One of my favorite pg ideas: "When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think."
while working on our startup [1] this is one of the top pg quotes I like. However while talking to our customers we regularly face the "toy" critic as opposed to "feature rich". however approaching it as a toy keeps it simple , though for saas it appears as too simplistic sometimes.
[1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.
Toys are relative -- the iPhone was not a toy compared to other phones but definitely a toy compared to a personal computer.
We built a stationary bike called Revvo (http://revvo.co) -- which does a lab quality VO2Max test but makes it a whole lot more fun. Not a toy compared to other exercise bikes but definitely a toy compared to a $45k metabolic cart used for lab tests.
I think it's also true that It's cool; users love it is valuable regardless of importance and that the internet tends to turn "big" into important, or at least impactful and profitable.
It's cool & users love it is an easier approach to big than "important." I think this explains why toys now turn into serious businesses.
Standard Oil actually did start out as a toy. They provided oil to burn in lamps. At the time most people thought that was a somewhat silly gimmick and a fad that would quickly pass. Oil in general was seen as something neat but not essential for years. But just like facebook, many people soon came around to the idea and it took over the world.
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible detail, if it is something that interests you.
This is plainly wrong. Rockefeller started dealing in oil because the unit economics were excellent, and because he recognized that no dominant players had emerged in the market yet, opening it up to vertical & horizontal integration (both of which he executed flawlessly).
Furthermore, asserting that indoor lighting was a toy -- in an age where other light sources were dim, prohibitively expensive, or excessively smoky -- seems mistaken to me.
This is a bit skimpy on the details. I highly recommend every American adult to read The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. It will change the way you think about the world. It also shows how Rockefeller was able to pivot his business from kerosene lamps, which were on the way to obsolescence, to fuel.
As a point of interest, I seem to recall from a documentary I once saw that Rockefeller was the person who invented the pipeline, because he was sick of paying railroads to move his oil around.
Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]?
Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands).
[Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually building crap - just because you can play with it does not mean it has value.
I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all.
Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.
Why do I suspect that the global market for ice skates, which now includes ice skating rinks in many areas that don't get ice, and supports multiple sports, such as Hockey, Curling (not to mention the Olympic level sports), is actually (much) more than ear muffs.
I mean, I was honestly trying to figure out which way you were going with that analogy while reading is, because it seemed to cut against your point.
Perhaps instead of this false dichotomy or business vs toy, we should actually consider supply, demand, reach etc and many the other variables that have proven the test of time that they actually help define future success.
Here's a list of toys I can rattle off the top of my head, let me know whether they are crappy businesses to start if they didn't exist: Movies, Video games, Comic books, Frisbee.
> This trend does not fit with history either. Standard Oil, US Steel, and Boeing were all iconically huge companies that were built as businesses. None of them went through a phase where they looked like toys.
This is largely because "inventing a new thing" and "building a massive business from that invention" are more closely linked now than they have been, historically. Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. Boeing postdated the Wright Flyer by a few years, and even then mostly got off the ground due to the World Wars. (And the Wrights actually did try and make a business out of their invention, but that's another story.)
The Apple I was a toy computer designed in 1976. The Apple II was a mass-market personal computer designed in 1977 by the designer of the Apple I. There wasn't a World War nor any obvious military applications for the early Apple Computers, and the inventor who designed them (Woz) just happened to be close friends with someone who was just mercenary enough to try and make a business out of it (Jobs).
The rapid development of ICs was greatly influenced by their military applications, there wouldn't have been anything to make an Apple I or II out of without that.
> Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries.
The first component of what was to become US Steel opened in 1857, only 2 years after the invention of the Bessemer process that made it practical to produce steel in industrial quantities.
The Apple II was not a toy. It was what businesses used to run VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program. Huge productivity gain over doing spreadsheets with a big piece of ruled paper and a calculator.
Nintendo is often derided for being a ‘toy’ company - as opposed to, say, Apple which is a ‘real’ hardware company.
Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc.
(And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc).
A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike.
Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up.
hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course.
or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :)
// edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum
This reminds me a lot of a chapter in Jesse Schell's awesome book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.[1][2]
He recommends occasionally thinking about a game as a toy.
"The Lens of The Toy: To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with."
