When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas.
Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits.
AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver.
Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies.
So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades.
Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has.
Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed.
You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.
The video has a good heuristic to apply that I think works even within changing contexts: "avoid things with a high supply of founders who want to work on it but zero consumer demand for the thing itself", the classic one being a discovery/recommendations app.
I think the summary of the video captures this essence really nicely.
> If your idea has been tried before, do your research and understand why it didn’t work. Assume the founders who tried before were very smart, very determined people; what’s different now?
If you can't answer that question, don't try again.
I think of "context change" as multiple technologies and trends that chaotically converge into a critical mass of opportunity. It's easy to spot looking backwards, but impossible to predict. You're just the nth individual trying this new/old thing, and now the market supports it, and for a while things are great, until you overreach, you don't reach enough, you're legislated, a new technology comes out of nowhere, there's a pandemic, there's a tectonic shift in global markets, etc.
From the video it doesn't really seem like tar pit ideas are about technical limitations but more about solving the wrong problem. I don't think the ideas you list are tar pit ideas at all. The value proposition for all of these things is obvious. The technology was hard but once the technology existed it was pretty clear that people would want these things.
At least from my read of the definition tar pit ideas are not just ideas that have been tried and failed but they are supposed to seem easy. Things like the restaurant discovery example are technically very easy to build but the limiting factor to people enjoying buying from restaurants is not a tech platform.
What pushed YouTube over the edge was it had backers that were willing to overlook and fight for the rampant copyright violations that it had at the time. Then once big enough it then did the deals to go legit, which it now enthusiastically supports for any new entrants.
No other streaming site would have got away with that. Napster was also a bit of a demonstration of how it probably wouldn't work, so it wasn't a low risk strategy.
I think many of the "fun" ones will always be tarpit ideas. e.g. "an app to help find something fun to do with friends"... that's just your chat app of choice.
Maybe the moral is: before starting a venture like others in the past that failed, work out from first principles as much as you can whether the enabling technologies or other circumstances in the world have reached some kind of tipping point that makes it different this time.
It probably won’t be different this time unless something has changed. “I’m just that good, I will out execute everyone before me” is probably BS. The people before you were probably not lazy or dumb, it just wasn’t time.
I used to be a schoolteacher, so whenever I read about someone's shiny new EdTech idea, I can't help but think that it's a tarpit idea.
Every developed country has a set of professional standards for teachers, and teachers who don't live up to those standards are pushed out, sometimes by having their teaching accreditation revoked. In Australia, for instance, there's a set number of hours of 'professional development' that teachers have to do every few years, and if you don't complete them, you lose accreditation and have to find a new career. The professional development activities and courses that meet the requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard.
When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades.
So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, probably because someone's seen a paper on spaced repetition. That's nice, but you can't build a business around this. It doesn't matter if all the thought leaders are all in on spaced repetition this year, because next year they'll have moved on to something else, because they need to have something new to talk about. In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads, so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.
If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.
Interesting. I don't mean to detract from your main point but as someone who's deeply into spaced repetition for the past 5-7 years (Daily Anki user + built my own spaced repetition systems for learning various skills), I find myself disagreeing with you on some things that you mentioned:
1. Spaced Repetition is not a fad. It's the most consistent and reliable way we we know for rote memorization (conditions apply). And it's not a new thing either. It's been around since the late 1800s. It just wasnt practical until the advent of computers and mobile devices. So I'm skeptical that there is another "something else" to move on to that is as impactful as SRS.
2. Not sure what the state of education in Australia these days but speaking strictly from my school days in India (1980s-1990s), something like spaced repetition would have been a godsend for every single student. And I'm 100% sure a vast majority of schools and teachers still havent heard of it.
3. I've been learning German for the past few years from some of the top private institutes in Vienna, Austria and let me tell you that neither the teacher, nor the students have any idea about spaced repetition.
That said, you're probably right about the business-viability of such ventures because of the difficulty of selling to the decision-makers, I just strongly disagree about Spaced Repetition being a "flavor of the year"
I partially agree with what you just posted, but — walking along your train of thought, I take a bit of issue with the following paragraph (sliced for emphasis):
> So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, [...] so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.
I am of the radical idea that lots of things should not be for-profit businesses (doesn't mean that it can't be profitable — just not exorbitantly so), and that economist's mistaken goal of exponential growth expectations is criminally separated from the sigmoid limits to reality.
So, therefore, while I agree that EdTech is a bunch of fads, I think the fact that EdTech is a thing is wrong.
And I agree with your main point that we should be chasing accumulation and refinement of knowledge, and not doing some sort of spring-cleaning every 10 years.
> If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.
I think this principle generalizes to:
If you want to sell software to X, go and work in a bunch of X, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.
