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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

If someone thinks "make something people want" means "pick a problem and solve it well", then it seems to me they are out of their minds. If people don't want it yet, it doesn't matter how well you make it; they don't want it. I find it very hard to believe that that interpretation is really so widespread. Maybe I'm naive.

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.

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If you read his definition as, "Pick a problem that others are willing to pay for a solution, and solve it well," the whole post becomes very good, rather than just having a few good parts.

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.

I actually had almost exactly this in the original version of the article. I changed it because there are lots of products/solutions that don't require people to pay for them but where the same framework still applies -- Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are three examples.

I think you had it right the first time, and changing it detracted from your real point, "Why now?"

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.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. also have to build something that their users want to use and this follows the same paradigm. Google could build something to make every advertiser happy but if it pissed off all of their users it would kill their business. They have to solve this problem on both sides -- they have to build something users want to use and they have to build something advertisers will pay for. Both halves of it have to answer the Why Now

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