"Build something people want" is not enough
avichal.wordpress.com
avichal.wordpress.com
(Obviously) I don't think asking why now is the right time for your idea is premature. I think it's orthogonal to the product building piece. I think a lot of YC companies could avoid a lot of pain if they asked this question early on, because it would lead them to talk to others who have worked in the space. Often they will quickly discover that the fundamental dynamics of an industry haven't changed yet and no matter how much time they spend building it's not worth their time yet. At the very least they should be able to point to why the other, previous attempts weren't quite right and why the time is now for this idea to take hold. But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.
If you talk to a lot of others who have worked in the space you may well end up with a long list of reasons why your idea is doomed. It may stop you from wasting time on an idea that can't succeed. Or, possibly more likely, it will muddy your thoughts and prevent you from observing the space with the fresh eyes that are needed to see what those before you have missed.
But all too often companies just start building without understanding why the previous attempts have failed.
Sometimes you need to just start building to begin to understand exactly why previous attempts have failed.
It would be like starting a poker website now and completely ignoring what just happened to Full Tilt. Online poker is illegal. Until that changes, probably not a good space to play in.
I think local merchants desperately wanted a way to use social networking to connect with customers and get them coming back. My local sushi place has a deal, check in 3 times and get a free appetizer. Users wanted a new, fun way to use the GPS on their smartphones, and they were looking for something more engaging than Twitter or Facebook.
I can say with 100% certainty that Foursquare addressed both needs nicely. I'm not a Twitter user, but I used Foursquare religiously in the early days. I spent more time (and money) becoming a regular at said sushi place just to defend my mayorship.
Foursquare tried to make them want it, and retrospectively it looks like people did. The decreasing number of checkins on that and Places would suggest that it didn't work, because presumably people didn't actually want it and they weren't convinced enough to use it.
Edit: in fact, it's kind of a perfect example of 'why now' making it seem like it makes sense, and bandwagoning, and the appearance of 'solving a problem' and 'changing the world', all to little effect because it's a shakey idea to begin with.
Making something people want is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for start-up success, and it's one that I see tripping up early-stage startup founders the most. Its incredible how many people build in a vacuum for 6+ months, and then release an overly-complex product that doesn't address a single real customer need.
Being able to rationalize "why now?" is much easier after the fact, as the OP demonstrates with his list of his now-successful companies. Doing the same looking forward is much trickier.
I agree, and think the retrospective analysis on this is often really sloppy. In hindsight, the iPhone was clearly at the right time, and the Newton was clearly at the wrong time, but the track record of anyone distinguishing between those is very poor. Even Jobs, famous for some of the big wins on that score, was wrong about timing as often as he was right (e.g. NeXT was about as timely as the BeBox with its initial launch).
If you're building a product for any other reason than solving a real customer's problem, you're making a mistake.
A true visionary solves a problem that customers don't even realize they have yet (and is only called visionary if he succeeds).
This is true, but the timing and pricing have to be right as well. Look at the Apple Newtwon...it was too early and it failed. More than a decade later, the iPad is a runaway success.
Take an iPad back in time to the era of Newton and it would sell. That's because it solves the problem well.
I don't know about this. Even if you could say that (for example) a number of ships hit a particular iceberg, which has now melted, so what? The ocean is full of icebergs.
I wonder if, on average, it might be even more advantageous to try something where everyone agrees there's an obvious barrier to success. What if conventional wisdom is wrong even some of the time, or if that barrier suddenly disappears for its own reasons? I'm pretty sure you can see this pattern in a lot of anomalously successful companies.
Ships don't float around the ocean randomly. They have captains and crews. If they hit an iceberg, there's usually a good reason for it. In the startup world you can track down and talk with founders, CEOs, and investors and pick their brains to understand why something didn't work.
It's very hard to know if something will succeed looking forward. It's easier to know why something succeed looking backwards. To the people who built the business, it's usually pretty obvious why something failed.
