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.
I remember the excitement around VR back in the late 80s. These new polhemous motion tracking devices and LED microdisplays were going to change the world! Except the technology was expensive and ultimately it kinda sucked. It was barely used outside academia, interest died off gradually and eventually it was tacitly acknowledged to be going nowhere.
Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
> But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough
I'm not sure what use cases you've tried it, but I'm "playing" a bunch of flight simulators, and after getting used using a HP Reverb 2 for all my simming, it's basically impossible to move back to "flat" screens again. It gives you a completely different depth-perception that is as vital when you fly as when you race, so basically any simming is a lot easier and more fun with VR. But again, if you make the plunge into VR simming, it's short of impossible to go back to "normal" afterwards.
> hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
Yeah, simultaneously I agree with this. VR-in-motion (so not sitting still) is still pretty bad, and the setups you need for good performance are pretty expensive, so it's unlikely to break into mainstream unless some breakthrough is being made. With that said, there are niches that are very well served by VR and personally I guess I hope it'll be enough when the mainstream hype dies off.
I disagree, I played a lot of Elite: Dangerous with a VR headset and while I completely agree about the scale, it was so much hassle to get in and out of the goggles and get everything set up and then to be totally cut off from the real world for any extended period that I stopped using it.
It's been in the closet for a few years. Beat Saber is fun too, but.. I guess if you're the kind of person who has a sim setup in a dedicated room in your house it's still appealing but for anyone remotely casual it's just not worth it
VR has moved from "only enthusiasts can even consider it" to "viable niche". That's a huge step up... viewed logarithmically you could even call it "halfway there". But it definitely needs a couple more revs before it gets to "mainstream accessible".
IIRC there was a brief VR spike around early 2000s. I remember trying out Duke Nukem in a helmet and a three-button controller.
And then a bit later, there were 3D glasses, ones that synchronized with the high-rate monitor to show each eye its respective right and left frame. The demo for it at the time was Rogue Squadron and I thought the effect was amazing.
AR is the true future, but we're a materials science breakthrough away. You need waveguides or some similar thing that generates holograms that's cheap, has a wide FOV, and works in bright light. HoloLens and Magic Leap came close, but people couldn't figure out how to make enough money off the devices, apparently.
I don't want to see sports teams playing on my coffee table. I don't want to see recipes dancing in front of me while I wear glasses in front of a stove, the humidity of boiling water vapor sticking to plastic lenses. I don't want people dicking around with headwear while they're supposed to be driving. I don't want to see contact and bio information hovering above my friends. And I certainly don't want to see ad overlays throughout daily life.
I want to escape life and enter fantasy worlds. I want to be transported. I want to see the Matrix unfold in front of me. That's about as far from AR or XR as I can imagine.
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.
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.
In central Europe our biggest tarpit are sustainability / climate topics. Even founders that are smart enough to realize the difficulties still pursue these topics because of an unfoly feedback loop where government agencies almost exclusively fund those "societally important" areas. There's no other risk capital available so most founders align their goals, just to fold 1-2 years later.
I'm not sure I agree with this - though I'm not in central Europe.
Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves.
If you're trying to sell sustainabiity, what is your business? What are you selling?
If it's advice on how people can be sustainable, or carbon credits or something, sure, those are things that may be tarpits.
But electric vehicles were probably a tarpit idea until they went from being advanced golf carts to being real cars.
Environmentally friendly packaging is doing very well. Etc etc.
I mean that's better then funding a bunch of startups that try and use psychological traps to capture the attention of your kids and ruining their ability to focus. Most of them also fold 1-2 years later.
The purpose of the app is to sell ads via engagement, recommendation is at least a partial (majority?) driver of engagement, so it’s part and parcel of the purpose of the app.
People want what they’re providing, companies want to sell ads, and increase people’s tolerance of ads. Until the next platform without ads comes out (note - tiktok didn’t have ads almost at all for the first year)
Yeah last.fm was a streaming webradio type thing. You could also scrobble your own mp3s but (as I remember it) the whole point of that was so you could then listen to the stream tailored to your preferences.
Just like Pandora which was also really great for a while.
> You could also scrobble your own mp3s but (as I remember it) the whole point of that was so you could then listen to the stream tailored
That's not how I remember it at all. The biggest features (that at least made me and my friends use it) was that no matter what player you used, it probably had a "Scrobble to last.fm" features (which sadly, seems Spotify at least removed), and then you'd use Last.fm to find new songs to play via your own player.