I actually just bought this book and it is arriving Friday. Funny to see the pdf now, but I think in the end this is a case I'll appreciate having a physical copy.
Interesting; I'm surprised to see this comparison made, even though in retrospect (thanks to 'ujeezy for pointing it out), I recognize the PG quote about things "described as a toy".
The funny thing is; they've drawn a mostly different comparison using the same dichotomy ("toy" vs "serious") that I use for occasional rants on this site. I say mostly different, because here's the intersection:
If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user.
What I loathe about current startups and SaaS companies is that they seemingly can't - or don't want to - progress past the stage of a toy. I agree that when I see a random toy on the net, I'll have a positive reaction of curiosity. But then, at some point, I'll have an actual thing I want to get done efficiently. Suddenly, the toy becomes borderline useless, because it either can't help me with the task at all, or the help is very weak.
What I mean is: if you're trying to show that something entirely new is possible, by all means, make it a pretty little toy. But when your site is full of advertising copy around "helping users" and "making world (of niche thing X) a better place", then for the love of $deity, make your product functional and efficient.
The reality is, most SaaS startups seem to be toys in that sense, to the point (or because of) it infected the modern UX trends! UX people will tell you about uncluttering, removing functionality, "your user doesn't need that", "this is confusing", "put this in 'advanced options'", "actually, 'options' are confusing, drop it entirely"... For example, observe how, over the years, Google dumbed down its products from actual tools to pretty Material Design toys with a fraction of original functionality. And then people treat Google as role model...
So yeah, startup founders: don't treat yourself seriously, but please, try to actually work on the value you're saying you're providing to your users.
This brings me back to a recent conversation on advertising not being informational.
If the makers of $tool also said what their greatest deficiencies were then buyers would be much more able to decide. Instead they're motivated to hide their flaws and make the sale, hoping -- if it's profitable to do so -- to fix those errors/flaws/shortcomings later.
In a slightly related note it grieved me to see the presenters/producers of the SpaceX launch hide the partial failure of landing the core (I swear you can see one of them set up to tell us, then they get a message in their ear). I thought it was a more progressive endeavour - targeting the end goal rather than media gloss.
For me one example of a toy that became a tool after a few design/development iterations is Postman. It started out as a basic browser extension that let a person make HTTP requests to an API endpoint and displayed the JSON/XML output for you in a pretty formatted result section.
Then after a few iterations it has become a very useful and capable tool for API exploration, testing, and design.
They key for me is to have a tool which hides its advanced features behind a sliding door, where you can reach for the complex feature when needed, but not be bothered by it when you don’t.
I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand?
It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-localized, and offering its own personality and levity.
It seems to me like the founders of the future are coding games today.
A lemonade stand makes sense because it captures people who want lemonade now, but not enough to get in a car and drive to the closest store. In practice, no single shop can scale itself to address this time/location limitation[0].
Similarly, an "e-Lemonade stand" has to be something that just can't scale beyond local level. Anything that a single entity could do for customers from around the country, or around the world, is out of the picture. So such "lemonade stand" would have to be something either with strong time/location constraints, or something unique to a very specific subgroup of people, that just can't be trivially copied to a different subgroup.
--
[0] - Except people putting out vending machines; this is real life, there are exceptions to every heuristic.
I think the simple realtime competitive "io games" that cloud computing, nodeJS, SVG / Canvas have allowed to explode in recent history are probably one playground for fledgling entrepreneurs.
This nicely highlights one of the huge distinctions between consumer startups and enterprise startups, and perhaps provides some reasoning behind why these two types of startups are run differently and have different results in the market.
If I'm at an enterprise startup, ideally we've identified a business problem, and created a widget to address it. This falls very much in to the tool category, and anything I do to make it 'fun' is of marginal value.
Unfortunately, in the Valley I see a lot of devs who want to work on the toys because they're fun, which means the pool of talent for the 'serious' startups is that much smaller. This is too bad, because in my experience the likelihood of having any startup equity attain significant value is much better in the enterprise startup world.
