251–260 of 268 posts
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That's a pretty funny comment to make on Hacker News, which is regularly accused of being a hivemind and downvoting comments / censoring stories that challenge its ideologies.
The comment being ironic-in-context doesn't make it any the less true.
I clearly remember when Imzy and Voat sprung up out of reddit turbulence, trying to ride a wave of discontent in the reddit community. I'm sorry to say I was cynical and doubted they would last. You can't force a community to happen. I never followed Voat but I did give imzy a chance and the feeling was very much that they were trying to force a community. Personally I think the best chance of building a community is…
This article by Chris Dixon sums up what you're trying to say — couldn't agree more with it!
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Indeed, there are many other ways of building a business on-line than startups. Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.
http://37signals.com/bootstrapped Hasn't been updated in a while though.
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>built WAY too much stuff that only really matters if you are operating at scale. Why do people do this?? Please don't build for mega huge scales before you've gone to market...it's a huge waste of time and money. I guess developers have too much pride to not make the _best_ platform
TL;DR: They do it because they haven't yet learned the skills needed not to. People doing startups are natural optimists, bold risk-takers. And to get the money, you have to sell people on a dream of giant scale, on a big vision of what is to come. If you can't create and sell that vision, nobody gives you the money. To then turn around and say, "Ok, what's the minimum necessary?" is really hard. You have to throw ou…
Seems related to: "MVP" --> "the rewrite / second system"
I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early. And this is one of the most extreme examples of that. Most community sites take a while to grow and you really never know what will happen. Even Reddit was sort of a failure vs. Digg and they sold it off to conde nast. It was only later AFTER the sale when Digg messed up on their own and Reddit enjoyed success as a side effect. You really sh…
I was there from early in the beta. The thing that annoyed me, when I suggested that people should take a look at it was the decision that you had to make an account to see content. Most people visited the homepage and then said 'no'.
This was inevitable from the very beginning. Disagreement forms the kernel of worthwhile discussion. An argument can also be made that "echo-chamber bubbles" are affecting people personally, intellectually, and culturally in tremendously harmful ways, so this is a very tiny step in the right direction.
Meanwhile, the best "debates" I've ever had were with people within what could arguably be described as my "filter bubble."
We're also a nonprofit and don't accept ad revenue or investment, so please excuse the plug. In contrast to Imzy, we're more focussed on conversation than community-building, but this enables us to make our sharing model harrassment-proof by design.
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Sometimes product fit takes longer than $VC_ATTENTION_SPAN
Indeed, there are many other ways of building a business on-line than startups. Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.
www.hellolyra.com
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> I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early. It's really difficult to offer perspective like that on something you don't really understand and haven't seen from the inside. It's pretty clear if you don't have product-market fit as a founder. And if you don't have a really good idea of what you could do to get to product-market fit, it's entirely possible it's wise of the founders to…
Sometimes product fit takes longer than $VC_ATTENTION_SPAN
I mean, the K-factor is either greater than 1 or it's less than 1. If it's less than 1, you can have 100s of years go by without gaining a meaningful audience. If it's greater than 1, then they would have seen that in their retention/cohort/signup analysis. Even, if only a sub-segment of their users were growing at a >1 K-factor, they would not have shut down. Since their shutting down, that's clearly not the case.
I worked on https://microco.sm with mattrco and it was forum/community software too. It looks like https://www.lfgss.com/ The #1 problem with a community startup: Every community is itself a startup. The revenue math and compounded growth all makes sense, but you need to assume that few of your communities survive, and that they each take as long as a startup to get traction and grow. If it takes you 1 year to get an…