must?

What disequilibrium did Facebook or Twitter arbitrage?

In the case of Facebook, it was clear that there needed to be a website that showed people what all of their friends were doing, and helped people plan social engagements with their friends. In the (paraphrased) words of Mark Zuckerberg, "I knew someone was going to make a social network with a billion plus users, so why not me?"

In the case of twitter, I don't think there was any temporary economic disequilibrium, which is why they are stuck with the revenue model of a service business and the cost structure of a startup. You could always make up something after the fact, like saying they are arbitraging the lack of money and literacy ability of inner city minorities, but that's clearly absurd because they never would have started the business if they had thought about it that way.

If they were applying to YC back in 2006 and had to answer that question, they probably would have written that there isn't currently a way to send text messages to groups, and it's clear this is going to exist some day. But that's probably about as much detail as they could have given, plus maybe some version of the usual mobile software use cases from Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs.

Is it necessary to have a temporary economic disequilibrium? According to the business school definition of entrepreneurship, it's one of two things that separates a lifestyle business from a startup, the other one being the potential for rapid scalability. (Cornell b-school actually uses the phrase 'temporary economic disequilibrium' in their 'official' definition of entrepreneurship, I didn't just make that up.)

I'm interested in your comment, Would you mind expanding upon the quote?

shouldn't the question really be "why is what you're building only possible or necessary tomorrow?"

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