I don't think I remember anyone using the Last.fm radios/playlists, but instead just as a data-browser to find new artists/albums/songs, then play those somewhere else.
But this was around 2005 sometime in Sweden, we basically just had Spotify and maybe Grooveshark available for streaming, maybe things typically worked differently elsewhere.
Yeah this is actually a really useful idea in general.
I learned this when I was put on a team for a modeling competition in college. You had like 72 hours to solve the problem and write the report. It was really stressful but a LOT of fun.
There were a range of topics that you could choose from. Some were really obvious how to apply mathematics to, and some... weren't.
I was the math talent on the team... but my team members talked me out of going for one of the problems that were easy to apply math to. We instead picked the problem where it was LEAST obvious. And... we ended up winning the competition against a field of 10,000+.
I think that lesson applies in business all over the place. There's actually a lot of good comfortable money to be made in unglamorous industries.
I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem
"It's a problem they want to solve for themselves", but note that they haven't tried all the alternative recommendation services and are only creating one as a last resort. They want to solve the problem, which is a different drive from wanting a recommendation app.
Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :)
I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool.
However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis.
The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard.
I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.
Interesting. I wonder if this is the right way though. Firstly because the RT critic score was gamified a while ago, and secondly because there's often a big gap between what the critics think and what the audience thinks. (One of the things I like to do is find movies on RT where the difference between the two is the biggest)
Even if you ignore the fact that some reviews will be sponsored and not made entirely in good faith this is assuming that critics' judgment is a good signal in the first place.
Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations.
There's also the fact that more data == better recommedations.
Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it.
Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here"
This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace.
For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server.
I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.
Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services.
Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.
That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.
It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.
Exactly. And the whole reason all these other services popped up is the IP holders realized they could make a lot more money with their own service vs licensing to an aggregator. I think it worked out pretty well for Disney+, because they have a huge back catalog of very popular IP. Not sure if anyone else is really making money with this new model, but they still don’t want to go back to ceding all control to Netflix.
I agree (and would also like to see that sort of info if it existed). But, I’m pretty sure the same folks who were in charge of cable when it became insufferable are now in charge of streaming. So, less-annoying business models… I’m not hopeful.
Amazon Prime Video is already this. You can subscribe to Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, etc. from within the Prime Video app, and watch content normally exclusive to those services.
That seems like terrible advice. First, many founders are targeting business or government customers rather than consumers. Second, when it comes to disruptive innovations, consumers don't even know what they want until you show it to them.
I guess. Successful executions become so endemic you have to take a step back and recognize it.
Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix.
Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie.
Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well.
So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it.
> Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix.
Nope, HN is just an online forum. I can't tailor what I see on HN to my tastes, and there's a subset of posters who get preferential treatment on the frontpage (YC companies), so nope, HN is not a recommendation site.
Quite often we are incapable of identifying what those different conditions were. When something you don't think is important is the actual cause of the failure you're unlikely to notice and misatrubute the cause.
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.
Instagram has recently been quite successful at giving me ads for events that seem actually fun and relevant to me, to the point of me being low key afraid of throwing off the algorithm so it starts recommend worse things. So, I think there's potential but it's very elusive. I feel that my Instagram "getting it" is more of an accident than by design.
Before we had cables dedicated to internet, we reused telephone cables for both telephone+internet, so adding digital data on top of the existing network, hence Digital Subscriber Line :) It was the fiber of the 90s.
The island I grew up on in Sweden (with a population of ~700) got broadband in 2007 sometime I think, and in 2013 got fiber optics. Surely most of North America has to be using better stuff than DSL at this point? Although geographically and politically it is probably a bit harder to get high performance internet access everywhere there.
Some thoughts: VR, fusion, non-refrigerant cooling technologies, personal genomics, silicon-on-sapphire ICs, every drug and treatment that is just around the corner, quantum computing, CO₂ capture, failed Google projects such as Google Glass, Google Wave, Google contact lens glucose sensor.
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"
Sure, but there are all sorts of pendulum shifts in the teaching zeitgeist. Spaced repetition was just an app-based example: it's been a few years since I was in the classroom so I'm not sure what the flavour of the year is, but if spaced repetition were currently popular amongst schoolteachers, the swing away from it that I would expect to see would be to argue that memorisation isn't really learning and that learning experiences should be about developing deeper understanding, and so on. There is no measure of 'best practice'; a lot of these shifts are driven by personal preference.