Closely related is the adage that great ideas often look like bad ones. I think it's worth thinking about all these nuggets of wisdom in terms of efficient markets:
Given that there are so many entrepreneurs building startups the best sounding ideas are already taken and what's left are the bad and seemingly bad ones. The market-economy is very good at picking low-hanging fruit. If you dropped a $20 bill in Grand Central station chances are it'll be taken in minutes, while if you dropped it in a random alley somewhere, you can probably go back the next day and find it.
So for you to find a good idea that the market hasn't picked up yet it needs to be somehow hidden in plain sight -- a crumbled $20 bill that looks like a piece of garbage.
A similar concept that I've been thinking a lot about in the context of my startup is a "scaling bottleneck". For you to get big and service everybody you have to first service a demographic that is often thought of as a dead-end in terms of making money. Say kids, or a hobbyists in a certain field. I think the Facebook example applies here too: it was hard to see how this toy could scale beyond college students. Worded as a statement about efficient markets: good ideas for startups that will initially service and grow on a potentially non-monetizable demographic will not attract entrepreneurs and therefore will be available for ones that have that insight.
I think Tesla is a great example of toy-first strategy. The roadster is comically niche. But: the electric drive train is super torquey so makes a great sports car, it's not an every day car so the lack of charging infrastructure is less critical, nor would the inevitable reliability problems dissuade that use, quite a few investors were Roadster owners first.
I remember when the first iphone was released in 2007. I had several friends working at Blackberry at the time and they were dismissive of the iphone as merely a "toy". I always quiped in response "who doesn't love toys?".
Had Blackberry taken the threat of the iphone more seriously, the smartphone market would look very different.
I think it’s way more complex than that. Blackberry made attempts at touch screens but they were all crappy.
Some engineers might have been dismissive, but as a company I think it tried its best to live in the future. It just didn’t have the insight to take the right tradeoffs with the more efficient tech.
Japanese phone makers had the same issue. As early as 2005 some maker tried to have touch screens, some with really innovative interfaces to compensate for the technology, but it stayed niche devices.
I don’t think anyone really dismissed touch interfaces as non threatening. It was just damn hard to have anything that was remotely useful.
i'd love to see more examples of SMB software that started either as "toys" or with "toy-like" features. the only one i can think of off hand is wufoo, but im sure there are others
im working on a product that (hopefully) will address an important need, but developing the solution to that need will require pretty robust software and a services component that will take some time. to get users excited about going on that journey id like to help them have some fun and get their imagination stirring. they are used to crappy dry software and have tough jobs, so lightening their day a bit and inspiring them about the future would make them happy
that kind of gamification does not alter the nature of your product though. it s still some kind of tool and not something people use almost exclusively for fun/leisure
Let's not forget perhaps the biggest toy to turn serious business in the past century or so: the microcomputer itself. Without which there wouldn't even be a Facebook, or a Y Combinator.
Pretty expensive to call it a toy. The Altair 8800 was $2000 in current dollars for the kit, $3000 assembled. The Apple II would be $5K now, the IBM PC $8K.
It strikes me that SW is a key reason for any shift toward a toy-first mentality. Most of the arguments in the article make sense when a (SW) product can be rapidly iterated. Physical products likely tend to be harder to start too toyish... well, except for when they are toys.
The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins. While these things are important in the long run, focusing on them too early injects an impossible set of things for an early startup to do.
Can somebody shed some light on this? I don't necessarily disagree with Aaron but its tough to make any sense of it when one YC person tells you one thing and another YC person tells you pretty much the exact the opposite.
One of the fun things about advice is that you'll find things that seem in direct opposition, even from people who generally agree.
In this case, though, context is critical. PG's point here is around startups that have been around for a while, on which people are working full time, that are meant to be businesses. I'm trying to get at the part that comes before that stage.
In this case, the additional context I'd look for would be around what the creator/founder is trying to do and how successful they've been at doing that.
> It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.
There's a point at which you have to worry about profitability, and that point can be earlier than you think, but at the same time it's not something you should be doing right at the start.
Depending on the definition of the word startup, most (if not all) successful open source communities started off as a toy. The Ethereum foundation is a recent example of this.
I also personally think that "toys" are great for building and sharpening one's skills, much like Lego in the real world. This can be everything from you trying to "sell" your toy so other kids will come play with it, all the way up to learning how to glue software components together and make it work. Some technical toy projects have steep learning curves, and as an engineer myself, I see it as an opportunity to learn things I otherwise wouldn't working on a "serious project".
