(I submitted this, but don't know the author personally, so there are some assumptions built into to the following.)
[edit- regarding issue of straw man perception]
The issue is that nobody who makes beautiful novelty thinks their own work is beautiful novelty. (So nobody will appear in favor of it, even if they make it.)
So it's not quite a straw man. Everybody agrees that a certain type of thing is bad, but nobody thinks they themselves are responsible for that thing.
I suspect the author has some specific start-ups in mind but didn't want to call them out. Why have people be distracted by the drama of him dissing $startup in a blog post when he really wants people to ponder a more big picture idea?
It sounds like he is attacking a straw man. It doesn’t seem like anyone is making the arguments he is attacking, especially not on the page he is linking to and saying he is responding to. Specifically (for example) no one seems to claim that designers are “the new kings of startups”.
The article references three different posts about how startups need to aim higher and try to change the world, then conflates it with "trying to do something really useful like making things that people actually want to pay for," before falling back to the comment on "or if it's free."
My point is that making something people will pay for is vastly different from what any of those articles he was referencing is talking about.
Honestly, the whole post kind of struck me as a retread dressed up to be linkbait. Which, ironically, is what he's complaining about in startups.
Yeah, your complaint is honestly kind of ridiculous. Contrarian viewpoints get eyeballs. This site (and many like it) welcome opinions from startup bloggers. This wasn't my favorite post by this author, but it was an interesting read and certainly topical.
So, how do these two statements jibe and form part of an sort of coherent argument?
Some other guys had an idea, received validation from two potential clients, raised funding, hired a lot of people, built a product and discovered nobody really wants to pay for it.
Why does it feel like the lean startup movement has given a lot of people the license to produce crap?
The lean startup principles are pretty much specifically against going out, raising funding, hiring a lot of people, and then building something nobody wants. The whole point of Customer Development is to not do all of that until you've validated the market for whatever it is you are proposing to build.
And then you have this statement:
On the other side you have teams producing amazing products. Take for example the Pebble smart watch, the DoubleRobotics telepresence robots, Appfog free PaaS hosting, SmugMug photo hosting, SixthSense or any random project on Kickstarter.
Where the author seems infatuated with a list of products with no commentary whatsoever on whether or not they are successful in the market. You can produce a great product and still fail to have a successful business. So what point is this article really trying to make?
If you’re in a startup looking forward to your next pivot, please just stop. The world doesn’t need another way for consumers to connect with merchants or an app that adds double rainbows to blurry pictures.
And again, we have to sentences that have absolutely no connection to one another.
This article comes off as a mish-mash of interesting thoughts, jumbled together, when the author's point seems to reduce to "work on big, world changing ideas. Where's my flying car?" And that's not a bad sentiment, but this article just seems to ramble all over the place to get there.
So it would seem that the outrage of the author is misplaced. The emphasis is put on the fact that the sites are being cloned, but that is not where the value lies. The value is in gaining traction in international markets. This practice seems perfectly legitimate to me. The straw man in this article is developed from the belief that the raw value of a startup comes only from the software.
i feel like it would be a great article if it weren't playing totally on semantics to write a sensationalist article.
he's basically labeling startups and startup culture as the "bad business" subset of entrepreneurs. it is not the case that all startups are bad businesses, nor is it the case that all entrepreneurs are running good businesses.
he could totally skip all of that labeling and write an article on running good business.
This post isn't particularly well thought out or argued, but special mention must go to footnote [2] for being self serving nonsense. While those complainers do exist and are wrong about some aspects of the situation they are quite right to criticise the exploitative start up ecosystem.
Hmm. My reply was absolutely genuine. You appear to be ascribing to me motives that don't exist. I honestly wanted to know the reasoning or beliefs underlying your comment, because I honestly didn't understand why you were calling it a "fluff of platitudes". I honestly wanted to know why you believe that this item is "actually hurting startup founders." That's why I asked for more information, and in particular, I asked for more details of why you said what you said, before I made any kind of judgement about your motives.
So thank you for your reply, I have found it interesting and enlightening. And believe it or not, I'm being genuine when I say that.
> My comment was directed at the author, not at you.
That wasn't clear. It often appears to me on HN that people direct comments at the submitter of an item, rather than at the author. After all, the author might not read HN. Thank you for your clarification.
> I don't know what if any connection you have to the author.
For reference, none.
> However, you should note the content-free enthusiastic comment
> by LeonW, posted right after you submitted the article, in which
> he does not mention that he is the author's co-founder.
Noted. Personally, I've always pretty much ignored content-free, enthusiastic comments, or even down-voted and in some cases flagged them. I do that without wondering whether people have connections, or are co-founders, or whatever, simply because I tend to act on the content (or lack thereof) rather than perceived, inferred, or supposed connections or motives. That's just me - I don't look for conspiracies.
> You might also have noticed that many articles from this blog are
> similar: a catchy headline, a bunch of vague inspirational words
> on an uncontroversial subject, a token link to the conversion
> funnel, and a surprisingly high rank on the HN front page.
So, you obviously think the high rank is undeserved. Fair enough - why do you think that might be the case? I know that there is a reasonably effective voting-ring detector on HN (at times possibly too aggressive) so it doesn't seem likely to me that it's just the author getting lots of cronies to upvote it. Do you think the HN audience is insufficiently critical?
