Not really a start up, but I thought Wikipedia was an extraordinarily dumb idea at first. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit - what could possibly go wrong?
I completely missed the value of having decent moderator tools (which no site had back in the early 2000's), and a passionate group of moderators who cared very deeply about the integrity of the site.
There have been a lot of startups over the past decade centred around the sharing economy that have helped to prove that humans can be civil in these situations where one might think that we would default to nefarious activity - Airbnb, Local Motion, etc. to name a few.
Humanity is continuing to prove itself as capable of dealing with each other harmoniously and we are seeing great businesses emerge that are benefitting the masses as a result.
If you think Wikipedia is civil, I recommend looking at the talk pages for contentious articles. It's overwhelmingly full of pedantic bickering and passive aggressiveness. It also suffers from a lot of bias in articles where there's a vocal minority on the internet willing to spend hundreds of hours militantly editing and moderating. It's essentially a shouting match on the internet with the loudest group winning.
Even worse are the articles on subjects which few people other than a couple of authors actually care about at all (notably English language articles on political issues in non-English speaking countries and fringe issues which aren't quite fringe enough to get their pages deleted) There's no argument taking place, but that's why the content is so bad. A couple of UK politicians editing their articles hit the headlines in the election buildup, but I found an article on a more obscure MP which was almost entirely, and very openly and honestly, written by the politicians' partner.
Wikipedia is more successful than most people could have imagined in generating quantity, and better than most would have thought in suppressing outright vandalism, but quality is far behind what people are lead to believe from rather superficial studies comparing heavily-trafficked pages against only slightly better-written and more outdated conventional encyclopedias. But there was a time when encyclopedias were expected to be authoritative, as opposed to where Wikipedia has excelled, which is regularly being the first remotely useful result in Google.
Facebook. I was convinced this was a terrible idea until about 2007 or so, despite being on it since 2004. Still think it's kinda a terrible idea, but a billion people disagree with me. (Or perhaps it's more like a billion people agree with me but use it anyway.)
I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, various tools for photo sharing, AOL Instant Messenger for chatting, mailing lists for groups, email and evite for organizing events, etc. The novelty of Facebook was profile browsing and poking each other. And if Facebook had just remained that it would have been a fad. What is impressive about Facebook, is how they managed to little-by-little get everyone on their network, and little-by-little beat out the tools people were using before Facebook.
Interesting, now, in 2015, Facebook is a worse tool for me than it was in 2009. Any tool that my boss is on, my aunt is on, my old high school classmates is on, etc, has lost any coherence to it. I now have to obey standard internet security: anything posted on the internet or on Facebook in my real name has to be treated like it is on my resume. Because, de facto, it is.
I solved that by being one of the few people who have never used the site or made a profile, even though I could have done so back when it required a .edu email address.
I have a different experience. I don't know a single person who used to send life updates with email, or engage in mailing lists. At least to this individual, it was very obvious why Facebook was going to be a success when it arrived, it had all the basic 'tools' you needed to communicate and stay in contact with family and friends.
I think this is a very good example of why Facebook succeeded. Everything Facebook does was done (oftentimes better) by a niche tool with a niche audience of early adopters before. Facebook managed to cross the chasm with all of them and unify them together into a single social networking experience. It brought all these tools that were in use by small populations to the mainstream audience.
My mate had a university assignment several years back to come up with an online business idea.
His idea was to set up an online "home delivery" service for restaurants (including those that don't do home delivery but do take-away). He got a shitty mark because the lecturer thought the idea was "stupid".
I was actually curious about parent's friend's idea. To be fair all these apps haven't yet figured out the whole market, so perhaps instead of genius we can call them 'implementable'.
I have seen an integrated system in Australia. Delivery Hunter. Actually involves a delivery service if restaurant does not have one.. We all thought it would fail but it is getting bigger and bigger.
In Aus, Menu Log and Delivery Hero are the main two with similar functions. They actually work with restaurants to integrate their existing online ordering systems into an integrated mobile app.
The original was http://waitersonwheels.com, which I used in the 1990's. It started as a catalog-based service, which waiter.com knocked off and improved.
It's not a defensible business model unless there's some exclusivity agreements with restaurants on the menu. (too tasty to resist.)
Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
I can't claim to have foreseen Instagram's success...but to me, it's one of the best and prominent examples of how removing friction can be a completely new product...well, when you think about it, even Facebook itself became hugely successful by reducing the friction of getting to know people and keeping tabs on old friends.
