The Zombocom Problem
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The Zombocom Problem
1–10 of 83 posts
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#2Unfortunately, the rarity of the super product means this tactic is useless.
Step 1. Be born with silver spoon in mouth
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#3Unfortunately, the rarity of the super product means this tactic is useless. Step 1. Be born with silver spoon in mouth
I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail.
I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#4Unfortunately, the rarity of the super product means this tactic is useless. Step 1. Be born with silver spoon in mouth
I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail. I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't…
> Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.
I think Cloud computing as a successful business comes from the same process as suggested though. It's hard to build the platform as a business by itself.
Amazon's cloud is an offshoot of their internal elastic computing needs. Google's cloud sort of is too. Microsoft's cloud is an offshoot of their enterprise software business, same with Oracle's. IBM has been renting computers to businesses since like forever, but they used to make calculators and typewriters. I've never understood what Salesforce does, but I dunno, now it does it in the cloud rather than customer hosted?
There's some maybe purer cloud businesses, but mostly they started with a simpler hosting model and expanded into cloudy offerings.
If steam was always meant to be an all the games store, it certainly didn't start that way. When it launched, it was only for buying/using Valve's games, and it expanded later.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#5I remember, when I was just starting, the founder of the company saying that if you tell him you're offering an 'engine' that's mostly saying you don't have an app. Of course, some successfully sell 'engines', but I think there's a basic truth that you need users to make your business work and make what you're building better and battle-hardened, and to get those users you usually have to be providing just what someone's looking for, and that often means making an app.
Some 'frameworks' or 'engines' budded off from work on a concrete problem, e.g. Django first for a specific CMS, Rails from Basecamp, Unreal Engine from Unreal the game. Work's not as much of an 'engine' as those are, but it's definitely turned out a big focus is on how customers can build their own stuff (both in the frontend and the data side) and integration. But for anyone to care about all that it has to be an app first!
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#6Unfortunately, the rarity of the super product means this tactic is useless. Step 1. Be born with silver spoon in mouth
I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail. I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't…
> There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened
Maybe hundreds. Maybe not. We (the initial amzn team of bezos, myself and shel kaphan) were certainly not looking at any others that I recall besides bookstacks who had a telnet-based online bookstore.
I think people overlook the role of luck here. Bezos was simultaneously very smart but also incredibly lucky to be "the guy who was doing books on the web". It really was the ideal product for the first large scale online retail, and Bezos brought a lot of imagination and energy to the effort. But if it had not have been him, it would have been someone else, who likely would have been more or less as successful.
Personally, I think that Bezos' relentless focus on customer service was the biggest factor in amzn's early success, combined with his near-insane quality standards for the people he was willing to hire.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. The reality is just that most business ideas don't pan out. There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened. If you're well-off, it's obviously easier to try and try again, but you're still likely to fail. I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't…
> There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened Maybe hundreds. Maybe not. We (the initial amzn team of bezos, myself and shel kaphan) were certainly not looking at any others that I recall besides bookstacks who had a telnet-based online bookstore. I think people overlook the role of luck here. Bezos was simultaneously very smart but also incredibly lucky to be "the guy…
What was the "lucky" part? The article claims that Bezos learned that web usage was growing 2300% a year (public knowledge), decided to sell stuff on the web, made a list of 20 potential products, and decided that books were the one where an online store could best compete. Is that wrong? It makes it sound like the particular way Bezos was lucky was by happening to be smart, smarter than the rest of us who were paying attention to what was going on. But it sounds like you're saying there was some other form of luck involved. What was it?
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#8Unfortunately, the rarity of the super product means this tactic is useless. Step 1. Be born with silver spoon in mouth
Just because success is unlikely, we shouldn't try for it?
There are a lot of ideas that sound good. Far fewer that are good. Being able to tell the difference makes it much more likely that you're on a plausible path to success.
Another way to see the point is to remember that it is better to make something that a few people really want than that a lot of people would like a little bit. An app is more likely to fit that bill than a platform.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There were hundreds of well-funded efforts to build online retailers before Amazon happened Maybe hundreds. Maybe not. We (the initial amzn team of bezos, myself and shel kaphan) were certainly not looking at any others that I recall besides bookstacks who had a telnet-based online bookstore. I think people overlook the role of luck here. Bezos was simultaneously very smart but also incredibly lucky to be "the guy…
What was the "lucky" part? The article claims that Bezos learned that web usage was growing 2300% a year (public knowledge), decided to sell stuff on the web, made a list of 20 potential products, and decided that books were the one where an online store could best compete. Is that wrong? It makes it sound like the particular way Bezos was lucky was by happening to be smart, smarter than the rest of us who were payin…
What I mean by luck is that I don't think that Bezos (or the rest of us) had any special qualifications or experiences that meant that we were the only ones who could have made amzn work. He was lucky in that his situation at D.E. Shaw allowed him to do the market research that led him to the book store concept (notably after Shaw rejected it). He wasn't smarter than the rest of us. Had Shaw not asked him to research possible online opportunities, he may never have come up with the concept at all. And it wasn't Shaw either, given that he turned down most of the ideas Bezos presented, most of which went on to become pretty huge.
Re: The Zombocom Problem
#10I remember, when I was just starting, the founder of the company saying that if you tell him you're offering an 'engine' that's mostly saying you don't have an app. Of course, some successfully sell 'engines', but I think there's a basic truth that you need users to make your business work and make what you're building better and battle-hardened, and to get those users you usually have to be providing just what someo…
I've also noticed this. Seems rare to find successful frameworks that were actually built out as a framework from the start.