Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before? | Hacker News Reader

Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before?

blog.eladgil.com

93 pointseladgil41 comments

If it's been tried before, you should absolutely care. The successes or failures of those that have tried or done it before should be your first lessons and they should inform your decisions (probably not define, but definitely inform).

No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about why it didn't work is your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.

Its not just about working or not. E.g. yahoo vs google. They both work, just google works better. Myspace worked too, just facebook worked better. Even in the cases where things have failed in the past, it can be difficult to figure out why. Do you think that the iPhone was the first smartphone?

Reminds me of Youtube. On-demand video was the "flying car" of Silicon Valley before them.

And what about Skype? The notion of a usable video-phone was pure fantasy for years prior to them.

And now, Tesla is doing this again.

I can walk into my grocery store, use their smart-phone app to get discounts on things I want to buy and then wave my phone at the self-checkout station to pay for it all. What a nice future.

Reminds me of these commercials: http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/ATT_You_Will . They seem so quaint now.

I dont understand what point you are trying to make and how that may relate to what I said. Are you trying to state that new things are invented? If so, I think you missed my point which was that determining why things work now can also be a difficult question.

I wasn't being combative. Just adding to your examples.

There's countless things that people tried for decades and nobody succeeded in that are now ubiquitous.

It's easy to justify being dismissive of people trying things that have yet to succeed by this argument. But it's also, clearly not valid.

For instance, with the rise of cloud storage and web-applications, we are doing, essentially, thin client computing now - something that people said would never come.

Self-driving cars were another constant future-device (e.g., http://ThisWillTake.Me/youtube/Johnny_cab_clips_from_total_r...). And now it looks like we'll get them by the end of the decade. That's pretty impressive.

Thin clients, a.k.a. "dumb terminals" with a prettier UI. (not more functional, quick or useful, but awesomely prettier)

From a software standpoint, there are now 2 categories:

1) Software as a service 2) Software as an end product

"1)" is more honest, because your customers only care about the service and you have nothing to gain by churning and regurgitating new-old-new-again ideas every 10 years in order to keep scoring new license deals.

"2)", well, I said it already: As a software vendor, you have no financial interest in selling anything that won't need to be replaced at least once a year. Hence, the constant renaming of recurring concepts over and over and over...in order to keep license revenues coming in.

It's interesting that you describe SaaS as more "honest"; it's like describing the loan shark in the back alley as more "honest" because he admits up front that he's charging an arm and a leg (perhaps literally) to borrow some money.

Though I use many SaaS offerings, I still prefer installable software as much as possible because once I own it, I own it forever. For example, Windows XP may reach EOL next year, but existing, activated copies aren't magically going to go away at that time.

This is a meta request: could you post the direct YouTube link instead of, or in addition to, the link through your descriptive URL redirector? Despite the descriptive nature of the URL, I still trust a direct link to YouTube a lot more.

interesting. I just wrote that earlier that day. I was trying it for the first time in that comment. Failure already! That was fast.

The only important factor in 'it's been tried before' is the 'before' bit, the timing. If the timing was off and that's why the venture failed then re-doing it makes sense. If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. But 'tried before and failed' will stick for everything where timing wasn't a factor.

During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means do a re-run.

>The only important factor

I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but rather execution.

Way to pull 'that part of my statement' out of context. It says (and I think that's a pretty clear bit):

> If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count.

Clearly, if your execution sucks then timing wasn't the factor.

> If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count

Thats a misleading idea because it suggests that execution and timing are separable. Who is to say that some company failed because the timing was wrong or because their execution was bad? Furthermore, couldnt it be both? As Drew Houston said, he had to convince people that he was solving a problem that they didnt even know that they had! What I am trying to show here is that Drew created his market, he didnt wait for the right time when people had this problem that they so desperately needed solved. He made them realize it himself. Chalking things up to just timing belittles the efforts put forth by the founders.

I must disagree, in light of ChuckMcM's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5592391). Though saying "timing is everything" may belittle the efforts of the founders who succeeded, saying "execution is everything" gives the successful founders too much credit, and the researchers, the also-rans, and the market too little.

Using a term like execution to describe why someone is successful is tautological and IMO meaningless.

What's more important is to figure out what the actual execution consisted of.

For instance it's speculated that one of the reasons why Dropbox got a lot of cover was that they where Mac based rather than Windows based.

Since a lot of tech-journalists have Macs it was easier for them to try out and write about it:

"My earlier version of this post was about how Syncplicity and Dropbox competed for mindshare back in 2008 when both companies launched. My initial Quora post was about some of the reasons why, around our respective launches, Dropbox was able to get more attention. 3 years ago, the press and early tech adopters were starting to fall in love with Mac products. The average consumer didn't have a Mac, but they were hot amongst influencers. Having a Windows-only product dramatically limited the attention Syncplicity received from the press. Today, I can't imagine launching a desktop app without Mac support. When we started developing Syncplicity, it wasn't obvious that Mac support was critical for press attention. Today both companies have Mac clients."

http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...

