Are you chasing a fad or a market? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you chasing a fad or a market?

#11

Post by BCM43 » Wed, Apr 06, 2011, 5:54 AM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #3

DuckDuckGo is indeed useful. I just spent a while looking around the site and the only obvious monetization was selling logo clothing and a water bottle. Just curious: what is their plan for making money?

It has ads now, via http://www.carbonads.net/

Re: Are you chasing a fad or a market?

#12

Post by erik_p » Wed, Apr 06, 2011, 7:55 AM UTC

If you're chasing a fad, you're already too late.

Re: Are you chasing a fad or a market?

#13

Post by epi0Bauqu » Wed, Apr 06, 2011, 10:16 AM UTC

nethsix wrote: post #6

mark_l_watson wrote: post #3

DuckDuckGo is indeed useful. I just spent a while looking around the site and the only obvious monetization was selling logo clothing and a water bottle. Just curious: what is their plan for making money?

This is an interesting comment because it may determine if DuckDuckGo (DDG) can remain true to its privacy goals given that the privacy feature was not part of its goal initially compared to say 'offering structured content'. E.g., if privacy-conscious users started using DDG thus enabling DDG to reach critical mass attracting buyouts, huge advertising dollars for it's structured content, will DDG cave-in and ditch p…

It only came later because I wasn't educated on it. Now it's personal. I updated the end of the post to make this more clear. Thx.

Re: Are you chasing a fad or a market?

#14

Post by antrod » Wed, Apr 06, 2011, 12:11 PM UTC

One other thing to consider about the big market hypothesis is: how accessible is it to a capital efficient startup. To take an extreme, the power generation market in the US is second only to health care, but it is quite unlikely that you can crack that as an entrepreneur. Similarly, even if you can get into a big market, the amount of margins available to subscale players is often a deterrent in and of itself (you can't for instance become a subscale ISP these days even though Internet access is a huge market as well). Outside of chasing a fad, going after inaccessible markets is the second biggest mistake I see.

Re: Are you chasing a fad or a market?

#15

Post by TillE » Wed, Apr 06, 2011, 12:40 PM UTC

aridiculous wrote: post #2

I love the point he made about search engine results not making too much inherent sense. It took a little bit of work, but I really tried to imagine what I'd like from a search engine, and it wasn't a list of textual links.

Absolutely. If I'm searching for journal articles, I'd love to be able to explore a network of citations. I want something to capture that experience of going to a library shelf organized by subject and browsing what's nearby. But it needs to scale to all works ever published.