I have been trying to spin up projects for years since my early teens and the best project I've have had traction on so far is my open source Tetris Attack-like clone.
I think it has come the farthest then any of my previous projects because I didn't take it seriously which made the barrier to entry for contributors easy since I set my standards very low.
I'd normally try to build something to scale with a monetization plan from day one, and I was so burned out on failed projects I thought I'd just work on something I wanted to do, without care of generating money. I figured if I got one of my serious for cash projects going it would free up time for such a project but I got tired waiting.
The seriousness has scaled with the project. Some team members stick around, some sunset, but this is fine because my project keeps attracting people who are suited for the current stage.
Will my project go from toy to business? I don't care. I'll just ride the project for as long as I can, and its possible I will sunset from my project where people better than me will take it somewhere I can't.
[+] [-] ujeezy|8 years ago|reply
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
[+] [-] diminish|8 years ago|reply
[1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.
[+] [-] jaravis|8 years ago|reply
We built a stationary bike called Revvo (http://revvo.co) -- which does a lab quality VO2Max test but makes it a whole lot more fun. Not a toy compared to other exercise bikes but definitely a toy compared to a $45k metabolic cart used for lab tests.
[+] [-] dalbasal|8 years ago|reply
I think it's also true that It's cool; users love it is valuable regardless of importance and that the internet tends to turn "big" into important, or at least impactful and profitable.
It's cool & users love it is an easier approach to big than "important." I think this explains why toys now turn into serious businesses.
[+] [-] turingcompeteme|8 years ago|reply
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible detail, if it is something that interests you.
[+] [-] loeber|8 years ago|reply
Furthermore, asserting that indoor lighting was a toy -- in an age where other light sources were dim, prohibitively expensive, or excessively smoky -- seems mistaken to me.
[+] [-] Blackthorn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brucephillips|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgore|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpwagner|8 years ago|reply
Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]?
Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands).
[Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually building crap - just because you can play with it does not mean it has value.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all.
Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and continue to be -- toys.
[+] [-] ambicapter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|8 years ago|reply
I mean, I was honestly trying to figure out which way you were going with that analogy while reading is, because it seemed to cut against your point.
Perhaps instead of this false dichotomy or business vs toy, we should actually consider supply, demand, reach etc and many the other variables that have proven the test of time that they actually help define future success.
Here's a list of toys I can rattle off the top of my head, let me know whether they are crappy businesses to start if they didn't exist: Movies, Video games, Comic books, Frisbee.
Entertainment is a business.
[+] [-] stealthcat|8 years ago|reply
No benefits but toys are really profitable to be simply let go.
[+] [-] philwelch|8 years ago|reply
This is largely because "inventing a new thing" and "building a massive business from that invention" are more closely linked now than they have been, historically. Standard Oil and US Steel postdated the invention of steel and steam engines by centuries. Boeing postdated the Wright Flyer by a few years, and even then mostly got off the ground due to the World Wars. (And the Wrights actually did try and make a business out of their invention, but that's another story.)
The Apple I was a toy computer designed in 1976. The Apple II was a mass-market personal computer designed in 1977 by the designer of the Apple I. There wasn't a World War nor any obvious military applications for the early Apple Computers, and the inventor who designed them (Woz) just happened to be close friends with someone who was just mercenary enough to try and make a business out of it (Jobs).
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TylerE|8 years ago|reply
The first component of what was to become US Steel opened in 1857, only 2 years after the invention of the Bessemer process that made it practical to produce steel in industrial quantities.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrian_mrd|8 years ago|reply
Yet look at the big N’s track record of innovative hardware and software integration: Wii motion controls, Switch’s Joy-Cons and (soon) the cardboard Toy-Cons, N64 rumble pack for haptic feedback, battery backup in NES and SNES cartridges, etc.
(And yeah, lots of misfires along the way like the Wii U, Power Glove, Virtual Boy, etc).
A massive advantage of being a ‘toy’ company is what I would call the Pixar effect: products work for kids and adults alike.
