One ending for a startup: running unsupervised until something breaks | Hacker News Reader

One ending for a startup: running unsupervised until something breaks

nedbatchelder.com

75 pointsmcherm10 comments

At first, it will run by itself.

Then something will break and nobody will bring it back up. So for months, it will just show an Apache error page. You'll see people complaining about it on Twitter. (maybe you'll even hear Timothy Sykes bitch about it on Mixergy…)

Then you'll check one day and the domain will strangely redirect to a baseball site.

And of course, further down the road, it will just be a parked domain.

And there's nothing you can do about it…

Ned is right. There are no similar alternatives. For those of you who think creating a photo sharing site means cloning something else out there, take a look at Tabblo. There are many dimensions to photo sharing worth exploring.

PG wrote something similar once (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html) and it strikes me as accurate. The social context of sharing kind of overwhelms the technical difficulty of implementing it, so it becomes less a "where are we going to put the bits" problem and more of a "who is sharing what with whom and how" people problem. It's never been a huge thing to me, but as I grow older I've come to learn that a lot of people close to me really, seriously care about the life stories of their families as documented by photos, and they're (still) not really well-served by the existing techy-friendly options. (And that is a subtly different use case than other photo sharing needs those same people have, to say nothing of what other people have.)

It seems to me that to wait for yet another startup to solve this problem and hope it becomes popular enough to become successful and continue to hope it doesn't outgrow itself or get bought by a big company to get neglected is not the way out of this mess.

That's part of the reason I'm so excited about OpenPhoto and the consumer productization of self-hosting solutions. And BrowserID. And the Locker Project. It sort of looks like a decentralized social networking standard is in our near future.

Those non-techy people close to you who seriously care -- what are they doing with their photos now?

Attaching refined petroleum products to dead plant matter using denatured animal proteins remains popular.

Are they shooting digital? How do they choose pics to print? What's the process from camera to final product?

It must feel terrible to see something you built and put your blood/sweat/tears into left to die after it's been purchased. I guess it depends on if you were in it for the paycheck from the get go or to create something that would live on. :-/

HP in general has a history of killing stuff off after purchase (Ehem.. Touchpad/WebOS I'm looking at you)

I've discovered that you have to look at your life as moments in time, especially as a software engineer. You will build something awesome, and you will be proud of it, and all will be right with the world. And then, the company you built it for will discontinue the project or die altogether and you're left with nothing.

The key to staying sane is remembering those moments when your accomplishment was there in front of all those people and you were excited and showing it off to your friends and family.

Chances are that almost everything you ever made will be obsolete in a few years, and probably long forgotten in 20 -- unlike, say, a civil engineer who's roads will be around for the foreseeable future.

I've been in this business over 30 years and have seen many applications I've created sunsetted. It is all a part of the cycle. Instead of worrying about it I make new applications for new companies.

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