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Well, let's apply the HN guidelines [1] and, more importantly their spirit, to this case. That spirit is to be reflective rather than reflexive [2], which means to interrupt the rapid reflex that springs up immediately ("what everyone is actually thinking"), inhibit the temptation to react, and give the slower, reflective part of the brain time to catch up. When I do that, the first thing that comes to me is that the dog-owner market is huge—so huge that $300M is likely a small number rather than a large one. Moreover, the emotions that people have about their dogs are intense, profound, and deeply personal. ("Dogs are the new kids", reads a coffee mug I once saw in a kitchen in San Francisco.) So this market is not only broad, it's deep; the potential customers are not only numerous but the chance for repeat business is high. Probably there's a huge opportunity here, if you can satisfy people's needs or at least give them a feeling of that. As for dog-walking sounding trivial, if you've ever been (or known) a stressed-out, overworked dog owner and how it feels to face your sad unwalked dog in the evening when you have no energy left to do anything, this is actually not trivial at all. It is not only a form of suffering, it's closely connected with deeper forms of suffering—because so many of us invest our unfulfilled relational capacity into our pets. People will spend a lot of money to relieve a problem like that. In short: huge market, repeat business, premium pricing. I know nothing about Wag, but this is more than enough to see how the GP comment broke the HN guidelines by being a shallow dismissal. I totally get why people want to post that kind of rant and share that perspective—I share it too, it's fun and creates a sense of community in its own way. But we have to remember what we're optimizing for on HN. There are tradeoffs in the kinds of discussion we get to have. If we take the shallow route and go for the sugar rush of piling on stupidity at a distance, we forego the quieter, insightful kind of discussion. Compounded, this determines the kind of site Hacker News is going to be. Edit: I read the article, which seems to me unusually good and to deserve a more thoughtful discussion than most comments have offered here so far. Among other things, it makes clear that the issue is not "a fucking dog walking company" being a bad business per se, because a competitor is actually doing better. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 2. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... |
Opportunity can often be so right under your nose that you scoff at people ridiculous enough to go and try to address that need.
I meant my comment more tongue-in-cheek as a bit of catharsis, for how hard we can tend to strive at an obscure problem while not addressing the low hanging fruit.