Pretty much every single unicorn except for Amazon and perhaps Uber. eBay, AirBnB, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat all seemed like strange ideas. Perhaps transformational businesses are supposed to sound totally nuts until you speak with the founders.
Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#22I thought the YO app, was stupid and pointless till I realized it was used to warn Israeli citizens of missile strikes!
Now that app is everywhere and seems to have mastered the concept "notification-is-the-message" philosophy.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#23I thought the YO app, was stupid and pointless till I realized it was used to warn Israeli citizens of missile strikes!
Now that app is everywhere and seems to have mastered the concept "notification-is-the-message" philosophy.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#24Selling shoes online.
There's a bit of a story behind that one because my one time Canadian accountant came to me with this idea and I told him I thought it was crap but also (fortunately) told him to ignore me because nobody knows what will and will not work online.
He went through with it and does very well indeed.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#25Facebook. I was convinced this was a terrible idea until about 2007 or so, despite being on it since 2004. Still think it's kinda a terrible idea, but a billion people disagree with me. (Or perhaps it's more like a billion people agree with me but use it anyway.)
I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, various tools for photo sharing, AOL Instant Messenger for chatting, mailing lists for groups, email and evite for organizing events, etc. The novelty of Facebook was profile browsing and poking each other. And if Facebook had just remained th…
I solved that by being one of the few people who have never used the site or made a profile, even though I could have done so back when it required a .edu email address.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#26Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
Similarly, Twitter. Status updates are great, but a separate social network just for that?
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#27Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
This one is actually something I can undestand seeing all my friends and a lot of girls obsessed with "making pictures" all the time wherever we go.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#28Facebook. I was convinced this was a terrible idea until about 2007 or so, despite being on it since 2004. Still think it's kinda a terrible idea, but a billion people disagree with me. (Or perhaps it's more like a billion people agree with me but use it anyway.)
I lost a $100 bet on FB never breaking a billion dollars in revenues. Money well spent though, as education comes it was a cheap lesson.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#29What about the opposite, something that seemed like genius but turned out to be a terrible, terrible idea? Secret, for example.
P2P filesharing. I loved the idea of this when it was all the rage c. 1999-2003. Cut out the big corporations, cut out the ISPs, no need for servers, just people sharing data with each other directly. Only problem was: it was slow, unreliable, hard to get started with, and the RIAA would sue you for it.
I do find it interesting how so many prominent companies grew out of ideas or founders that were deeply connected to the P2P boom of the early 2000s. Facebook (Mark Zuckerburg worked on a media player before Harvard and a filesharing network in parallel with Facebook, and its first COO Sean Parker co-founded Napster). Uber (Travis Kalanick ran a P2P company that was acquired by Akamai). Skype and Rdio, both by the founders of Kazaa. Y-Combinator (RTM's research at MIT was in distributed hash-tables). Bitcoin, which builds on P2P algorithms for exchanging transactions. Bittorrent is now widely used legitimately for distributing software updates.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#30Facebook. I still think it's stupid.