But Instagram's value proposition is subtler than Facebook's...I remember that Hipstamatic and its filters was all the rage among my amateur cameraphotographer friends...it was so dominant that Pulitzer Prize-winner Damon Winter of the New York Times used it in his war photography [1].
But IIRC, Hipstamatic did not at all care about the concept of social networking...although perhaps what made it lose to Instagram was the fact that it cost money. I was very slow to take up Instagram because I keep an active Flickr (pro/paid) account...but now I see that Instagram's main value is not attractive photos, but its minimalist, sleek social features. The appeal of phone photography in general is that it constrains the amount of thinking/editing you can do...Instagram's filters ease the tradeoff of quality/ease and its networking features reduce even further the friction of showing the world what you just saw. And you have few options to elaborate on the photo, other than a caption and some tagging...I still like using Facebook, but Instagram works very well on its own because it's not just a filtered visual view, but its constraints limit the kind of things that piss people off about Facebook...for example, it's considerably more difficult to get into political arguments on Instagram.
I thought that initially (Android, couldn't get it) - I can put filters on my photos in a proper editing package. Then I'd tried it and I was like "oh right, I get it now".
I suppose the way it makes sense to me now - my friends put 900 pictures of their holiday on Facebook. They put the one picture that defines their holiday(/day/event) on Instagram. It makes so much difference. Add into that the celebrity voyeurism, and there you have it.
I think the fact that it is a separate social network is actually a huge part of its draw. I use Instagram on the daily, but haven't used Facebook in a good four years.
Facebook is just too full of garbage that is irrelevant to my interests as well as stupid ads. Instagram, on the other hand, is still basically ad free, and has interesting content I care about, easily consumed without having to dig through tons of cruft that I don't care about.
Flickr had a lot of strong social elements to it in 2005. I guess sharing photos is something computers are really good for. This article seems to do an okay job of outlining the history:
Agreed. It took me a while to join Twitter. I was reluctant at first because I thought: "Why the hell would anyone want to hear my random thoughts?" I didn't realize that I was the one who wanted to hear OTHER people's random thoughts.
There's a bit of a story behind that one because my one time Canadian accountant came to me with this idea and I told him I thought it was crap but also (fortunately) told him to ignore me because nobody knows what will and will not work online.
He went through with it and does very well indeed.
I know two different guys that sell shoes online. The one moved to Amazon fulfillment and grosses over $15k a month. It's a lifestyle business for him.
I thought the YO app, was stupid and pointless till I realized it was used to warn Israeli citizens of missile strikes!
Now that app is everywhere and seems to have mastered the concept "notification-is-the-message" philosophy.
Unless you want to suggest there is literally no other way on a device capable of running the YO app to send a message to a group of people (which would be an absurd thing to assert), then I will stand by my statement. If it's useful, it's useful in spite of its own stupidity, not because of its own brilliance.
I think Marc Andreessen made a good point here, how such one-bit communication turns out to be rather useful for some folks. Don't think this is was YO's initial vision though! :)
Twitter. To this day, I find it idiotic. I thought society reached rock bottom when politics started using it to convey their message (is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?)
I too thought it was idiotic. Now I realize that because brevity is the soul of wit is the reason it succeeds. Sometimes less is more and the pearls of wisdom of society at large certainly qualify.
As of this writing, Twitter's market capitalization is over $23 billion. That's a success by any sensible definition. If you know something the market doesn't, there's any easy way to put your money where your mouth is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
That is actually not a bad idea. A business with poor underlying fundamentals must either improve, or lose market cap. I'll have to give some serious thought to shorting twitter.
EDIT: It may be too late. It has already had major drops in the last quarter, and is down almost 50% off its highs from 2014.
Also on my agenda, which is an interesting situation for me because I'm a heavy user.
I think it is a great way to stay up-to date on what happens in startup-land and in open source, the granularity with which you can follow people still fascinates me. Seeing that 95% of what active human accounts post is pretty useless, I don't see justification of a $20bn+ market cap, especially without growth.
PS: They've recently cranked up ads, next earnings report could surprise ...
Do you own TWTR? I think eventually Twitter will be acquired and integrated into a different social network. As for the OP's original point, they've never turned a profit, and I'd estimate that half of their accounts are inactive/fake.
I don't own TWTR, but that's irrelevant. All of Twitter's early investors are very pleased with their investment, while those who missed out or (worse) passed are probably wringing Twitter's hands. Anyone who invested $10K in one of Twitter's early rounds is now set for life. (If I could have gotten in on one of those rounds, I certainly would have invested myself.)
