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Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking lately, don't make "products" at all.

It's like "building a city." Whenever someone tries, it's a disaster. It's artificial, it's authoritarian, it's clumsy.

What to do instead? I don't know. Solve a problem for someone. Build a place for your friends. Make a tool. Make a script. Make a meme. Start a club. Build a boat.

I'm more and more interested in the anthropological viewpoint. Looking at us as, well, a human culture. People in Papua New Guinea build boats and tools. And here we are building "products."

pg's saying this but from a more capitalist viewpoint: that successful startups start as solutions to problems, that the best ideas come from your own problems, and so on.

I think that if we bracket out the question of making money, it's still interesting to think about. What is a "product?" Is it different from other created things?

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City creations are ordered all the time and they do not forcibly fail. Many new world (ie. US, Australia, NZ) cities weren't organically grown. And so were a lot of cities built during Antiquity that are still there in Europe. Greeks and Carthaginians (themselves Phenician colonials) founded colonies ex nihilo that are still thriving today. And so did the Romans, though they often built on top or besides existing urban centers (my own city was founded in -133 on a new spot, but was a few kilometers away from a Gaulish oppidum of which the population was subdued). Most of the cities inside what used to be the Empire have been rebuilt from the ground or created by Rome at some point. It's just a matter of good engineering.

I understand what you are saying. But a product can be used to solve a problem. Building a city because a lot of people suddenly need a house is solving a problem. Building a city because you like to design a city is building a ghost town.

> It's like "building a city." Whenever someone tries, it's a disaster.

Not always! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmeloord

The trick is to not aim too high.

Some background, for the interested: Emmeloord is the central town of the 'Noordoostpolder', an area reclaimed from the sea in the early 20th century in the Netherlands. This land was created in order to increase the amount of farm land available, so that the country could increase its food production and better sustain itself.

All towns in this area are 'planned cities'. 1 larger one (Emmeloord) in the middle, and a bunch of smaller towns at equal distances around it. The goal for these towns was never prestige or some 'national symbol'; the goal was food, for which you need farmers. Farmers need towns for groceries, schools, and so on, so towns would come.

Emmeloord itself was designed as a 'modern town' with straight roads and whatnot. The other towns were designed as if they had organically grown (church in the middle, expand from there). The town names were made up by linguists to sound like they could've been 'real' historically-evolved place names. All of it was intended to be practical and feel familiar.

In my personal opinion, much of it turned out quite well. Emmeloord itself would've been better of without the 'modern' city plan IMO, but there's many other cities (or large suburbs) much like it because of the urbanization wave in the 60s.

The area is not especiallly known or celebrated by the Dutch. It is what it is: a dull rural area with a dull central town. Which was exactly the idea.

"The trick is to not aim too high."

Like the "Blauwestad" which failed. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blauwestad_(project) (Dutch)

Eh, was there any modesty in that project at all? I think that, in startup terms, Blauwestad is an excellent example of the "if you build it, then they will come" attitude. The real estate version of Color.

EDIT: Oh wait, that's exactly what you meant.

Sometimes I just want to buy a product known as a monitor, not a pixel-based temporally-dynamic visualization solution.

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