I understand what you are saying, but as the saying goes: "a little inaccuracy saves a lot of explanation." Similarly here, I use the term execution to refer to the set of features they chose which led to success. I did not feel that it was vital to the point I was trying to make to specify which features specifically.

It is meaningless, but I think saying "it was that one thing" is also probably being too specific, and there is a requirement for a happy medium.

If the answer was obvious (in hindsight even) usually it is imo, an oversimplification of success.

Many times success isnt doing one thing right, its doing the right things right enough, and the wrong things not often enough to piss everyone off.

I see this all the time, and the challenge is that 'ideas' never occur in a vacuum. Even when the people who have the idea don't consider any of the things going on around them, the success of those ideas are controlled by forces outside and sometime unrecognized.

One of the classics for me was the 'video phone' which was (and remains) a stupid idea. The idea that you would have a device, that only allowed you to communicate with the same family of devices, and provided by a single provider. Is stupid. The idea that you could interact with someone over a network in real time via a combined video and audio stream is a good one.

When Bell Labs proposed the video phone you could use a $1,500 hard wired terminal to send a 262 x 184 grainy black and white video stream to another person who used the same kind of dedicated $1,500 terminal. Not a lot of value to the end user there.

When you could use a $25 web camera and a bit of software to create a video and audio connection between your $1,500 computer and someone elses computer with a webcam, the computer and networking costs were already 'sunk' in the sense they already had justified their value, so video conferencing only needed to meet the marginal value of being able to see who you were talking too.

The difference between 'success' and 'failure' here was the environment in which the idea was presented, and the amount of value the idea brought relative to the cost of doing it. In the context of today's $29.99 cable internet video conferencing is a great idea, with $2,000/month 1.544Mbit T-1 lines it was a stupid idea.

I totally agree with this notion about "timing." MICHAEL RAYNOR has some good research in The Strategy Paradox. One of his central points is that all of the behaviors that create "knock it out of the park" success are the same behaviors that create bankruptcies. He uses the classic example re: Apple, but also provides many others.

http://cdn.dupress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/US_deloitt...

A market with a successful competitor can be a good sign of consumer demand. However, a market with dozens or hundreds of failed/stagnant startups and no standout winners is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad.

cough Smartphone-based loyalty cards cough

Have you heard of Belly?

I had four or five examples ready to go, but I didn't say them because I know people working on each of them :)

The startup fad that caught me was a phone app that helps you meet strangers near you. I thought I was being unique and clever, but then a hundred other startups came out in the space and failed spectacularly. The only one that survived was grindr.

Hardly. Highlight is pretty active still.

>>>is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad

Or a good sign that everyone else is doing it wrong and there's still room for someone to do it right.

He cited the iPod. Nuff said there.

Saying that it's possible to nail a business that has been tried and failed before is fine, but you had better understand why things are different now.

What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing, and an opportunity has opened up now?

In his title, he needs to use "It's" as a contraction of "It Has". "its" is the possessive for "belonging to it" -- always.

Its not that important.

There are two kinds of founders-inventors:

1. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with semi-successes

2. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with truly new ideas that create markets for themselves, that bring solutions that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and "poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before" market

If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why they failed, you know...).

An important way to evaluate others, especially prospective colleagues, is to observe how much information they use to come to a decision, and note what they do with it.

Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know? Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.)

However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.

I wish I could find this blog post now, but it seems to have disappeared... but there's one by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that I found very influential some time ago. It goes something like (paraphrased) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else".

Now, this may not always be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products, better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys and you at least have a shot.

"Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else."

I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes.

His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.

" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS)."

Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows.

I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.

It matters greatly if you're entering a thriving market, or a graveyard market (one littered with tons of failed attempts and no reasonable success stories).

If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's probably a reason they all failed too.

The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.

+1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of times before. :)

I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small.

And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.

yep, HN'ers especially are very well aware of this.. the only critiques I usually see on "Show HN" is how does your X product differentiate from already existing Y product, not oh this was done before don't bother etc...

This post has already been done before under the title "On the value of a better mouse trap".

I'm going to start posting this to all the HN bozos who comment to the affect "hasn't this already been done" (after downvoting them, of course).

Smart people care if it's been tried before. The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from someone else's mistakes.

In the early part of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon said (in essence) "Man cannot do what has never been done, except by means not yet tried."

There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily be the key to new varieties of failure.

What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.

anyone who cares about base rates.

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