The pattern you see in anomalously successful companies is absolutely one of violating conventional wisdom; By definition these companies are outliers because they are successful. But there's always a reason for it. Picking something that people have an aversion to is a great place to start. Figuring out what has changed about the ecosystem or opportunity that may enable it to succeed today where it had previously failed is the critical question to answer.
If you look at the icebergs that were in the way before and they're gone now, it doesn't guarantee success or mean there aren't other obstacles, but at least you know that the previous reasons for failure aren't still insurmountable.
Whether or not its world changing, a lot of the rules are pretty much the same.
Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.
Like 99% of "social" apps, including Foursquare. See what that other commented pointed out about the sliding downward trend of checkins.
It reminds me of...i hope somebody can remember the name of some of these because i tried looking the other day...back in the 90's, there were a bunch of (legit, i think?) companies that gave you money if you installed a little application on your computer that showed you ads while you browsed the internet. Like, a penny per 3 minutes viewing, or a penny per 50 webpage views, something like that (anybody remember?!). This seemed like money-manna from heaven to my dumbass teenage eyes, until i realised how little i was getting out of the equation (my dumbass teenage eyes didn't factor in that it cost me a penny a minute to browse, at the time, too).
They'll need to un-chore it, if they're going to turn things around. And they'll need to come up with some big shift if it's going to be world changing...
HN hack ;)
You don't get big by thinking small. World changing tech companies tend to have a big vision from the beginning. Manufacturing, mining, or other industries may be different. But you rarely see tech companies that touch 100 million lives without wanting to do that from the beginning.
So if people built businesses because they like to do something and found out that they can make money doing it, why does it all of a sudden have to change the world? Because same as the painter example above, one biz doesn't have to change everything but collectively they can have a huge impact.
This post has a lot of good ideas. "Why now?" is a good question. But if you have a problem with people's mistaken interpretation of a phrase, say that in your blog post about it, instead of critiquing/rejecting the phrase itself.
Maybe you're not reading enough into his definition, or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Either way, I prefer to read over the rough spot and extrapolate where need be, so I appreciated the article (thanks avichal).
There are only two types of people in this world; those that can extrapolate from incomplete information.
You intentional blurred the normally clear distinction between something sold (product/service), and a buyer. In the case of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and similar, the users of the service are the product being sold, and the buyers are (typically) advertisers. The users are given something useful and beneficial (search results, creepily stalking other people, pointless "business" connections, publicly broadcasting the precise color of your last bowl movement, etc.) to attract them, but there must be someone else, a buyer/customer, willing to pay for it all or you don't have a business.
In the above sense, collecting users by offering free services is really no different than manufacturing physical products; in both cases your expending capital to create a "product" with the intent of selling it for more than what it cost you to create.
--Why isn't anyone else doing this? (Depending on your idea, they probably are. Hint: if it's idea A + B = C, they are.)
--Why me? (If you can't answer this, then it shouldn't be you.)
--Why this and not something else? (If you can't muster up some passion, save yourself the time.)
In other words, "why?" is one of the toughest questions to answer, and keep answering because you can always ask "why?" again. But if you CAN answer it, you may just have something.
Spaceship trips existed for 50 years. But it costs $10,000,000 per person. Not enough tourist potential to offset the costs.
Now with many companies and countries entering, it's down to $200,000 per person. And probably going down more. Now, there's enough tourist potential to offset the costs and derive profit.
Other examples; flying cars and jetpacks.
Also, a lot of times the enabling new technology or new customer behavior doesn't obviously solve the problem. So there may be new technology and/or behavior that make the problem solvable, but it's not obvious until you try to solve it. There is new technology and customer behaviors that make a whole slew of seemingly unrelated problems solvable now, and if I knew the mapping there, I wouldn't be posting here, I'd be running a company that solves the problems.
The ideal scenario is one where the answer to the "why now" question makes pulling the trigger on building the "something" worthwhile, and avichal makes note of some of those, such as Foursquare.
That said, "why now" is not as important as building something people want. It simply contributes to the conditions about whether or not it's a worthwhile endeavor.
Most people are wrong.
"Pick a problem to solve and solve it well" focuses on the "Build" part. The important part is "people want".