> argue that memorisation isn't really learning and that learning experiences should be about developing deeper understanding,
Agreed, but if you ask anyone who's SR for any amount of time will tell you: It's realllly hard to be effective with it if you don't understand the underlying concept. The order of operations is "first understand, then drill". Of course, this comes with nuance. There are things that just have to be drilled and others that don't even need any drilling if you understand the concept. And I'd expect those educators to know the difference.
> There is no measure of 'best practice'; a lot of these shifts are driven by personal preference.
Again, you're probably right but using the example of SR threw me off because it's the one thing where I think the data is so clear that it's easily justifiable.
I didn’t read GP as making a judgment that spaced repetition was new or a fad, but rather that in the environment of how education decision-makers shift focus to new things, it’s a current flavor-of-the-year.
We saw elements of this with “new math”, Singapore math, and common core math, each label of fairly similar concepts promising to improve kids’ facility with math. Test scores haven’t leapt though.
Yeah, you're probably right. I agree that the problem might be shifting focus every year but the one difference with your math examples is that Singapore Math/Common Core math etc. all seem like different systems that don't build on top of each other. You (I'm assuming here) can't focus on Singapore Math one year, then the next year to add Common Core math on top of that etc. Its one or the other.
Spaced repetition on the other hand is a cross-disciplinary technique that just needs to be introduced and kept there. There's nothing else out there to substitute it with. If the young staff hype it up one year and then it becomes part of the curriculum and then they move on to other fancy edtech things, then there's nothing wrong with it.
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.
"EdTech" is ripe for disruption - by a non-profit, open-source entity that provides "school stuff as a service" but is basically a lifestyle business.
It would have to be funded by adventure capitalists (e.g., retired techies having fun building stuff) for awhile, but it could easily take over once it got traction.
> 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.
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.
> B2B puts you at the mercy of "your next customer's wished feature".
Yes.
> The bigger the "B" you're trying to sell to, the bigger the desire to say yes.
Absolutely.
> This is a very dangerous path.
You lost me here. What you term "a very dangerous path" I call "a roadmap".
The bigger the customer, the more they can pay. Also, just because it's 'B' and not 'C' doesn't mean there aren't humans involved. You can go a long way (often, all the way) with a simple 1:1 conversation with the most senior person responsible for your project on the customer's side.
> 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?
Which is why it feels virtually impossible to many founders. Some people may claim B2B is easier, but only if you have the skill and it is hard to figure out how to obtain it
Not everyone needs to be on the sales team. You only need ~one person who knows how to do it. Once they get the channels opened with the client and the technical people are sending emails directly & regularly, even the most closeted nerds (including those who might also be founders) can begin to contribute meaningfully.
This is what being a "non-technical" founder is all about - building bridges between people and organizations.
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.
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?
How big is that space in terms of businesses? Can you reach them more easily than you could reach a similar $ value of customers? Can you expand your reach and learn more about the market once you're embedded? Are they easier to sell to than consumers? Can you sell them support or maintenance contracts?
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.
Oh yeah, multipath is the term I was thinking of. As I recall, the issues were that a "longer" path may have a stronger signal than a more "direct" path, and that a straight line of sight path is not a given.
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).
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
I worked in a consultancy/agency 15 years ago for less than a year (it wasn't for me) and in that short span I witnessed 3 "facebook with a twist" projects. Code was delivered, but they naturally failed to gain any critical mass whatsoever. Also having startups getting a consultancy to do their code was already quite strange.
I specifically remember one of them being "facebook for dogs" and another being for restaurant professionals.
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.
If by “AI” you mean freemium platforms making api calls to OpenAI with a markup, I would say most of them. If it’s easy, 100 people are already doing it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why do I feel like YC videos are targeted at really slow people? The combination of discussion in slowmotion and exaggerated gestures reminds me of elementary school. I’m sure there are valuable ideas in there, but I just don’t have the patience to watch.
YC (and Dalton & Michael in particular) like to emphasize clarity and "the basics" in their videos. Recall that their target audience are largely nerds in their early-mid twenties who've never started a business before.
They are probably following some kind of training.
Those features are very common on every educational video. I do agree that this one focus on an audience that is supposed to be too advanced in relation to the video depth of knowledge, so it shouldn't need it. But still it is normally pushed for every video, and the risks of getting the pacing wrong are very asymmetric.
