Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup • Hacker News Board

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#181

Post by gridlockd » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #166

> As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product. Huzzah! we thought. We should build a tool that tells you the adoption rate of every component in your design system—across your product. Chefs kiss. This article has nothing to do with bleeding-edge tech. It's about launching…

A design system is a systematic approach to achieving consistent look-and-feel across the product(s) of a company.

This is in contrast to the "non-systematic" approach, which is to have designers use apps like Photoshop to copy-paste design elements and then have developers eye-ball and eye-drop that into code. You may up with lots of redundant definitions for essentially the same visual intent, especially with larger teams.

Most products start out with the non-systematic approach and then may later attempt a switch to a design system. Presumably, this is where this product could help you validate your progress. Whether integration of such a product is a valuable addition to your workflow or a distraction is up for debate.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#182

Post by tootie » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #168

aazaa wrote: post #166

> As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product. Huzzah! we thought. We should build a tool that tells you the adoption rate of every component in your design system—across your product. Chefs kiss. This article has nothing to do with bleeding-edge tech. It's about launching…

The entirety of this article (and their startup's failure) can be summed up by this one line: > prospects didn't know [...] the problem we were solving If "prospects" don't know what problem you're solving, 99% of the time that means they don't have the problem your product solves. And if that's true, they're not actually a prospect. Seems like a classic case of being a solution looking for a problem. Also the author…

I think the relevant phrase here is a "solution in search of a problem". I understand exactly what their product was intended to do and have worked on a lot of design system projects before, but adoption rate has never really been a key metric of anything.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#183

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #181

aazaa wrote: post #166

> As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product. Huzzah! we thought. We should build a tool that tells you the adoption rate of every component in your design system—across your product. Chefs kiss. This article has nothing to do with bleeding-edge tech. It's about launching…

A design system is a systematic approach to achieving consistent look-and-feel across the product(s) of a company. This is in contrast to the "non-systematic" approach, which is to have designers use apps like Photoshop to copy-paste design elements and then have developers eye-ball and eye-drop that into code. You may up with lots of redundant definitions for essentially the same visual intent, especially with large…

It would certainly be useful, but I wouldn’t be very inclined to pay for it. It’s just not that useful.

You also need adoption across all the teams in your org to reap most of the benefits.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#184

Post by neutronicus » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #166

> As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product. Huzzah! we thought. We should build a tool that tells you the adoption rate of every component in your design system—across your product. Chefs kiss. This article has nothing to do with bleeding-edge tech. It's about launching…

Design System is a term of art for UX Designers.

My wife is the UX Designer in the family, so I can't say more than that, though

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#185

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

heipei wrote: post #107

lultimouomo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the "bleeding edge product" in the article is some kind if analytics system that tells you the adoption rate of "components" (web widgets? Not sure) in your system. This might not exactly be what you think of when you hear bleeding edge, so take this article with a grain of salt.

Yeah, I read the piece and couldn't believe that this was the "bleeding edge" product they were referring to. At one point they call it "niche" themselves, which is a more accurate description. "As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product." Yeah, and I've never met anyone w…

That doesn’t really let you know how many components are custom and how many come from the design system.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#186

Post by jungletime » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #84

jungletime wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Vegan, I'm repulsed at throwing dead fish at people. Also they kill dolphins when they catch them. Dolphins are "people kind" best friend in the ocean.

How about vegetable soup? Furthermore, there’s plenty of dolphin safe tuna out there, which does mean something as designations go: http://savedolphins.eii.org/news/entry/what-does-dolphin-saf...

Its more ethical, for sure, but only if it's vegan soup.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#187

Post by nwsm » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

If OP is still not abandoning the project, they should add a Storybook addon as it does sound somewhat useful. My question would be how do we decide what adoption metrics we want. How do we identify places that a component could/should be used? The usage numbers alone don't seem incredibly useful, except to point out components that have low or no usage.

Regardless, "Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup" is not a good title for the article. The actual article title (maybe it was updated) is a bit better- "Bleeding edge tech means you'll bleed to death". But most people here are miffed that neither title makes it obvious that the article is about selling bleeding edge tech.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#188

Post by redshirtrob » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

rikroots wrote: post #180

redshirtrob wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Canvas is painful. I recently ran into a weird image distortion issue on Samsung Internet Browser 12 (I guess it's based on the Chrome engine) when drawing a video frame to a canvas context using `drawImage`. Since you've made Canvas your focus, I'm curious if you've seen this or have any ideas. Here are a couple reports I found online. This one shows exactly what I see (note: this is not my post), and I…

I don't have an answer for you, except to say that getting and elements to play nicely with each other across all browsers and devices is pretty much guaranteed to damage your day, week, or even your month. My Google searching bought me to this posting about Samsung Internet's Video Assistant feature (Nov 2019). My gut feeling is that the Video Assistant is possibly getting in the way of your code executing as expect…

One month is about right when you add it all up. Not fun.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have only found this to be an issues with version 12 and on. I have examples from version 9 & 11 that work as expected (both before and after video assistant was introduced). And I'm able to reproduce the issue with the video assistant turned off.

Of course, none of that is to say it's not related to the video assistant in some way. I just don't have evidence of that yet.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#189

Post by usr1106 » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

holler wrote: post #109

usr1106 wrote: post #63

I don't think that is really true. Most start-ups fail, whether they build a bleeding edge product or try to compete on an existing market with smaller enhancements. After they fail if it's easy to pick the reason. Very few start-ups succeed whatever they do. Skype was pretty bleeding edge at the time, the internet speeds wheren't really there at the time. Spotify or Tesla didn't enter a market with real competitors.…

Is that true with Spotify? Didn’t Pandora already exist and have considerable traction? rdio and a few others come to mind as well

I had never even heard of Pandora. A quick check seems to suggest that they are America-only, Alexa rank 800, while Spotify is international, rank about 80. As a European I hope I am excused.

Yes, Pandora seems to be older. How intense the competition was when it started I have no clue. I'd say it was bleeding edge in either case, in those days broadband internet was not so widespread, not to mention mobile data.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#190

Post by holler » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #130

holler wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem was Discord solving when they launched? Twitch already existed, Slack existed. Asking because it's a similar question I'm asking myself as I build https://sqwok.im , a news-focused public messaging app. I chose to use "bleeding edge tech", and have been challenged by peers about whether it would have been wiser to just use some off-the-shelf solution for parts of it vs architecting a fully custom a-z pla…

* Skype sucked. Voice call audio quality was unreliable, managing lots of disparate groups sucked, if you had some random join your raid group (its initial market was FFXIV raiders as the initial team had previously worked on FFXIV utilities with guildwork) for the night you didn't really want to add them to your group chat for a voice call, it leaked information that was actively used to DoS people. * It's users wer…

Thanks for the solid recap, for some reason I forgot how voice chat was a big focus of Discord in the beginning. That might be because I mostly use Discord for non-gaming oss servers where voice chat isn't really a focus, and rather it's just a chat app.

It's interesting how they started out focused on gaming and have since moved away from it. I discovered a new Discord competitor, Guilded.gg, that sprouted up with marketing claiming Discord has abandoned gamers and they're going to recapture them.

It just goes to show that you never know which direction it's going to truly move and you have to be able to pivot. But having a core initial user group that you solve a problem for is key, and having a working product is key as well.