PG: Quite possibly the worst idea ever

http://blog.fuzzyshot.com/2008/08/pg-quite-possibly-worst-idea-ever.html

by eventhough • 18 years ago

42 61 18 years ago

blog.fuzzyshot.com

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

Trust me, the worst idea ever, by a factor of ten, is sleep.fm. Compared to them you don't even rate.

eventhough3• 18 years ago

The youtube videos are priceless. DADDY I LOVE YOU! WAKEUP!

davidw• 18 years ago

The Kramer test for 'bad ideas': imagine Kramer explaining to Jerry why he just invested a bunch of money in the company ("but Jerry - it's an alarm clock... AND it's SOCIAL!"). If it sounds like something he might say, then it's probably a bad idea.

To sleep.fm guys: not trying to offend, I genuinely think it's a bad idea.

To those who were in elementary school when Seinfeld was on: damn kids:-)

stcredzero• 18 years ago

After QuickMeet, they could use the platform to implement QuickMeat -- which lets users post their ETTBGD, or Estimated Time To Beer Goggles Drunk.

Like Redux, they would be helping their users get laid.

aston2• 18 years ago

The thing is, Kramer had some decent ideas. Particularly hiring an NYU student as an intern for Kramerica Industries. Easiest way to get a personal assistant ever.

izaidi• 18 years ago

Somewhere, someone is dreaming up a social coffee table book about coffee tables.

immad• 18 years ago

The quote actually was:

"Out of all the ideas you could build for this platform, this one is quite possibly the worst idea ever."

Sleep.fm probably didn't work on android :P

raganwald2• 18 years ago

slep.fm is better than all of the ideas still on the drawing board ;-)

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

I disagree. A turd in hand is worth less than 1000 in the bush.

42flicks• 18 years ago

sleep fm would be better if they made a decent video (browser area only), removed the stylesheet (the interface is horrible) and lost the sleep fm 'loves you' type impression. Its a utility.

It could be useful if they streamlined it and marketed it without the corn :P

cmos• 18 years ago

Actually, I really like this idea, though this implementation might be a bit rough. Making this an iphone app, which would be your alarm clock, might be better than having your laptop next to your bed.

And like youtube there could be top rated wakeup messages and bedtime stories. It could be a passive voicetwitter that helps you in and out of your day.

maxklein4• 18 years ago

It's not a bad idea. It's a good idea. Seriously. In a year, they will sell it for a few hundred thousands and you'll not be happy.

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

I wouldn't be unhappy if that happened. I don't wish the founders any ill will. But no, they won't.

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

Everywhere sleep.fm is mentioned on HN, you are around. It is funny that although it is a bad idea to you a few thousand people like it enough to go back to use it everyday. Not a lot of startups can claim those numbers.

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

Umm, a few thousand users is basically 0 on the web. Investors ignore you until you have half a million.

Are you one of the founders?

rms• 18 years ago

They have thousands of users?!

Tichy• 18 years ago

Could you explain somewhere (possibly on the front page of fuzzyshot) what is special about fuzzyshot? It seems to me being able to post pictures from a phone to a blog has been possible for a while, or am I mistaken? I know I can post photos to flickr from my phone.

As for the meet thing: what do you do if you know your friends are 30 minutes late. Start another round of Sudoku on your phone?

aasarava• 18 years ago

Take some photos and update your blog. ;)

raganwald2• 18 years ago

Quite possibly the best idea ever: If someone tells you you have the worst idea ever, don't give up.

You may need to stubbornly prove them wrong, or you may need to listen to them and make some changes. But don't pack it all in and get a job working for the man.

pkaler• 18 years ago

How is that the worst idea ever?

I use Buddy Beacon with Where.app all the time on my iPhone. Probably one of the most useful apps I've used.

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

Read the proposal and critique carefully. Note the part about how the app is useless if you're the only person you know who owns a copy. Then note the part about the Android platform, the one platform on Earth that (for the moment) is guaranteed not to be owned by a single one of your friends. Finally, note that PG's critique is quite carefully phrased.