Current profitability is irrelevant. What matters is net future (discounted) profitability. People who malign companies for not currently being profitable apparently don't understand this, but investors do, and the market certainly does.
Many great companies are massively unprofitable while in their early growth stage, then become massively profitable in their later years, and are valued accordingly. If you can exchange $1B in profits this year for (say) $2B in profits next year, you'd be a fool (assuming current discount rates) not to make the trade.
Bizarrely I'm much happier signing in on web sites using my slightly anonymous twitter account than anything else. Maybe this is where twitter can expand?
> is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?
Formerly respected news outlets reproducing others' 140 character comments as a substitute for actually asking subject experts specific questions.
I understand the rationale for reproducing Twitter comments when they come from someone directly connected with the story. I can even see how comments from people claiming to be involved or particularly pithy statements might make it into a "breaking news" feed. What I don't understand is why news outlets with loftier ambitions than Buzzfeed think tweets like these:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33656579
is substantial enough to constitute a commentary piece.
(Or worse still, the obituary complete with "@randomdave said 'RIP U were a legend'")
> (is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?)
Sadder? Or anger inducing? I'm convinced the reason twitter succeeded is that it wound up being an echo chamber for the outraged. A perfect platform for trolls. You can't explain anything sufficiently in 140 characters, so dialectic is out. The fallback is usually rhetoric (appeals to emotion), with anger being the most effective.
The end result is you have an internet shouting match where everybody is trying to piss off everyone else and nobody can clarify anything. It's the digital embodiment of CGP Grey's video "This video will make you angry[0]".
I really like the idea of a service designed to deliver concise epigrams. Twitter is great when people are doing that.
Of course, more often they're boiling political agendas down to 140 characters, or worse, splitting a page-length message up into 17 chunks tagged (1/17). C'est la vie.
I don't think it's so much about conveying an important message more than being able to engage the masses at a pretty ridiculous speed. Besides, most politicians only post brief messages linking to bigger and more in-depth articles.
Yes I worked for a guy in 1998 who basically invented both salesforce and AWS and wanted me to join him as the technical lead. I thought he was nuts and told him no. Due to the geographical location of the company he couldn't find anyone else to do it and went back to fixing PCs.
You're right. But this was in an area where there were no staff. One reason I quit was we couldn't even get someone to repair PCs in so I ended up having to do it.
I was a PFY working for a dot-com shop in the mid-'90s. I (in large part) invented an internal, web-based system that we used to track employee time against external (billable) and internal (non-billable) projects and tasks. Our salespeople would use the system as a common directory of customer contacts, share notes on business development, and generate estimates. Our accounting department would use the system to generate invoices with different payment terms and forecast receivables.
I left the place right before Y2K, a flaming wreck of burnout, dead set on going to college for a CS degree. My friends and coworkers at the time were emphatic that I should take the system I had designed, reimplement it, and sell it. Of course, this was way before cloud and SaaS and all that stuff. I thought it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard; I couldn't imagine any other company needing and using the same (or a similar) system. And regardless, I was so burned out from it that I couldn't bear the thought of turning around and doing it all again. What can I say... I was young. :-)
Niku was founded in '97, which CA renamed Clarity in '05 after purchasing the company for $350M. Salesforce.com launched in late '99 and currently has a market cap of about $50B. If I were a little smarter (or more hardworking), or if I had met a few different people along the way... who knows? Or maybe I wasn't so unique in creating something like this, and the Niku, Salesforce.com, and others were the ones who simply saw the opportunity for what it was.
Snapchat. Thought it was a pretty dumb idea till recently. I'm now an active user. To be fair though, I still think the messaging feature of it is fun only as the occasional gimmick. The value tapers off as soon as you pass a certain age (at least that's what I feel). But when they introduced stories, and "live stories" in particular, their value just skyrocketed. It suddenly became genius. Being able to follow a full day of Red Bull's highlights, experiencing a country or city from multiple viewpoints in the span of a couple of minutes was amazing. Watching UFC from the front, back stage, way at the back of the ring, seeing the reactions of people in a curated-ish form that lasted 5 minutes was incredible. Snapchat suddenly became a whole lot more valuable for me.
One other idea. Yo. I don't think anyone's really using it to its potential. Apart from the "Yo" feature, the idea of it as a notification broker is fantastic. I still carry bets that it won't hit "critical mass/momentum" in its current form. Way too clunky.
Came here to say roughly the same thing about Snapchat. I didn't expect it to rise very far above a niche sexting app, and I was surprised when I started seeing a lot of people using it for more innocent purposes.