"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.
> Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced.
This. Nobody has invented a Recommendation engines that really works, the ones that seem to work just have lots of content they can throw at you. I really think tiktok would be no less succesful with an engine that simply threw a random video at you. Recommendations is a really hard problem and anyone that solves it had essentially solved AGI
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.
On the subject of context I wrote a short post back in 2018 [0].
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...
I remember the excitement around VR back in the late 80s. These new polhemous motion tracking devices and LED microdisplays were going to change the world! Except the technology was expensive and ultimately it kinda sucked. It was barely used outside academia, interest died off gradually and eventually it was tacitly acknowledged to be going nowhere.
Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
I can't wait for round 3 in 2040 or so.
> But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough
I'm not sure what use cases you've tried it, but I'm "playing" a bunch of flight simulators, and after getting used using a HP Reverb 2 for all my simming, it's basically impossible to move back to "flat" screens again. It gives you a completely different depth-perception that is as vital when you fly as when you race, so basically any simming is a lot easier and more fun with VR. But again, if you make the plunge into VR simming, it's short of impossible to go back to "normal" afterwards.
> hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
Yeah, simultaneously I agree with this. VR-in-motion (so not sitting still) is still pretty bad, and the setups you need for good performance are pretty expensive, so it's unlikely to break into mainstream unless some breakthrough is being made. With that said, there are niches that are very well served by VR and personally I guess I hope it'll be enough when the mainstream hype dies off.
I disagree, I played a lot of Elite: Dangerous with a VR headset and while I completely agree about the scale, it was so much hassle to get in and out of the goggles and get everything set up and then to be totally cut off from the real world for any extended period that I stopped using it.
It's been in the closet for a few years. Beat Saber is fun too, but.. I guess if you're the kind of person who has a sim setup in a dedicated room in your house it's still appealing but for anyone remotely casual it's just not worth it
VR has moved from "only enthusiasts can even consider it" to "viable niche". That's a huge step up... viewed logarithmically you could even call it "halfway there". But it definitely needs a couple more revs before it gets to "mainstream accessible".
IIRC there was a brief VR spike around early 2000s. I remember trying out Duke Nukem in a helmet and a three-button controller.
And then a bit later, there were 3D glasses, ones that synchronized with the high-rate monitor to show each eye its respective right and left frame. The demo for it at the time was Rogue Squadron and I thought the effect was amazing.
AR is the true future, but we're a materials science breakthrough away. You need waveguides or some similar thing that generates holograms that's cheap, has a wide FOV, and works in bright light. HoloLens and Magic Leap came close, but people couldn't figure out how to make enough money off the devices, apparently.
Is it?
I don't want to see sports teams playing on my coffee table. I don't want to see recipes dancing in front of me while I wear glasses in front of a stove, the humidity of boiling water vapor sticking to plastic lenses. I don't want people dicking around with headwear while they're supposed to be driving. I don't want to see contact and bio information hovering above my friends. And I certainly don't want to see ad overlays throughout daily life.
I want to escape life and enter fantasy worlds. I want to be transported. I want to see the Matrix unfold in front of me. That's about as far from AR or XR as I can imagine.
Maybe the change is the internet amplifies those holding the flame longer, like those responding parallel to me
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.
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.
In central Europe our biggest tarpit are sustainability / climate topics. Even founders that are smart enough to realize the difficulties still pursue these topics because of an unfoly feedback loop where government agencies almost exclusively fund those "societally important" areas. There's no other risk capital available so most founders align their goals, just to fold 1-2 years later.
I'm not sure I agree with this - though I'm not in central Europe.
Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves.
If you're trying to sell sustainabiity, what is your business? What are you selling? If it's advice on how people can be sustainable, or carbon credits or something, sure, those are things that may be tarpits.
But electric vehicles were probably a tarpit idea until they went from being advanced golf carts to being real cars.
Environmentally friendly packaging is doing very well. Etc etc.
> Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves.
Tell that to the funding programs.
I mean that's better then funding a bunch of startups that try and use psychological traps to capture the attention of your kids and ruining their ability to focus. Most of them also fold 1-2 years later.
Discovery and recommendation apps for music and videos, such as Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, are big hits.
You just have to have a colossal inventory, and a reasonably good algorithm.
