Atleast the fact that this was written and its currently at the top of Hacker news says that this pain exists. The author of the post is saying that no solution has been found yet. You should consider this a blessing in disguise and not get disheartened. There are perhaps atleast two things to take away from this.

1. The problem exists ( and is a genuine problem that quite a few people care about! ). 2. A good solution has not been found yet. ( also kind of good for you! ).

Apart from this, it also gives you a lot of information about the industry. Especially the discussions that are happening here. So, why dont you consider this a loooot of great feedback and go back to the drawing boards and go disrupt this industry ?

A couple of guys I know did a small travel planning website. It's plastered with ads. I think they have almost not touched the site after they launched it, and it's doing ~6-8K€ monthly with ads (traffic coming from SEO).

Don't get discouraged by a guy explaining why it can't work according to its theory.

This post is pretty light on justification.

20% retention is neither good nor bad. There are a lot of businesses that survive on one or two events a year. If you are in the business of selling metrics software (like his friend at MixPanel), you probably want people to come every day.

The "I don't have room in my brain" argument is just silly. I can open my refrigerator and see hundreds of different brands. There are millions of websites, of all kinds! Should we stop building websites because there are a lot of them and it's harder to differentiate?

It's pretty hard to swallow this kind of advice from a guy who founded a blogging platform in 2008, 5 years after blogger.

Anyway, as our man PG likes to say, just go make something useful. The rest will take care of itself.

Just make sure you're validating your idea as you go instead of just building it, and you'll find out for yourself if its worth continuing.

As depressing as it sounds, there's little point in continuing product development without solid validation. Its a problem I ran into at my previous startup - a good product, but just not needed by enough people.

Do you have a business model wherein people will pay you money? I can only see this working for B2B. If you can't answer why it will be different for you, rethink your business.

Are you working on the idea, or working on validating the idea?

Don't get dejected. A person can probably write a similar post about every great company that will get started in the next 10 years. Prove cynics like that wrong.

Same here. I've been doing user research on the subject, and while there are some clear problems to solve they might not just be worth solving.

I've got a fairly unique take on local trip planning @ 80%. If you want to chat, shoot me an email!

Time to prove him wrong! :)