Although some people seemingly have a talent for selling products into industries they have no idea about. I always assume that means a highly motivated buyer.
The tarpit idea is very descriptive in hindsight. What makes something a tarpit is an idea that sounds cool on the surface and is accessible (don’t have to be one of a kind founder to do it) and when you talk to your friends and people who might be customers you get very positive feedback. So it all starts to feel like a slam dunk. However, if you are a VC you will have seen this exact idea or close variations in it a hundred times and they all flamed out to a zero. As the VC you have visibility into common failure modes ( not able to charge enough, no scaled market, not sticky enough, etc) what is hard from the founder side of things is all those issues and many more are common to almost any venture until you crack the problem and get market fit. So the tarpit concept is more a description of VC scare tissue than a fully operational definition for founders ,because a former tarpit can become a blue ocean of opportunity ( uncontested market) if some element of the equation changes ( technology shift, culture shift, deep founder insight etc)
So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit?
1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were.
2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation.
3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention.
But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.
I found imagining the actual metaphor of tarpit enlightening - it looks like a nice healthy pool of water but turns out to be sticky and impossible to get out of. Under that attractive surface are all the corpses of everyone else who charged in and got stuck.
So it’s exactly like you say: you keep your distance and you look for evidence.
I do think the point of the metaphor is that sometimes a tarpit is just what it is. I.e. there is no value under that shiny surface and you’re only getting stuck staring at it.
An idea is tarpit until someone, or some new tech, or regulation cracks it.
YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.
I think an underrated aspect of this is also that YC is ultimately a VC fund and so they're talking about companies that have the potential to be massive, multi-billion dollar companies.
Many typical tarpit ideas (to do apps, habit trackers, note taking etc.) can be great businesses for a couple of people building software together but not have venture-scale outcomes.
I do agree that as soon as you get network effects (recommendations, marketplaces etc.), SOOOO much is tarpit.
B2C is virtually impossible compared to B2B. This may not be immediately apparent but it is so obvious in hindsight.
The biggest reason I think founders are going for B2C is because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them?
The advantage of B2B is that once you figure it out for the first customer, you are on an exponential path to happiness. You can practically cancel your marketing budget at that point. B2C requires an ongoing assault on the dopamine economy. Unless you can get someone on a subscription and program them to forget about it, you're gonna get steamrolled by TikTok & friends.
My experience is the complete opposite. B2B is almost impossible, even when you have a great product for a great price. B2C on the other hand is a delight, with much better prospects for growing your clientele.
B2B puts you at the mercy of "your next customer's wished feature".
The bigger the "B" you're trying to sell to, the bigger the desire to say yes. This is a very dangerous path.
If you're DHH, you can say no. If you're responding to RFPs for a living... It becomes complicated. Not impossible of course, but it's a different path altogether.
The only B2B ideas I have would apply to one company i'm familiar with, maybe a couple of similar companies in the same space. How is that better than B2C?
> because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them?
How do you learn this skill? Any resources or books you recommend?
Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck.
Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).
I did a project on this in like 2010 as a student hobby project. It wasn't accurate, but I also had no idea what I was doing. I mostly did it in a naive way, where I mapped out signal strengths in various rooms (it was dorm floor, 2 rooms shared each) and then trying to figure out where I was based on it. As a non-CS student I thought it was cool......
I think there is a difference between ideas that are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works and ideas that we do not currently have the capabilities to solve.
What about multipath? Is that not an issue at wifi wavelengths? Or is that a sub or superset of reflections? It was quite a long time ago now that the first "proof" that one could use leaky WiFi to "see through walls" and observe people moving around inside a building from without.
Participate in a transmitter hunt (also called a foxhunt or a t-hunt) where the organizers or the people hiding the transmitter know their stuff. Reflections and multipath can lead you miles away from a transmitter location.
Anyhow, someone asked me if I knew how to do this without consent once; that is, if I knew how to track people in a building without them knowing. This was 8 years ago or so. I had hoped saying "that's not possible" would dissuade them, but instead they just never spoke to me again.
Not AI but Ive seen a lot of social startup apps in my time all trying to be the next facebook with a twist. They all end up in the same place. If you have any idea along the lines of "Do/share X with your friends" it has probably been tried a million times before so just don't. Another one is dating apps. Everyone thinks they all suck and everyone thinks they have the new twist that will make it not suck. End result is so many shitty 'ghost town' dating apps that end up looking and functioning like the other 99%. Once in a while a Snapchat or Tindr will break out with a genuinely fresh idea but for every one of those there are a million carcasses of failed startup ideas
Not sure about AI specific but:
Todo apps, habit trackers, lots of social media, job boards, recommendation apps, fun things to do with friends, travel planners, trackers (movies/books).