Discovery and Recommendation in those apps seem to be features, not the purpose of the app itself.
The purpose of the app is to sell ads via engagement, recommendation is at least a partial (majority?) driver of engagement, so it’s part and parcel of the purpose of the app.
People want what they’re providing, companies want to sell ads, and increase people’s tolerance of ads. Until the next platform without ads comes out (note - tiktok didn’t have ads almost at all for the first year)
You can't have a discovery app _that doesn't host the content_.
Last.fm did it, or did they host content and I've never realized this in 20 years?
Yeah last.fm was a streaming webradio type thing. You could also scrobble your own mp3s but (as I remember it) the whole point of that was so you could then listen to the stream tailored to your preferences.
Just like Pandora which was also really great for a while.
> You could also scrobble your own mp3s but (as I remember it) the whole point of that was so you could then listen to the stream tailored
That's not how I remember it at all. The biggest features (that at least made me and my friends use it) was that no matter what player you used, it probably had a "Scrobble to last.fm" features (which sadly, seems Spotify at least removed), and then you'd use Last.fm to find new songs to play via your own player.
I don't think I remember anyone using the Last.fm radios/playlists, but instead just as a data-browser to find new artists/albums/songs, then play those somewhere else.
But this was around 2005 sometime in Sweden, we basically just had Spotify and maybe Grooveshark available for streaming, maybe things typically worked differently elsewhere.
Google and/or IMDb don’t count as discovery apps or not hosting the content?
The main purpose of these apps is to click on them and watch/listen to some $foo. Not to just tell you what to watch/listen to.
Yeah this is actually a really useful idea in general.
I learned this when I was put on a team for a modeling competition in college. You had like 72 hours to solve the problem and write the report. It was really stressful but a LOT of fun.
There were a range of topics that you could choose from. Some were really obvious how to apply mathematics to, and some... weren't.
I was the math talent on the team... but my team members talked me out of going for one of the problems that were easy to apply math to. We instead picked the problem where it was LEAST obvious. And... we ended up winning the competition against a field of 10,000+.
I think that lesson applies in business all over the place. There's actually a lot of good comfortable money to be made in unglamorous industries.
I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem
"It's a problem they want to solve for themselves", but note that they haven't tried all the alternative recommendation services and are only creating one as a last resort. They want to solve the problem, which is a different drive from wanting a recommendation app.
Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :)
> I could see that being successful in this market
I guess SaaS aimed primarily at founders makes it a meta startup? The snake is eating its tail.
> It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem
I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool.
However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis.
The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard.
I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.
And this is how we ended up with tinder...
Interesting. I wonder if this is the right way though. Firstly because the RT critic score was gamified a while ago, and secondly because there's often a big gap between what the critics think and what the audience thinks. (One of the things I like to do is find movies on RT where the difference between the two is the biggest) Even if you ignore the fact that some reviews will be sponsored and not made entirely in good faith this is assuming that critics' judgment is a good signal in the first place.
I think all of this is addressed by matching you to critics who like and dislike the same shows as you like.
Still doesn't solve the problem of finding content I don't like, but it's so good, that I start liking it. This doesn't seem to happen much anymore.
Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations.
There's also the fact that more data == better recommedations.
Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it.
Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here"
This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace.
For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server.
I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.
What’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything?
Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services.
Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.
That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.
It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.
> vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator
Isn’t this what Netflix used to be
Exactly. And the whole reason all these other services popped up is the IP holders realized they could make a lot more money with their own service vs licensing to an aggregator. I think it worked out pretty well for Disney+, because they have a huge back catalog of very popular IP. Not sure if anyone else is really making money with this new model, but they still don’t want to go back to ceding all control to Netflix.
I agree (and would also like to see that sort of info if it existed). But, I’m pretty sure the same folks who were in charge of cable when it became insufferable are now in charge of streaming. So, less-annoying business models… I’m not hopeful.
Amazon Prime Video is already this. You can subscribe to Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, etc. from within the Prime Video app, and watch content normally exclusive to those services.
We could go back to the olden days when everything was on Netflix instead :)
Yeah, what was Zomato if not this?
That seems like terrible advice. First, many founders are targeting business or government customers rather than consumers. Second, when it comes to disruptive innovations, consumers don't even know what they want until you show it to them.
Even worse if you show it to them they still might not know they want it.
You need like critical mass of early adopters so that people would see „hey this is useful, maybe I can use it too”.
