Why Toys?
81–90 of 211 posts
Re: Why Toys?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
while working on our startup [1] this is one of the top pg quotes I like. However while talking to our customers we regularly face the "toy" critic as opposed to "feature rich". however approaching it as a toy keeps it simple , though for saas it appears as too simplistic sometimes. [1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.
Additional question - what is the value prop for clients? Why do they buy your service?
Lego's "Serious Play" is a good example of this kind of marketing done really well.
Re: Why Toys?
#83I am constantly thinking about the question: What is the future tech entrepreneur's lemonade stand? It would have to be something typical and low-skill so a young entrepreneur can build it and learn the hard lessons about running a business, but it needs some special defense to avoid being out-innovated by an Amazon or Google. The Facebook example as a toy is perfect - the platform was able to thrive by being hyper-l…
has a lemonade stand ever evolved into serious business? I am of the impression they get abandoned
Actual lemonade stands (run by children)? They're usually shutdown by the police, at least in the U.S. [Tho my sources severely skew my sample so as to entirely neglect counterexamples.]
Metaphorical lemonade stands are almost always abandoned too. But that seems obviously fine anyways.
Re: Why Toys?
#84This reminds me a lot of a chapter in Jesse Schell's awesome book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.[1][2] He recommends occasionally thinking about a game as a toy. "The Lens of The Toy: To use this lens, stop thinking about whether your game is fun to play, and start thinking about whether it is fun to play with ." [1] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Book-Lenses/dp/012369... [2] PDF version (see book…
I actually just bought this book and it is arriving Friday. Funny to see the pdf now, but I think in the end this is a case I'll appreciate having a physical copy.
Re: Why Toys?
#85"The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins." This is of course only true if you're playing the Silicon Valley VC game, a lot of healthy businesses has been built by focusing hard on turning profit early. For an example from recent news, look at IKEA.
Building toys probably requires the VC game. Ikea was never a toy.
Huh; I was thinking exactly the opposite, i.e. every cool new project with but a GitHub repo to its name is a 'toy'.
Re: Why Toys?
#86I think Tesla is a great example of toy-first strategy. The roadster is comically niche. But: the electric drive train is super torquey so makes a great sports car, it's not an every day car so the lack of charging infrastructure is less critical, nor would the inevitable reliability problems dissuade that use, quite a few investors were Roadster owners first.
Re: Why Toys?
#87There is a book about this that they don't seem to mention:
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30798471-wonderland
It's not bad. It pushes the hypothesis to breaking point but there is something in the idea.
Re: Why Toys?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I disagree with his thesis here, the entire point of it is that YC wants to and does fund toy companies. So they're trying to solve the exact problem you're railing against.
I think OP has a point. MZ was comfortable enough leaving school for a semester, and that too after being put on academic probation for violating serious codes of ethics. Despite all that, he still managed a $500k seed investment from Peter Thiel. Students who grow up in poverty and put the work in to get into college, let alone a prestigious one like Harvard, are usually fighting to do everything right just to make…
I think the point is only 'locally' right. If you consider a long enough period of time, effectively no one has ever been able to afford the luxury of 'building a toy'.
And yet, at least some people do now have that luxury. It certainly isn't impossible for lots and lots of people to afford some degree of something pretty similar tho.
Re: Why Toys?
#89Standard Oil actually did start out as a toy. They provided oil to burn in lamps. At the time most people thought that was a somewhat silly gimmick and a fad that would quickly pass. Oil in general was seen as something neat but not essential for years. But just like facebook, many people soon came around to the idea and it took over the world. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible…
This is a bit skimpy on the details. I highly recommend every American adult to read The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. It will change the way you think about the world. It also shows how Rockefeller was able to pivot his business from kerosene lamps, which were on the way to obsolescence, to fuel.
Just curious: why only American adults? (I am Australian)
Re: Why Toys?
#90Cute title but this is actually just an extension of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”. Facebook had TIME to be a toy because Mark Zuckerberg had a rich family, and plenty of skills to get a job if it didn’t work out. “Making a toy” is only possible with the resources of money and time. People who need to make money need to focus earlier on making money, which stunts growth in the long run. This is true…
But, on a long enough time horizon – at least more than several decades anyways – it's not true that the poor have gotten poorer.
It's not even obvious that the rich today are relatively wealthier than in the past because, e.g. there's no obvious way to compare having running water and owning an iPhone to being the highest status person in your area and owning lots of slaves.