I think it’s more common for B2C because these are things that a lot of people come across.
Some of these ideas could maybe be done better now that we have genAI but the question might would it work as a standalone app or is it just a feature?
It's far too soon to call any AI-specific ideas tarpits. Nothing newly made possible by LLMs or generative image models has been tried long enough to give up on. There are no startup bones to dig up yet.
It's only a tarpit idea when you don't know it's a tarpit idea.
I'm building a bookmarking service. I have no illusions that this will become anything more than a hobby project. Still, I love solving specific problems for myself (specifically, making consumption easier to deal with content overload).
Sometimes a tarpit idea might work because of founders execution. Then the upside is huge.
For instance, some animals who survived the tarpit were naturally selected for evolution.
Philosophically, idea of building a startup is a tarpit too. You need lot of perseverance and courage to navigate out of it, survive and eventually win.
I wish HN had a wiki, and that articles like this could have a list associated with them, with links to the companies that tried and failed under each tarpit idea.
dang that was packed with real talk - ive tripped over my share of looks obvious, actually impossible ideas too. you ever get tempted to try the same failing thing hoping this time the timings right?
You can browse through to the video on YouTube then read the transcript (I think transcripts are available on all YouTube videos - perhaps unless the publisher disables it. But it’s definitely available on this one).
I think it would be great if YC turned discussions like this into well edited written articles. I know there’s talk about producing more text content to help startups.
"The restaurant doesn't exist" is an important axiom.
It's why recommendation engines are useless, Netflix has nothing more. Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced.
> the world seems limitless but for these physical things it's actually fairly limited
This is a really good quote, it also applies to digital.
Anyway, a list of tarpit ideas would be useful. The axiom's are too hard, like software complexity and getting money out of educational institutions.
[+] [-] kristopolous|10 months ago|reply
Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits.
AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver.
Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies.
So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades.
Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has.
Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed.
You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.
[+] [-] nickdothutton|10 months ago|reply
Smart people spend time on this problem/solution.
Solutions appear but fall short of expectations.
The technology or more commonly that application of it is stigmatised.
Sometimes the whole field becomes tainted.
The problem/solution complex is declared a “dead end” or “false dawn”.
Interest cools. Nobody invests for a while. The wreckage of the previous cycle rusts away. The craters erode. This takes 20-30 years.
During this period, some very small companies, academics, and individuals continue to guard the flame, but lack funding or new talent to advance.
Go to step 1, invent new buzzwords/framing and repeat.
Ignore much of what was learned during the previous cycle.
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...
[+] [-] dgs_sgd|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] maccard|10 months ago|reply
> If your idea has been tried before, do your research and understand why it didn’t work. Assume the founders who tried before were very smart, very determined people; what’s different now?
If you can't answer that question, don't try again.
[+] [-] HPsquared|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cjohnson318|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] morsecodist|10 months ago|reply
At least from my read of the definition tar pit ideas are not just ideas that have been tried and failed but they are supposed to seem easy. Things like the restaurant discovery example are technically very easy to build but the limiting factor to people enjoying buying from restaurants is not a tech platform.
[+] [-] fidotron|10 months ago|reply
No other streaming site would have got away with that. Napster was also a bit of a demonstration of how it probably wouldn't work, so it wasn't a low risk strategy.
[+] [-] mritchie712|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] api|10 months ago|reply
It probably won’t be different this time unless something has changed. “I’m just that good, I will out execute everyone before me” is probably BS. The people before you were probably not lazy or dumb, it just wasn’t time.
[+] [-] fnord77|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelcampbell|10 months ago|reply
What's this mean?
[+] [-] aaron695|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cjs_ac|10 months ago|reply
Every developed country has a set of professional standards for teachers, and teachers who don't live up to those standards are pushed out, sometimes by having their teaching accreditation revoked. In Australia, for instance, there's a set number of hours of 'professional development' that teachers have to do every few years, and if you don't complete them, you lose accreditation and have to find a new career. The professional development activities and courses that meet the requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard.
When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades.
So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, probably because someone's seen a paper on spaced repetition. That's nice, but you can't build a business around this. It doesn't matter if all the thought leaders are all in on spaced repetition this year, because next year they'll have moved on to something else, because they need to have something new to talk about. In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads, so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.
If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.
[+] [-] udit99|10 months ago|reply
1. Spaced Repetition is not a fad. It's the most consistent and reliable way we we know for rote memorization (conditions apply). And it's not a new thing either. It's been around since the late 1800s. It just wasnt practical until the advent of computers and mobile devices. So I'm skeptical that there is another "something else" to move on to that is as impactful as SRS.
