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Comment by regextegrity | Hacker News Reader

I think your problem is treating the success of the Kardashians as deterministic

Their initial success may not have been, but their sustaining success absolutely must be, or else it would have fizzled out, one way or another. Many celebrities tried to latch on to this style of success as their careers waned more generally, (Jessica Simpson comes to mind, she had a similar enough reality TV show and was a big star for her time), but there was no sustaining power there. Not saying she isn't in her own right successful (she is), but by all given metrics I can think of, the Kardashians are outliers here

How about these examples? Amiga had customers, and was profitable, yet Amiga is no longer a force in the computing, nor is Commodore.

Both had more (arguably) capable operating systems than Windows (until at least Windows 95), yet, no sustaining power.

Look at the sustaining power of iOS and Android, despite other more capable competitors that tried to win market share (Windows Phone, WebOS, and I really wanted WebOS to win, mind you)

I find going from 0 to 1 much more interesting than 1 to n though, since 0 to 1 seems far less understood.

As do I, what I'm addressing here is a question of "do they have some kind of special staying power" which is in my mind, an absolute yes.

Its understanding how they managed that that you can work your back to 0, I think. There is value in that

> their sustaining success absolutely must be

Isnt that just survivorship bias?

Considering there are now many many more of those type of people on youtube and instagram, I would not call it undeterministic. Sure, there is many luck and several variables involved; not many can do the same, especially not on that scale. But the general process of how it works is today known enough for other people succedding too.

If it's non deterministic, if these people are just extraordinarily lucky, then OK. But that means it's all just luck, just being in the right place and knowing the right people at the right time. And I don't have that kind of luck so I should stay away from mass-market ideas. Or probably, any ideas at all because there's nothing special about the mass-market, and it's all "just luck".

There are millions of beautiful people out there trying to get rich and famous. The Kardashians have managed to do that very successfully, and consistently, for years. I don't think that's luck. That doesn't look like luck. I think they knew exactly what they were doing, had a good plan, and executed it perfectly. And a major component of that was understanding their market perfectly.

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