Ask HN: Why do I always see “X has shut down”, but have never heard of X?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770771

by DiabloD3 • 11 years ago

16 15 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Over the past 2 years I've seen maybe a hundred "X has shut down" postings, but many of them I have never heard of, and some of them looked like a company I would have liked to have done business with.

So, what gives? Do companies just not advertise themselves enough?

informatimago• 11 years ago

Same here. :-)

svisser• 11 years ago

They failed to reach you and that's part of the reason why they shut down.

casion• 11 years ago

For a lot of the companies I see, it's not that they don't advertise enough... It's that they're selling a solution to a problem that nobody is rushing to solve.

Other factors come in of course, such as: bad advertising, bad product, poor social media representation, bad SEO, bad service, bad management, bad whatever.

From my perspective though, I just see lots of companies selling solutions to problems I never thought of looking for a solution to. It takes some really, really good advertising and a good product to overtake that burden.

moioci• 11 years ago

For the simple reason that the more successful a company is, the more likely you are to have heard of them. These are the companies that never gained traction.

Yenrabbit• 11 years ago

Based on the title I arrived here to explain how the X display server works :P

davelnewton3• 11 years ago

What's X? Never heard of it.

rubiquity• 11 years ago

X is a windowing server and that shuts down all the time.

davelnewton3• 11 years ago

(Back in the day I had a three-year X session, and that was on an AIX RS-6000; couldn't hardly believe it.)

wcchandler• 11 years ago

It'd be nice if there was a "Startup Portfolio" that's linked on HN which is basically a long list of startups that have been endorsed or blessed or backed by HN founders, supporters or alum. Each company could get 1 paragraph to describe their company and their current objectives. Might be interesting to just browse the list on occasion.

DiabloD32• 11 years ago

That would be nice. And maybe companies owned by high karma count HN users (cough cough)

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

There are also lots of multi million or multi billion dollar successful businesses that you have never heard of.

I think it is more about your bandwidth as a mere mortal. Even with the number of advertising messages laid on us per day, there is no way we can know about every business that may be relevant to us. There is only so many Kb/s that can enter our brains!

anon3_• 11 years ago

You don't need to be magnificent and newsworthy to be successful as a business either. You can be quietly successful as well.

There is this fetish in the valley with external validation. Often times, even the public, sluttiest startups end up touting, over-promising and subsequently under-delivering.

umeboshi• 11 years ago

Who cares about X when there is Y?

Ask HN: Why do I always see “X has shut down”, but have never heard of X?

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