[Akuehne]

So many people are victims of what I like to call the "Field of Dreams Fallacy."

Also known as: If you build it, they will come.

In the real world, it doesn't matter in the slightest if you build the best product in the history of the universe. If you don't have the proper marketing and sales pipelines, you will lose to the product that does.

There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.

Same for HD-DVD against BluRay. And for so many other great products that have died on the vine.

I think this is actually a bigger problem with society as a whole than people notice. The majority of people think that an idea alone is as valuable as a business. People regularly tell themselves that if they would have come up with X, Y, or Z, then they'd be rich and successful. When in reality, the product or idea doesn't equate to success in the slightest.

It's the same thing that I'm sure a lot of you in tech see, where people say "Can you make me an app?" or "We should start a tech company that does this one thing better than the other guy." And yet almost every single time I explain to them that there are 4,000,000 versions of their app already, and that it's still a business that requires significant effort, they act like it's my fault for not helping them or not believing in their idea.

I've let millions of better ideas fade from memory without a second thought. Because I've learned that operating a successful business is an entirely different world from building a cool thing. The idea is the easy part. Everything after it is the actual work.

[lazarkap]

"The idea is the easy part" is something I knew deep down but was too afraid to admit to myself. It's easier to keep building than to confront that everything after it is the actual work. Took me years and a few dead products to really accept that.

I feel like Im in the process of swallowing that pill.

[alexpotato]

> There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.

There is some nuance here.

Manufacturers didn't know if people preferred shorter, higher quality (Beta) or longer, less quality (VHS). That's partly why there were two formats.

Most people like to say VHS "won" but what it really won was the consumer market. Beta won the professional TV news market because it turns out news stations had a high demand for short, high quality video storage.

I point this out only to say that winning isn't a one dimensional/binary outcome. You can "lose" in one market but still be very profitable in another market.

[Gagarin1917]

>There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.

Not every measure. It could hold like half the recording as a VHS.

The “killer app” for video tapes was being able to record live TV when you weren’t home with timers on the players. VHS could record more without any intervention.

It also meant most movies could be watched all the way through without interruption.

People didn’t care about the ever so slightly better quality of Betamax. They cared about getting their moneys worth and not being interrupted.

That’s why VHS won.

[ipaddr]

What mattered was every other company got together and agreed on a format. The size of their market caused hollywood to release more movies in that format which made more people buy. The super long mode became more important later.