It's frustrating enough to develop an app that depends on the adoption rate of a vaporware platform, but it really is kind of crazy to develop an app that depends on the square of the adoption rate of a vaporware platform.

hugh• 18 years ago

Still doesn't make it the worst idea ever. Hell, you could have an app which depends on the cube of the adoption rate of a vaporware platform.

axod• 18 years ago

Surely it's not a million miles away from loopt? I don't see why loopt would be a good idea and this a bad one...

menloparkbum2• 18 years ago

Maybe the idea was just ahead of its time. I remember Philip Greenspun publicly humiliating a guy who invented "tagging" back in 1998. "Nobody will ever voluntarily submit metadata! This is the stupidest idea I have ever seen!" 18 months later he sued his own company for the remainder of their cash reserves. Be cautious around old lisp programmers.

mechanical_fish2• 18 years ago

18 months later he sued his own company for the remainder of their cash reserves.

Philip Greenspun, Founders at Work, pg. 343:

People focus a lot on the bust-up phase. It upsets me that they remember the wrong things like, "This Greenspun guy sued the venture capitalists." This is not true, first of all, since I was a defendant, not a plaintiff.

So, do you have evidence that Greenspun is lying or confused, which I'd be very curious to see? Or are you just spreading malicious rumors with no basis in fact?

menloparkbum2• 18 years ago

No, you're right. He deserves most of the criticism aimed his way and he knows it. However, factual inaccuracy crosses a line and I apologize. There's more to the story than what Greenspun claims but I don't want to make any more public comments about it. I really just wanted to get the "be cautious of old lisp programmers" meme out there.

halo• 18 years ago

Actually, I think the idea isn't terrible.

However, the problem is that the implementation was flawed. Relying on people having solely the Android platform is a mistake. Basing it on the web as well as having a simple implementation over many platforms and having some sort of SMS or MMS integration for non-smart phone users might have got you somewhere. How to make money from it is a different question entirely though.

dustineichler• 18 years ago

Maybe he's inadvertently trying to motivate you... personally, the more i hear the word "no", the more I'm inclined to go after something. Use it as motivation.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard this too. Just realize it only takes one "yes"... or whatever you're looking for to make it happen.

maxklein4• 18 years ago

Ah you guys. FuzzyShot is not solving a problem, it's creating a problem. I never take photos with my mobile phone because I have to blog about it.

Your technology is good, your idea is good, but you positioning is bad. You see, you think people want to blog, but you are forgetting the motivation. People don't want to blog, people want to be heard or want to be seen.

Now, let me give you an idea that is almost like yours, but with the correct positioning:

Imagine there is a big-ass concert happening in town. Now, this is where everyone has their camera with them, and they are taking photos with their cameras. Now, THAT is a position for your application. When I take my photos of Kenny Rogers or whoever, then I want everyone to know that I got a photo with Kenny. So NOW I want to share.

So you see, in your case I have never wanted to blog about stuff I see on the street. But in the second case, I actually want to post photos of the concert, but it's not just easy to do it.

If I were your marketing guy, I'd rebrand as this:

Where were you? Send your photos in!

People take photos of their concerts or whereever they were, and it all gets dumped into a visually very attractive group collage of that concert. Something that looks like a poster, but with everyones photos just mashed together.

And there is your first monetization idea right there - sell posters of people in their own concerts, but with themselves inside.

And it's easy to make money, because you focus on people going to concerts and events, so you can make money by affiliating with a ticket seller.

The problem you have is that you make a proposition to me that sounds like pain. You write on your site: Blog with mobile phone, and I'm thinking:

1. I have to sign up 2. I have to download and install their app 3. I have to figure out how to send photos 4. I have to frickin blog 5. I have to invite everyone to join this damn blog I have which will be filled with a bunch of boring photos

It's pain. If I were already a photo blogger, maybe your tool would make sense, but for me, it has zero compel.