I guess. Successful executions become so endemic you have to take a step back and recognize it.
Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix.
Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie.
Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well.
So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it.
> Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix.
Nope, HN is just an online forum. I can't tailor what I see on HN to my tastes, and there's a subset of posters who get preferential treatment on the frontpage (YC companies), so nope, HN is not a recommendation site.
Recommendation apps would work a lot better if we weren’t so collectively hing up on copyright.
is there a difference between this and product market fit?
Similarly a lot of people give up on something in their life, e.g. finding a partner, because of earlier attempts in different (worse) conditions.
Quite often we are incapable of identifying what those different conditions were. When something you don't think is important is the actual cause of the failure you're unlikely to notice and misatrubute the cause.
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.
Instagram has recently been quite successful at giving me ads for events that seem actually fun and relevant to me, to the point of me being low key afraid of throwing off the algorithm so it starts recommend worse things. So, I think there's potential but it's very elusive. I feel that my Instagram "getting it" is more of an accident than by design.
> DSL era
What's this mean?
It means I now get to feel really old for the rest of the day.
If you imagine a modem handshake sound I wonder what baud rate it is.
Before we had cables dedicated to internet, we reused telephone cables for both telephone+internet, so adding digital data on top of the existing network, hence Digital Subscriber Line :) It was the fiber of the 90s.
Surely a large # of North American internet users are still using DSL?
I mean, I live rural and even I have fiber now, but that's new.
The island I grew up on in Sweden (with a population of ~700) got broadband in 2007 sometime I think, and in 2013 got fiber optics. Surely most of North America has to be using better stuff than DSL at this point? Although geographically and politically it is probably a bit harder to get high performance internet access everywhere there.
Digital Subscriber Line
Learning the timing of timing is one key skill to learn.
do you know of any technologies that are lousy now and might untar sometime later?
Some thoughts: VR, fusion, non-refrigerant cooling technologies, personal genomics, silicon-on-sapphire ICs, every drug and treatment that is just around the corner, quantum computing, CO₂ capture, failed Google projects such as Google Glass, Google Wave, Google contact lens glucose sensor.
Social media that aligns with human needs, permaculture farming, digital voting systems, smart contracts.
Nuclear energy (new OR existing technologies)
optical computing, custom printed medication(s) pills
I think optical computing is in the exact opposite of the situation the OP describes.
We have known how to do it for a while now. There are just not too many applications where its strengths are more important than its drawbacks.
Choose your own adventure games.
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.
You mean due-diligence in market research?
Bah! That'll never work!
[dead]
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"
Sure, but there are all sorts of pendulum shifts in the teaching zeitgeist. Spaced repetition was just an app-based example: it's been a few years since I was in the classroom so I'm not sure what the flavour of the year is, but if spaced repetition were currently popular amongst schoolteachers, the swing away from it that I would expect to see would be to argue that memorisation isn't really learning and that learning experiences should be about developing deeper understanding, and so on. There is no measure of 'best practice'; a lot of these shifts are driven by personal preference.
> argue that memorisation isn't really learning and that learning experiences should be about developing deeper understanding, Agreed, but if you ask anyone who's SR for any amount of time will tell you: It's realllly hard to be effective with it if you don't understand the underlying concept. The order of operations is "first understand, then drill". Of course, this comes with nuance. There are things that just have to be drilled and others that don't even need any drilling if you understand the concept. And I'd expect those educators to know the difference.
> There is no measure of 'best practice'; a lot of these shifts are driven by personal preference.
Again, you're probably right but using the example of SR threw me off because it's the one thing where I think the data is so clear that it's easily justifiable.
I didn’t read GP as making a judgment that spaced repetition was new or a fad, but rather that in the environment of how education decision-makers shift focus to new things, it’s a current flavor-of-the-year.
We saw elements of this with “new math”, Singapore math, and common core math, each label of fairly similar concepts promising to improve kids’ facility with math. Test scores haven’t leapt though.
Yeah, you're probably right. I agree that the problem might be shifting focus every year but the one difference with your math examples is that Singapore Math/Common Core math etc. all seem like different systems that don't build on top of each other. You (I'm assuming here) can't focus on Singapore Math one year, then the next year to add Common Core math on top of that etc. Its one or the other.