The concept still doesn't appeal to me as much as a lot of people (though I still use it), but I was clearly wrong about its potential for mass appeal.
Im with you on the Snapchat development. Once many people got on there they leveraged it in really cool ways. It's very interesting how they turned an app which people used for nudes and what not into one that advertisers now pay toooons of money to certain content creators.
I still think Snapchat is a dumb idea. Maybe well executed? I tried myself to start using it, but everytime I install it, I'll uninstall after few minutes..
You and many other people, including myself. Unfortunately being a bit of a traveller, it's probably the best practical ways of keeping in touch with other friends/family.
The Selfie Stick comes to mind. It's the simplicity of the idea that I find genius. Back when I first saw it, I couldn't see the appeal of it. I was biased though, since I did not have much trouble with making selfies and didn't care much about them.
Then I went on vacation to the US and was considering buying one... A few good YouTube videos showing how to use them creatively helped as well. These videos weren't made by the company itself, but by passioned YouTubers who didn't have a camera man.
twitch.tv, Periscope, etc. or just about any form of live streaming application seems like a huge time-sink to me (and largely inferior products when compared to curated content).
Google. Who would ever want (or need for that matter) to search for something on the internet. You should already know the phone numbers of your favorite BBS by heart.
I was in an Austin Ruby meetup when these guys came in who had a music startup (this was when everyone and his dog had a music startup). They were hiring for the startup, and they presented this side project they had. They described it as "basically your myspace status, only that's all there is".
Thought the music startup was dumb and Twitter made it look smart. They were hiring. I could have been a really early hire…
Back in 1995, it seemed obvious that any idiot with a text editor could write their own HTML page. Why would they want to pay someone else to do it?
I still cringe when I think that a friend interviewing with a web design agency asked my opinion and I told her that this HTML authoring business had no basis, and she turned down the job.
P2P filesharing. I loved the idea of this when it was all the rage c. 1999-2003. Cut out the big corporations, cut out the ISPs, no need for servers, just people sharing data with each other directly. Only problem was: it was slow, unreliable, hard to get started with, and the RIAA would sue you for it.
I do find it interesting how so many prominent companies grew out of ideas or founders that were deeply connected to the P2P boom of the early 2000s. Facebook (Mark Zuckerburg worked on a media player before Harvard and a filesharing network in parallel with Facebook, and its first COO Sean Parker co-founded Napster). Uber (Travis Kalanick ran a P2P company that was acquired by Akamai). Skype and Rdio, both by the founders of Kazaa. Y-Combinator (RTM's research at MIT was in distributed hash-tables). Bitcoin, which builds on P2P algorithms for exchanging transactions. Bittorrent is now widely used legitimately for distributing software updates.
It actually wasn't hard to get started with at all. The likes of eDonkey/eMule, LimeWire, Kazaa and Napster all became hugely popular (and some remain popular in certain jurisdictions) precisely because of how trivial they were to use.
Then, you already mentioned BitTorrent. P2P filesharing wasn't a terrible idea at all, and BitTorrent is evidence.
It's all relative to the alternatives. P2P was easy by desktop app standards, but concurrently with its development, the web started taking over. With webapps, you didn't need to download a program, you didn't need to deal with your firewall settings (consumer firewalls were just starting to become popular during this time period as well), you didn't need to configure upload/download rates or servers - you just clicked on a link and got a file.
Did anyone apart from the VCs hoping for another Snapchat think it was that good? Even the founders, infamously, cashed out early.
Same applies to the little-lamented Color, which was universally panned on here for more than just the excess represented by a $30m initial fundraise.
As for companies I thought could be huge and didn't really make it, a 4x return on Hunch was pretty unspectacular. I think there's a huge company waiting to happen in the [meta]event search space, but that's not borne out by the companies that have tried it.
Pretty much every single unicorn except for Amazon and perhaps Uber. eBay, AirBnB, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat all seemed like strange ideas. Perhaps transformational businesses are supposed to sound totally nuts until you speak with the founders.
Transformational businesses are nuts until someone executes fantastically well.
(Without the fallacy of the genius idea, this thread would be "Ask HN: What's the worst startup idea you've heard, which someone executed amazingly well?")
I think Twitter ranks way up there. Who the hell would care about a public messaging solution for people posting status updates - "Cooking #dinner" - with a 140 character limit.
I completely missed the value of having decent moderator tools (which no site had back in the early 2000's), and a passionate group of moderators who cared very deeply about the integrity of the site.