One reason I ask is this: for a slightly different context, I could've written this article and I would have meant every word of it. I'm active in certain circles, and I frequently mentor and give time and advice with absolutely no expectation of return or reward. The reason? Pretty much exactly as listed in this item. That's why it resonated with me, and that's why I submitted it - I'd like to see more people give back to their communities, whatever communities they may be.
As it happens I do get benefits in return, largely in line with those listed in the item. It's not why I do it, it's not why I did it in the first place, and it's not why I'll continue to do it. In truth, I think it's important on some level, and I think it's right.
> If you aren't even slightly suspicious that this article is
> 99% conversion fodder and maybe 1% altruism, I am not going
> to be able to explain it to you.
Well, I read things to gain insight, learn stuff, and with any luck, to become better at what I choose to do. Sometimes I find real truths in unlikely places.
But here's one thing I've found. For me, evaluating things critically for what they are, and not for where I think they come from, or why I think they've been produced, and independently of any real or assumed motives on the part of the author, works for me. After all, the overwhelming majority of material on the web has some motivation behind it, and I deal with that by treating everything on its merits.
It's taken me some time to compose this reply. I hope you find it an interesting insight into a point of view other than your own. No doubt we won't agree, but I've learned something from you, and I hope this affords you the same opportunity.
Second this. Specifically he is pointing out that without the proper definition of a startup, this is merely lip-service that hits the right amount of buzz words for the media to regurgitate.
Why is he posting this? My guess, he genuinely cares to see entrepreneurship thrive in America and can't bare to see halfhearted attempts with hidden agendas.
My reaction was the opposite when I read his post. I thought it is pretty ballsy for someone like him to to go against the grain like this as he is likely speaking out against peers and colleagues. Status quo for Blank as he has written posts critical of VCs when deserved.
I'm not sure the author is questioning the quality of startups. He's just reminding everyone about the goal of starting a business, not a website.
You're absolutely right, the author is frustrated. It's because many startups have innovative technical visions but no clear business model. The stand outs have both, right?
I think the author makes some weak arguments. I've worked as a consultant on a few zany startups and all I have to say is that this kind of crap happens all the time:
There are so many cocked up ideas out there (many of them built with someone else's money in the hope that somehow, someone, somewhere will give them money).
Some of these ideas actually get funding, which is tragic, and some of them actually make it, which might be worse, but most of them never see the light of day.
That comment is not wishing for "personal harm to a new product's creator." It's wishing that the market rejects a business. There's a deeply reasoned argument in that comment about the merits of the business model and it is anti-intellectual to dismiss it the way you would dismiss unhinged claims for violence.
I understand that a side effect of a business failing is that the people working for the business lose their jobs. But if anything, that argument would apply primarily to the employees of the new product, not the creator. The creator understands that a new business is a venture - an attempt, not a guarantee - and that for many reasons it could fail.
And, more generally, it seems like an awful slippery slope to characterize wanting some other business to not succeed as a desire to harm anyone. Suppose I agree with Suhail's goals but also I think I can execute on the idea better and I start a competitor. If there's only enough room in the market for one winner, and I want to be that winner, am I now wishing harm on Suhail too? Suppose I start a business that competes with some old-school giant ripe for disruption. Am I attempting to cause personal harm to the C-suite of that business?
This is exactly what people are concerned about with Paul's article. Once you get comfortable painting some critics as "haters," it's easy to dismiss all critics that way. Haters and fanboys do not spring up from the quantum foam; they might not present their arguments in the best way, but if you have an overwhelming number of one or the other, there's quite possibly a reason for it.
It is not so much an as-hominem attack as a reality check on the level of abstraction. The rocks that came back from the moon are (for insurance purposes) "priceless", but yet the moon was not a for-profit expedition. On the contrary, why not sell some "priceless" rocks for an infinite sum and alleviate world hunger? But somewhere in-between what sounds logical and what is reasonable to expect there intervenes some other considerations.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.
None of this is to discourage. Its more to get the dialogue on a track where what is actually hard is actually at least given some respect.
The article betrays a complete lack of empathy for the pain points of the customer - which is probably why he's having so much trouble to get people to pay for them.
He starts out by citing Field of Dreams "if you build it they will come" but then seems to completely miss that point by building it without validating it was something people actually wanted.
"I didn’t care so much about creating a product that would actually make me money, I just wanted someone to use something I built." perhaps sums this piece up best. He's getting into this for the wrong reasons - to be an "entrepreneur" or have a "passive income" rather than solving a problem anyone wants solving.
This whole post seems like a feeble attempt at addressing the issue that he makes horrible comments about startups that haven't failed when his has.
Yes, this is the point: to show you that no matter how illogical something can be on the internet, there will still be hype and buzz around it. It's not supposed to make sense.
Seems like that is what his point is now that he is a lower statistic than the people he rants about.
Agreed. The insidious thing about this article, though, is that the author is feeding into startup-wannabe culture by catering to the question that is the first out of the mouth of the most clueless "idea guys". It almost seems like a ploy for page views given that the rest of the article is fairly reasonable and I have no reason to doubt the author's credentials.
[edit- regarding issue of straw man perception] The issue is that nobody who makes beautiful novelty thinks their own work is beautiful novelty. (So nobody will appear in favor of it, even if they make it.)
So it's not quite a straw man. Everybody agrees that a certain type of thing is bad, but nobody thinks they themselves are responsible for that thing.
I suspect the author has some specific start-ups in mind but didn't want to call them out. Why have people be distracted by the drama of him dissing $startup in a blog post when he really wants people to ponder a more big picture idea?
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