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“Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

andrewchen.co

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Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#121

Post by nostrademons »

0xffff2 wrote: post #117
nostrademons wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a recognizable brand means answering the question about differentiation, though. People know how KFC is different from McDonalds is different from Pizza Hut is different from Chipotle. Hell, most of the time they even know how Burger King is different from McDonalds (white meat chicken tenders and more meat in the burgers), how In'N'Out is different from McD's (simple menu, Thousand Island dressing, onion ri…

>how In'N'Out is different from McD's (simple menu, Thousand Island dressing, onion rings) Is there a joke in here I'm missing? I don't associate Onion rings with McDonald's at all, and In'N'Out doesn't even have them.

Oh, I was referring to how In'n'Out will slice a whole onion (in concentric rings, still attached) and put that on your burger, while McD's uses diced onions sprinkled over the top. Used an unfortunate phrase to describe it, because onion rings are also a real side dish (which I don't associate with any fast food joints - more like clam shacks and stuff). Maybe that makes it a bad example anyway, if nobody knows what I'm talking about.

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#122

Post by nostrademons »

greggman2 wrote: post #115
nostrademons wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting t…

me being stupid but I actually thought flickr for video would fail because video takes more work than photos to create and because it takes more time to view them. clearly I was wrong

YouTube's genius was to realize that that was no longer the case. They've said in interviews that a lot of the impetus to create the product was to realize that tools like cell-phone video and iMovie meant that video would rapidly become a lot cheaper to produce, and that meant there'd be a market for video-sharing. Cell-phone video is also what took the average duration of a video down from 60min 8mm cassettes to 2-3min digital clips, which are the perfect size for a webpage view.

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#123

Post by PowerfulWizard »

robomartin wrote: post #56

Very often engineering types can only think of differentiation in technical terms. I think I can say that, in practice, at least in mature markets, differentiation is more about positioning and marketing rather than almost anything else. Easy examples: - Cars - Bottled water - Computer monitors The vast majority of automobiles produced today have reached a level of design and manufacturing maturity that makes them pr…

I think the marketing differentiation works best when it is driven by factors that are hard to measure and control, but that are perceived as high value, like flavour and style. When buying bottled water, the water is free, you're buying the bottle, the refrigeration, then real-estate & inventory space, and you can compare it on those dimensions, but if you are sensitive to the taste that can override the other factors. With cola it is much much stronger because the taste is more intense and your body is conditioned to link it to the sugar and caffeine hitting the bloodstream which gives you that immediate Pavlovian response. But taking something low-cost and using human psychology to assign a high value is how marketing makes profit. As opposed to the prosaic side of marketing where you're just letting people know you exist.

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#124

Post by alde »

robomartin wrote: post #56

Very often engineering types can only think of differentiation in technical terms. I think I can say that, in practice, at least in mature markets, differentiation is more about positioning and marketing rather than almost anything else. Easy examples: - Cars - Bottled water - Computer monitors The vast majority of automobiles produced today have reached a level of design and manufacturing maturity that makes them pr…

Imo, engineering types usually think about technical differentiation because they can potentially be good in it. Usually marketing/branding is very expensive and not very accessible for the average bright founder+engineer type.

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#125

Post by beachy »

smogcutter wrote: post #119
robomartin wrote: post #56

Very often engineering types can only think of differentiation in technical terms. I think I can say that, in practice, at least in mature markets, differentiation is more about positioning and marketing rather than almost anything else. Easy examples: - Cars - Bottled water - Computer monitors The vast majority of automobiles produced today have reached a level of design and manufacturing maturity that makes them pr…

Absolutely agreed, but I think part of what distorts this perspective for tech products is often the influence of VC. If you need to convince investors that you’re lined up for explosive growth, something like “we’re Tinder with branding that captures a different market segment” is probably a less compelling story than “we’re Tinder with an AI gimmick that will crush our competitors, burn their villages, and salt the…

To address your unrelated tangent, as a pedant (as I think many techy types are), I personally appreciate the extra effort put in to qualify the statements.

Your "you’re 100% right that all bottled water is functionally identical" makes me bristle.

