All actually good startup ideas are bad ideas when they are started. Everybody thought twitter was retarded, and nobody had any idea social networking was even going to be a thing when facebook launched. If you only work on things that people agree seem like a good idea, you are probably the 5th team that is working on it, and you probably started about 3 years too late. This actually ends up giving many real success…
I have to disagree a bit with the idea that no-one thought social networking was going to be big. Were you not around for Friendster? Amongst my college friends it was huge. The problem was that it didn't scale. I logged on frequently until logging-on became too painful. It was the first site I used to reconnect with lost friends, and that was valuable to me. Apparently Google also saw the value in Friendster, as the…
I've been trying to separate startups into ones you could do customer discovery for before you build the app and ones where you have to see it to get it. I think Facebook falls in the first category and Twitter falls in the second category but I'm not exactly sure why.