Spaced repetition on the other hand is a cross-disciplinary technique that just needs to be introduced and kept there. There's nothing else out there to substitute it with. If the young staff hype it up one year and then it becomes part of the curriculum and then they move on to other fancy edtech things, then there's nothing wrong with it.
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.
"EdTech" is ripe for disruption - by a non-profit, open-source entity that provides "school stuff as a service" but is basically a lifestyle business.
It would have to be funded by adventure capitalists (e.g., retired techies having fun building stuff) for awhile, but it could easily take over once it got traction.
> 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.
There's also a different angle: EdTech doesn't have to sell to schools, but could also be learner-facing.
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.
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.
> B2B puts you at the mercy of "your next customer's wished feature".
Yes.
> The bigger the "B" you're trying to sell to, the bigger the desire to say yes.
Absolutely.
> This is a very dangerous path.
You lost me here. What you term "a very dangerous path" I call "a roadmap".
The bigger the customer, the more they can pay. Also, just because it's 'B' and not 'C' doesn't mean there aren't humans involved. You can go a long way (often, all the way) with a simple 1:1 conversation with the most senior person responsible for your project on the customer's side.
> 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?
Sure, a lot of people have written about this but this isn't a skill that you can learn from a book.
Which is why it feels virtually impossible to many founders. Some people may claim B2B is easier, but only if you have the skill and it is hard to figure out how to obtain it
Not everyone needs to be on the sales team. You only need ~one person who knows how to do it. Once they get the channels opened with the client and the technical people are sending emails directly & regularly, even the most closeted nerds (including those who might also be founders) can begin to contribute meaningfully.
This is what being a "non-technical" founder is all about - building bridges between people and organizations.
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.
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?
How big is that space in terms of businesses? Can you reach them more easily than you could reach a similar $ value of customers? Can you expand your reach and learn more about the market once you're embedded? Are they easier to sell to than consumers? Can you sell them support or maintenance contracts?
etc...
I guess the logic behind B2B vs B2C comes down this belief: It is easier to sell one unit for $1 million than one million units of something for $1.
The video has a sequel released nine months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs
And for completeness, here is a video from 2022: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg&t=195s
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......
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.
Oh yeah, multipath is the term I was thinking of. As I recall, the issues were that a "longer" path may have a stronger signal than a more "direct" path, and that a straight line of sight path is not a given.
https://taylor.town/tarpits
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).
this is neat. i think digg should come back.
What are some tarpit ideas that y'all've come across? Any AI-specific tarpit ideas?
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
I worked in a consultancy/agency 15 years ago for less than a year (it wasn't for me) and in that short span I witnessed 3 "facebook with a twist" projects. Code was delivered, but they naturally failed to gain any critical mass whatsoever. Also having startups getting a consultancy to do their code was already quite strange.
I specifically remember one of them being "facebook for dogs" and another being for restaurant professionals.
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.
If by “AI” you mean freemium platforms making api calls to OpenAI with a markup, I would say most of them. If it’s easy, 100 people are already doing it.
Any idea where you are basically just a wrapper over some other other company's API.
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.
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?
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.
this is a great video
Maybe YC is the problem
Is there a way to consume this in text instead? Video is far too slow and cumbersome and requires headphones
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.
Google Gemini will also summarize if you want to start there. The transcripts are tough to read IMO
Why do I feel like YC videos are targeted at really slow people? The combination of discussion in slowmotion and exaggerated gestures reminds me of elementary school. I’m sure there are valuable ideas in there, but I just don’t have the patience to watch.
YC (and Dalton & Michael in particular) like to emphasize clarity and "the basics" in their videos. Recall that their target audience are largely nerds in their early-mid twenties who've never started a business before.
They are probably following some kind of training.
Those features are very common on every educational video. I do agree that this one focus on an audience that is supposed to be too advanced in relation to the video depth of knowledge, so it shouldn't need it. But still it is normally pushed for every video, and the risks of getting the pacing wrong are very asymmetric.
Just watch at 150% speed.
Sorry Mr. Smarty Pants that Hacker News is not Smart enough for you.
Hehe. But I must say HN in general is significantly higher pace than these YC videos, intellectually.
I think it's a good video.
"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.
> Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced.
This. Nobody has invented a Recommendation engines that really works, the ones that seem to work just have lots of content they can throw at you. I really think tiktok would be no less succesful with an engine that simply threw a random video at you. Recommendations is a really hard problem and anyone that solves it had essentially solved AGI