If it's been tried before, you should absolutely care. The successes or failures of those that have tried or done it before should be your first lessons and they should inform your decisions (probably not define, but definitely inform).
No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about why it didn't work is your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.
Its not just about working or not. E.g. yahoo vs google. They both work, just google works better. Myspace worked too, just facebook worked better. Even in the cases where things have failed in the past, it can be difficult to figure out why. Do you think that the iPhone was the first smartphone?
The only important factor in 'it's been tried before' is the 'before' bit, the timing. If the timing was off and that's why the venture failed then re-doing it makes sense. If there was some other factor why a venture failed and it wasn't timing then it does not even count. But 'tried before and failed' will stick for everything where timing wasn't a factor.
During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means do a re-run.
I see this all the time, and the challenge is that 'ideas' never occur in a vacuum. Even when the people who have the idea don't consider any of the things going on around them, the success of those ideas are controlled by forces outside and sometime unrecognized.
One of the classics for me was the 'video phone' which was (and remains) a stupid idea. The idea that you would have a device, that only allowed you to communicate with the same family of devices, and provided by a single provider. Is stupid. The idea that you could interact with someone over a network in real time via a combined video and audio stream is a good one.
When Bell Labs proposed the video phone you could use a $1,500 hard wired terminal to send a 262 x 184 grainy black and white video stream to another person who used the same kind of dedicated $1,500 terminal. Not a lot of value to the end user there.
When you could use a $25 web camera and a bit of software to create a video and audio connection between your $1,500 computer and someone elses computer with a webcam, the computer and networking costs were already 'sunk' in the sense they already had justified their value, so video conferencing only needed to meet the marginal value of being able to see who you were talking too.
The difference between 'success' and 'failure' here was the environment in which the idea was presented, and the amount of value the idea brought relative to the cost of doing it. In the context of today's $29.99 cable internet video conferencing is a great idea, with $2,000/month 1.544Mbit T-1 lines it was a stupid idea.
I totally agree with this notion about "timing." MICHAEL RAYNOR has some good research in The Strategy Paradox. One of his central points is that all of the behaviors that create "knock it out of the park" success are the same behaviors that create bankruptcies. He uses the classic example re: Apple, but also provides many others.
I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but rather execution.
A market with a successful competitor can be a good sign of consumer demand. However, a market with dozens or hundreds of failed/stagnant startups and no standout winners is a bad sign that you are working on a startup fad.
Saying that it's possible to nail a business that has been tried and failed before is fine, but you had better understand why things are different now.
What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing, and an opportunity has opened up now?
1. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with semi-successes
2. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with truly new ideas that create markets for themselves, that bring solutions that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and "poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before" market
If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why they failed, you know...).
An important way to evaluate others, especially prospective colleagues, is to observe how much information they use to come to a decision, and note what they do with it.
Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know? Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.)
However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.
I wish I could find this blog post now, but it seems to have disappeared... but there's one by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that I found very influential some time ago. It goes something like (paraphrased) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else".
Now, this may not always be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products, better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys and you at least have a shot.
"Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market - just be better than everybody else."
I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes.
His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.
" In some cases these companies will win if they have a superior product or an unfair advantage in distribution (think Microsoft bundling browsers with their OS)."
Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows.
I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.
It matters greatly if you're entering a thriving market, or a graveyard market (one littered with tons of failed attempts and no reasonable success stories).
If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's probably a reason they all failed too.
The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.
+1 Elad. I seem to specialize in making things that have been tried lots of times before. :)
I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small.
And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.
yep, HN'ers especially are very well aware of this.. the only critiques I usually see on "Show HN" is how does your X product differentiate from already existing Y product, not oh this was done before don't bother etc...
In the early part of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon said (in essence) "Man cannot do what has never been done, except by means not yet tried."
There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily be the key to new varieties of failure.
What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.
[+] [-] obviouslygreen|13 years ago|reply
No, "it's been tried before" doesn't automatically mean "it won't work." But if it didn't, finding out as much as possible about why it didn't work is your best chance at avoiding mistakes that have also already been made.
[+] [-] chacham15|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
During the .com heydays lots of concepts were floated and failed that are successful today. One interesting one is chatroulette, videochat with random partners. Youtube is another, instagram a third. All of those had been tried before but without success because the market just wasn't ready for it. So if you can identify the cause of the mis-fire and it is timing then by all means do a re-run.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
One of the classics for me was the 'video phone' which was (and remains) a stupid idea. The idea that you would have a device, that only allowed you to communicate with the same family of devices, and provided by a single provider. Is stupid. The idea that you could interact with someone over a network in real time via a combined video and audio stream is a good one.
When Bell Labs proposed the video phone you could use a $1,500 hard wired terminal to send a 262 x 184 grainy black and white video stream to another person who used the same kind of dedicated $1,500 terminal. Not a lot of value to the end user there.