2. Not sure what the state of education in Australia these days but speaking strictly from my school days in India (1980s-1990s), something like spaced repetition would have been a godsend for every single student. And I'm 100% sure a vast majority of schools and teachers still havent heard of it.
3. I've been learning German for the past few years from some of the top private institutes in Vienna, Austria and let me tell you that neither the teacher, nor the students have any idea about spaced repetition.
That said, you're probably right about the business-viability of such ventures because of the difficulty of selling to the decision-makers, I just strongly disagree about Spaced Repetition being a "flavor of the year"
[+] [-] rolandog|10 months ago|reply
> So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, [...] so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.
I am of the radical idea that lots of things should not be for-profit businesses (doesn't mean that it can't be profitable — just not exorbitantly so), and that economist's mistaken goal of exponential growth expectations is criminally separated from the sigmoid limits to reality.
So, therefore, while I agree that EdTech is a bunch of fads, I think the fact that EdTech is a thing is wrong.
And I agree with your main point that we should be chasing accumulation and refinement of knowledge, and not doing some sort of spring-cleaning every 10 years.
[+] [-] fidotron|10 months ago|reply
I think this principle generalizes to: If you want to sell software to X, go and work in a bunch of X, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.
Although some people seemingly have a talent for selling products into industries they have no idea about. I always assume that means a highly motivated buyer.
[+] [-] FinnLobsien|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] asimpleusecase|10 months ago|reply
So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit?
1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were. 2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation. 3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention.
But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.
[+] [-] scyzoryk_xyz|10 months ago|reply
So it’s exactly like you say: you keep your distance and you look for evidence.
I do think the point of the metaphor is that sometimes a tarpit is just what it is. I.e. there is no value under that shiny surface and you’re only getting stuck staring at it.
[+] [-] dzink|10 months ago|reply
YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.
[+] [-] FinnLobsien|10 months ago|reply
Many typical tarpit ideas (to do apps, habit trackers, note taking etc.) can be great businesses for a couple of people building software together but not have venture-scale outcomes.
I do agree that as soon as you get network effects (recommendations, marketplaces etc.), SOOOO much is tarpit.
[+] [-] dgs_sgd|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|10 months ago|reply
The biggest reason I think founders are going for B2C is because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them?
The advantage of B2B is that once you figure it out for the first customer, you are on an exponential path to happiness. You can practically cancel your marketing budget at that point. B2C requires an ongoing assault on the dopamine economy. Unless you can get someone on a subscription and program them to forget about it, you're gonna get steamrolled by TikTok & friends.
[+] [-] carlosjobim|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] phtrivier|10 months ago|reply
The bigger the "B" you're trying to sell to, the bigger the desire to say yes. This is a very dangerous path.
If you're DHH, you can say no. If you're responding to RFPs for a living... It becomes complicated. Not impossible of course, but it's a different path altogether.
[+] [-] fud101|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nkzd|10 months ago|reply
How do you learn this skill? Any resources or books you recommend?
[+] [-] Scene_Cast2|10 months ago|reply
Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).
[+] [-] little_ent|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AdventureMouse|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] genewitch|10 months ago|reply
Participate in a transmitter hunt (also called a foxhunt or a t-hunt) where the organizers or the people hiding the transmitter know their stuff. Reflections and multipath can lead you miles away from a transmitter location.
Anyhow, someone asked me if I knew how to do this without consent once; that is, if I knew how to track people in a building without them knowing. This was 8 years ago or so. I had hoped saying "that's not possible" would dissuade them, but instead they just never spoke to me again.
[+] [-] surprisetalk|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] joshdavham|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thruway516|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] queueueue|10 months ago|reply
Some of these ideas could maybe be done better now that we have genAI but the question might would it work as a standalone app or is it just a feature?
[+] [-] tlb|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] davidedicillo|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] debarshri|10 months ago|reply
For instance, some animals who survived the tarpit were naturally selected for evolution.
Philosophically, idea of building a startup is a tarpit too. You need lot of perseverance and courage to navigate out of it, survive and eventually win.
[+] [-] more_corn|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gitroom|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] badmonster|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mwilcox|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anself|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tomhow|10 months ago|reply
I think it would be great if YC turned discussions like this into well edited written articles. I know there’s talk about producing more text content to help startups.
[+] [-] djmips|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|10 months ago|reply
"The restaurant doesn't exist" is an important axiom.
It's why recommendation engines are useless, Netflix has nothing more. Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced.
> the world seems limitless but for these physical things it's actually fairly limited
This is a really good quote, it also applies to digital.
Anyway, a list of tarpit ideas would be useful. The axiom's are too hard, like software complexity and getting money out of educational institutions.
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]