I only drink tap at home, but I know that bottled water is drawn from very different sources, and certainly some has quite different taste and taste is certainly a function of water

Fortunately you yourself mounted an effective defence against pedantry by qualifying that with "for the purposes of this discussion".

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#126

Post by snegu »

nostrademons wrote: post #67
snegu wrote: post #18

One category that's missing on the left is "Parents." There's Tinder for parents (Peanut), Birchbox for parents (multiple subscription boxes). It would be interesting to think about what Uber or AirBnB for parents would be. I couldn't read the article though because I got that absurd uncloseable newsletter subscription screen. That was one of the most user-hostile things I've seen on a website lately.

So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting t…

Oh yes, I agree, Peanut is terrible. I recently moved to a new area and left all my mom friends behind, so I was desperate for a way to find new ones, but it's useless. There needs to be an OK Cupid for moms.

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#127

Post by shantly »

redkoala wrote: post #107
WaxProlix wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that nobody owns games or movies anymore. I suspect that letting someone log on to my Steam account would potentially be grounds for a banning, and losing whatever investment I have in the platform.

Redbox is a thing. Not for renting out PC games, but there is a case for renting out physical console games. A large part of GameStop’s business model is retrading second hand games.

AFAIK those are dying. DLC's killing them. You buy (or rent) the disk, you only get like half the game. The rest can't be resold. Consequently, second-hand prices for disks seem to be dropping quite a bit, outside certain categories where that's less of an issue (Nintendo, kinda, and certain genres that still aren't that heavy on DLC like JRPGs). The dropping prices might but OK but with digital stores competing, and providing pretty good prices to anyone willing to wait for a sale, volume (both coming in, and being sold) is surely going down too, at least relative to total market size if not absolutely (and I suspect it's dropping absolutely, too).

Gamestop & friends seem to be muddling along through inertia, the larger-than-it-was but still-small retro gaming market (less Gamestop, they don't carry stuff that old), and selling non-game materials. And new games that come with DLC tickets and such. Not so much used sales or rentals (remember renting games from Blockbuster?)

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#129

Post by dkarl »

nostrademons wrote: post #67
snegu wrote: post #18

One category that's missing on the left is "Parents." There's Tinder for parents (Peanut), Birchbox for parents (multiple subscription boxes). It would be interesting to think about what Uber or AirBnB for parents would be. I couldn't read the article though because I got that absurd uncloseable newsletter subscription screen. That was one of the most user-hostile things I've seen on a website lately.

So Tinder for parents is a terrible idea. (Full disclosure: my wife's a Peanut member. She's been meaning to uninstall it for a while.) Think about the key observations that made Tinder take over the dating space: people are basically superficial and judge who to go out with based on looks alone; people have spare time to flip through photos; people want to be casual and not invest too much in a date before getting t…

I found the best thing about Tinder when I used it was that by stripping down information and interaction to the bare minimum, it gets people face-to-face quickly with few established expectations, which is the best way to get to know anybody. There is so much about a person you can't learn through a web site or an app, and conventional dating sites worked very hard at getting you to invest a lot of time and work into interactions that only gave you a false sense of knowing someone. With Tinder you just showed up thinking literally only "I have seen a couple of okay pictures of this person and they thought my pictures and two lines of text seemed acceptable as well" which really set expectations appropriately and let you schedule a lot of dates without feeling disappointed about the outcome.

I can see that making a lot of sense for parents. The last thing they need is another high-pressure, high-judgment thing in their lives. Much better to meet someone and feel like it's no big deal if something doesn't click on either side. At least that sounds plausible to me.

Re: “Is your startup idea taken?” and why we love X for Y startups

#130

Post by chrisweekly »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #110
robomartin wrote: post #56

Very often engineering types can only think of differentiation in technical terms. I think I can say that, in practice, at least in mature markets, differentiation is more about positioning and marketing rather than almost anything else. Easy examples: - Cars - Bottled water - Computer monitors The vast majority of automobiles produced today have reached a level of design and manufacturing maturity that makes them pr…

You can do the apple thing, but imo that's more than just marketing abs branding. To be a startup though (work radical growth) it's likely you'll be able to do and sustain that only with marketing and branding as a differentiator. Imo.

"You can do the apple thing"

Who can?

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