When you could use a $25 web camera and a bit of software to create a video and audio connection between your $1,500 computer and someone elses computer with a webcam, the computer and networking costs were already 'sunk' in the sense they already had justified their value, so video conferencing only needed to meet the marginal value of being able to see who you were talking too.
The difference between 'success' and 'failure' here was the environment in which the idea was presented, and the amount of value the idea brought relative to the cost of doing it. In the context of today's $29.99 cable internet video conferencing is a great idea, with $2,000/month 1.544Mbit T-1 lines it was a stupid idea.
[+] [-] mitchell360|13 years ago|reply
http://cdn.dupress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/US_deloitt...
[+] [-] chacham15|13 years ago|reply
I disagree with that part of your statement. Take for example, Dropbox. The main difference between Dropbox and previous attempts was not timing, but rather execution.
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
Or a good sign that everyone else is doing it wrong and there's still room for someone to do it right.
He cited the iPod. Nuff said there.
[+] [-] vbl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunnybunny|13 years ago|reply
What happened to those original teams? Bad team? How was their execution flawed? What new advances in technology (or your secret sauce) will make things different now? Not enough money to jumpstart the market? Bad timing, and an opportunity has opened up now?
[+] [-] primo44|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narsil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnq|13 years ago|reply
1. those who can navigate a sea of ambiguous, "poisoned", fud-ed information about the failures and micro-successes of others - these people have good chances to succeed where others have tried before, on markets littered with semi-successes
2. people who create from scratch, who innovate from nothing, who come with truly new ideas that create markets for themselves, that bring solutions that are so good they make people realize they had a problem in the first place though they weren't shopping for a solution and nobody was trying to sell it to them - these people are very sensitive to crowded markets and "poisoned" information, they have all the chances to fail in a "tried before" market
If you are a type (2) guy, stay tf away from the kinds of market niches the OP is describing: yeah, some can make a killing here, but you need to know how to fish in a poisoned river to do it (almost nobody tells the truth about why they failed, you know...).
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
Do they judge a book by its cover? Are they confirming what they already know? Are they working back to first principles, or are they merely satisfied with oft-repeated heuristics? How well do they pursue additional information? How skeptical are they about their own ideas, knowledge, and mental models? Well over 80% of the population fail in this regard. (For a startup, you're attempting to gain an information asymmetry over the mainstream herd, so why settle for the mainstream herd's heuristics.)
However, before you do this, you should first turn such scrutiny on yourself.
[+] [-] mindcrime|13 years ago|reply
Now, this may not always be good (or even useful) advice, but I think it applies in many contexts. Much like the advice of the author of TFA. Having competitors isn't a horrible thing, if you can just find a way to be better than them. Whether it's better marketing, better sales, better products, better business model, whatever... find a way to be better than the other guys and you at least have a shot.
[+] [-] nitrogen|13 years ago|reply
I once met a man who emigrated to the US from Mexico with basically nothing, then eventually became a Porsche-driving millionaire. His industry? Shipping palettes.
His message was the same: in a crowded market, there's always room for one more.
[+] [-] wcdolphin|13 years ago|reply
Do you mean to imply that you believe Microsoft bundling a web browser in their OS was an unfair competitive advantage for the company? I can see an argument for it increasing market share of Internet Explorer, but definitely not as an unfair competitive advantage for Windows.
I am also not clear on your definition of an idea. As I see it, the idea of Dropbox is fundamentally different from the other online storage solutions provided of the time. To call it another implementation of the idea of storage seems a rather large generalization.
[+] [-] thatthatis|13 years ago|reply
If it is littered with failed attempts (turning one's future personal income into a security, for example), be extra extra extra careful. There's a reason so many people thought it was a good idea, if they all failed then there's probably a reason they all failed too.
The dangerous problem with entering a graveyard is that the reason the market fails is probably something you'll figure out in year 2 or 3 as you're shutting down shop, not something you'll find in your first month of trying.
[+] [-] thetrumanshow|13 years ago|reply
I think having even a tiny foothold in big markets (with no clear winner yet) puts me a great deal ahead of lots of folks who are starting out from scratch. Should it become absolutely necessary that these things start paying my bills in full and even allow me to hire people to help out, it is plausible that the jump is quite small.
And, if I sense a clear opportunity in one of the spaces I'm already in, and I wanted to take a bit of money to make a run at a $MM business, we're warmed up, we have our cleats on, and we're already in the starting gate.
[+] [-] joshbaptiste|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EternalFury|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Millennium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexqgb|13 years ago|reply
There are two parts to this; the means and the ends. Succeeding means getting both parts right. The fact that a field is littered with failed attempts doesn't mean that the aim is unobtainable, or not worth obtaining. Nor does it mean that unconventional thinking is the key to success. It can just as easily be the key to new varieties of failure.
What it does mean is that taking conventional approaches to unsolved problems is a sure way to fail before you've even begun.
[+] [-] dlss|13 years ago|reply