Lego is also worthy of a look, but made a major strategic error IMHO by not purchasing Minecraft and letting Microsoft snap it up.
hat tip to Google Cardboard, of course.
or maybe that was a success, given its marketing impact post ‘The Wizard’ :)
// edited a few spelling mistakes and added the gCardboard ref and Lego appendum
[+] [-] siong1987|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebspelman|8 years ago|reply
He recommends occasionally thinking about a game as a toy.
"The Lens of The Toy: To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with."
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/012369...
[2] PDF version (see book page 90 // PDF page 119): http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] runevault|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
The funny thing is; they've drawn a mostly different comparison using the same dichotomy ("toy" vs "serious") that I use for occasional rants on this site. I say mostly different, because here's the intersection:
If you give people a tool and tell them it will perfectly solve an important problem, any imperfection in the tool is going to make them angry. If you give someone a toy and say “Look what I made! Isn’t it fun? It kinda does this thing.” then you’ve set yourself up for a positive reaction. It’s much easier to beat low expectations than high ones, so you’ve materially increased your chances at having a happy user.
What I loathe about current startups and SaaS companies is that they seemingly can't - or don't want to - progress past the stage of a toy. I agree that when I see a random toy on the net, I'll have a positive reaction of curiosity. But then, at some point, I'll have an actual thing I want to get done efficiently. Suddenly, the toy becomes borderline useless, because it either can't help me with the task at all, or the help is very weak.
What I mean is: if you're trying to show that something entirely new is possible, by all means, make it a pretty little toy. But when your site is full of advertising copy around "helping users" and "making world (of niche thing X) a better place", then for the love of $deity, make your product functional and efficient.
The reality is, most SaaS startups seem to be toys in that sense, to the point (or because of) it infected the modern UX trends! UX people will tell you about uncluttering, removing functionality, "your user doesn't need that", "this is confusing", "put this in 'advanced options'", "actually, 'options' are confusing, drop it entirely"... For example, observe how, over the years, Google dumbed down its products from actual tools to pretty Material Design toys with a fraction of original functionality. And then people treat Google as role model...
So yeah, startup founders: don't treat yourself seriously, but please, try to actually work on the value you're saying you're providing to your users.
</rant>
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|8 years ago|reply
If the makers of $tool also said what their greatest deficiencies were then buyers would be much more able to decide. Instead they're motivated to hide their flaws and make the sale, hoping -- if it's profitable to do so -- to fix those errors/flaws/shortcomings later.
In a slightly related note it grieved me to see the presenters/producers of the SpaceX launch hide the partial failure of landing the core (I swear you can see one of them set up to tell us, then they get a message in their ear). I thought it was a more progressive endeavour - targeting the end goal rather than media gloss.
[+] [-] Dangeranger|8 years ago|reply
Then after a few iterations it has become a very useful and capable tool for API exploration, testing, and design.
They key for me is to have a tool which hides its advanced features behind a sliding door, where you can reach for the complex feature when needed, but not be bothered by it when you don’t.
[+] [-] schnevets|8 years ago|reply
It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-localized, and offering its own personality and levity.
It seems to me like the founders of the future are coding games today.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
A lemonade stand makes sense because it captures people who want lemonade now, but not enough to get in a car and drive to the closest store. In practice, no single shop can scale itself to address this time/location limitation[0].
Similarly, an "e-Lemonade stand" has to be something that just can't scale beyond local level. Anything that a single entity could do for customers from around the country, or around the world, is out of the picture. So such "lemonade stand" would have to be something either with strong time/location constraints, or something unique to a very specific subgroup of people, that just can't be trivially copied to a different subgroup.
--
[0] - Except people putting out vending machines; this is real life, there are exceptions to every heuristic.
[+] [-] lotyrin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
Likely Wordpress or Wix... as unfortunate as that is the more interesting question is what form the lemonade will take.
[+] [-] zerostar07|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djrogers|8 years ago|reply
If I'm at an enterprise startup, ideally we've identified a business problem, and created a widget to address it. This falls very much in to the tool category, and anything I do to make it 'fun' is of marginal value.
Unfortunately, in the Valley I see a lot of devs who want to work on the toys because they're fun, which means the pool of talent for the 'serious' startups is that much smaller. This is too bad, because in my experience the likelihood of having any startup equity attain significant value is much better in the enterprise startup world.