Position correct, and position in a simpler manner. Think of the twitter slogan.

eventhough3• 18 years ago

Hey Max,

Great suggestion. We have some ideas for how we can aggregate photos based on location and category. For example, if a bunch of photos from San Diego Comic-con came in we could somehow group those together into a public event. The iPhone camera quality is not super great so I'm not sure how many people would be interested in paying for a collage of photos with strangers in it. Maybe we can create personal prints of people's photos with the location of each photo on some sort of map...

maxklein4• 18 years ago

Well, my point is that your entire positioning is wrong. Not that you lack certain features. The whole "blog" with X thing is tired and old news. Position in a fresh manner.

jonknee3• 18 years ago

What's wrong with a text message saying, "running late". That's usually even one of the templates included with cheap phones. No app necessary and it will almost surely be faster.

nuclear_eclipse3• 18 years ago

Except with the rate of text messages (20c to send, 20c to receive a reply saying "ok"), it's even better/cheaper to just call the person to tell them you'll be late. I've never understood why texting is so popular when it's so expensive, slow, and inconvenient. Why not just dial the number and talk?

brk2• 18 years ago

20c texts are generally only for people who have NO text messaging plan. I have a BB (vzw) and iPhone (att obviously). Both have text messaging plans that for some trivial amount per month (like $5 or $10) I get more text message allotments than what I would ever reasonably use (a few hundred at least).

99% of the time, SMS messages arrive within 30 seconds of the sender hitting "Send". When you are going to be delayed by 5+ minutes, 30 seconds rounds down to "instant".

As for the inconvenient, I personally HATE getting a call when I am either in a very quiet business lobby, or very loud social event for someone to deliver an essentially 1-sided trivial message ("I am running 15 minutes late"). SMS's are PERFECT for this. They are, IMO, cheap quick and convenient.

Perhaps it is all in the eye of the beholder.

The "killer app" for this situation would be (IMO) to use a GPS-enabled phone with some rudimentary mapping capabilities that would auto-text SMS ETA messages once you are >5 minutes away from the meeting start time and your travel time is also >7 minutes (ie: when it predicts that you're going to be late by more than a couple of minutes). You would have an "app" on your phone that sent SMS messages to your co-attendees (they would NOT have to install, download or use any sort of application just to get this trivial text info). This would increase the viability and adoption rate, as suddenly your friends do not all need smartphones to get some benefit from the app.

jonknee3• 18 years ago

My friends don't pay for individual texts, but I see your point. (Even though an app like this would likely have to use SMS in the background anyway. And if you're friends aren't hip enough to have an SMS plan, what are the odds they are all going to have smartphones and this little app running? Approaching nil.)

I do take issue with the slow and inconvenient part. It's real time and much less distracting than a phone call. If you stick with it for a few days you can type messages at a surprising rate and it really is faster than a phone call. You don't stop what someone's doing and take over when you send someone a text message. SMS has the convenience of email and the immediacy of a phone call.

arthurk• 18 years ago

I remember Paul saying something like "rather build something inappropriate now" on some Rails Conference Talk video.

pg• 18 years ago

I remember this one. The problem was that it depended on all your friends also having Android phones. I don't think the quote is accurate though. I wouldn't say either "quite possibly" or "worst x ever."

eventhough3• 18 years ago

PG, sorry if we misquoted you. Your advice was invaluable to us because it helped us understand why QuickMeet would not be something worth pursuing at the time.

russ• 18 years ago

PG said the same thing when I demoed my Jump to Conclusions Mat. =(

aaroneous• 18 years ago

After spending 5 mins with the site: Fuzzyshot doesn't do anything that Flickr doesn't already do better.

Not to say it can't, but as-is it doesn't.

13ren• 18 years ago

You can be "problem seeks solution" or "solution seeks problem". Both work, but the former is easier.

Are we solving a customer pain with Fuzzyshot?

But what customer pain are you solving? You describe your solution but not the problem...

froo• 18 years ago

There is probably a good thought in there somewhere. Get a thread up and running where people can post some of the worst ideas they can think of for the people applying for this (and later) rounds of funding.

Sort of like a process of elimination; people can cross-check their ideas against a list of pre-determined list of bad ones for similarities. Might help with an early filtering process or even good for a laugh.

For example:

It's like a toilet, but only more social! This is not only a bad idea, but I think George Michael has already done this.

PG: Quite possibly the worst idea ever

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