[+] [-] amasad|8 years ago|reply
Given that there are so many entrepreneurs building startups the best sounding ideas are already taken and what's left are the bad and seemingly bad ones. The market-economy is very good at picking low-hanging fruit. If you dropped a $20 bill in Grand Central station chances are it'll be taken in minutes, while if you dropped it in a random alley somewhere, you can probably go back the next day and find it.
So for you to find a good idea that the market hasn't picked up yet it needs to be somehow hidden in plain sight -- a crumbled $20 bill that looks like a piece of garbage.
A similar concept that I've been thinking a lot about in the context of my startup is a "scaling bottleneck". For you to get big and service everybody you have to first service a demographic that is often thought of as a dead-end in terms of making money. Say kids, or a hobbyists in a certain field. I think the Facebook example applies here too: it was hard to see how this toy could scale beyond college students. Worded as a statement about efficient markets: good ideas for startups that will initially service and grow on a potentially non-monetizable demographic will not attract entrepreneurs and therefore will be available for ones that have that insight.
[+] [-] dsimms|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlamont|8 years ago|reply
Had Blackberry taken the threat of the iphone more seriously, the smartphone market would look very different.
[+] [-] hrktb|8 years ago|reply
Some engineers might have been dismissive, but as a company I think it tried its best to live in the future. It just didn’t have the insight to take the right tradeoffs with the more efficient tech.
Japanese phone makers had the same issue. As early as 2005 some maker tried to have touch screens, some with really innovative interfaces to compensate for the technology, but it stayed niche devices.
I don’t think anyone really dismissed touch interfaces as non threatening. It was just damn hard to have anything that was remotely useful.
[+] [-] aaavl2821|8 years ago|reply
im working on a product that (hopefully) will address an important need, but developing the solution to that need will require pretty robust software and a services component that will take some time. to get users excited about going on that journey id like to help them have some fun and get their imagination stirring. they are used to crappy dry software and have tough jobs, so lightening their day a bit and inspiring them about the future would make them happy
[+] [-] zerostar07|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calchris42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsp1984|8 years ago|reply
How is this not in direct contradiction to http://paulgraham.com/aord.html?
Can somebody shed some light on this? I don't necessarily disagree with Aaron but its tough to make any sense of it when one YC person tells you one thing and another YC person tells you pretty much the exact the opposite.
[+] [-] akharris|8 years ago|reply
In this case, though, context is critical. PG's point here is around startups that have been around for a while, on which people are working full time, that are meant to be businesses. I'm trying to get at the part that comes before that stage.
In this case, the additional context I'd look for would be around what the creator/founder is trying to do and how successful they've been at doing that.
[+] [-] lmm|8 years ago|reply
> It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.
There's a point at which you have to worry about profitability, and that point can be earlier than you think, but at the same time it's not something you should be doing right at the start.
[+] [-] tzhenghao|8 years ago|reply
I also personally think that "toys" are great for building and sharpening one's skills, much like Lego in the real world. This can be everything from you trying to "sell" your toy so other kids will come play with it, all the way up to learning how to glue software components together and make it work. Some technical toy projects have steep learning curves, and as an engineer myself, I see it as an opportunity to learn things I otherwise wouldn't working on a "serious project".
[+] [-] brucephillips|8 years ago|reply
A simpler explanation of the value of a toy is just that being "fun" matters much more for consumer products.
[+] [-] andrew_wc_brown|8 years ago|reply
I think it has come the farthest then any of my previous projects because I didn't take it seriously which made the barrier to entry for contributors easy since I set my standards very low.
I'd normally try to build something to scale with a monetization plan from day one, and I was so burned out on failed projects I thought I'd just work on something I wanted to do, without care of generating money. I figured if I got one of my serious for cash projects going it would free up time for such a project but I got tired waiting.
The seriousness has scaled with the project. Some team members stick around, some sunset, but this is fine because my project keeps attracting people who are suited for the current stage.
Will my project go from toy to business? I don't care. I'll just ride the project for as long as I can, and its possible I will sunset from my project where people better than me will take it somewhere I can't.
https://github.com/omenking/swap-n-pop