I think that the "making something people want" at the right time is the hardest part, and maybe distribution as well.
Execution is important.
But I think many people have the skills to create what ends up being successful.
Take Groupon for example. It made something a lot of people wanted. Could most people on Hacker News have made it? Sure.
But Groupon created it before anyone else (I might be wrong about this?).
Another example is HN. Pg has said that what he thinks users want most are quality articles and discussion.
While it's "just a forum", I think Pg is right for not adding a lot of features, or spending the limited time he has working on the UI, and instead focusing on how people can discover quality articles and make/read quality comments.
"Make something people want." It's simple, but it sure isn't easy.
Take Groupon for example. It made something a lot of people wanted. Could most people on Hacker News have made it? Sure.
But Groupon created it before anyone else (I might be wrong about this?).
Group buying has been done many, many times before, going back to the bubble. Many millions of dollars were burned to little avail. What Groupon actually nailed was all the hard parts of the business model that don't look really freaking difficult on the napkin -- particularly "signing up local merchants" and "cost-effective customer acquisition."
That second one is relevant for virtually all businesses and gets disproportionately short shrift here.
>What Groupon actually nailed was all the hard parts of the business model that don't look really freaking difficult on the napkin -- particularly "signing up local merchants" and "cost-effective customer acquisition."
I may be misunderstanding what you're saying, but signing up local merchants doesn't seem all that hard. There seem to be many Groupon clones that have produced deals with merchants.
The main problem for the clones is not having Groupon's scale/distribution.
I think what Groupon got right was the simplicity of its offering.
One page that clearly explains what you're getting, at at least 50% off.
When looking at an offering, I see a picture, a short and sometimes funny/interesting description of the offering, short crisp bullet points about restrictions, how many people have bought it, how much time is left, and contact info -- specifically where the place is located.
That's really easy to understand. The user can vote yes or no in a minute or two.
Focusing on the hard parts is a commonality to just about every successful startup story. It's not always pretty or interesting, but the business flows to their doorstep because competitors can't get the hard stuff right or keep up. Startup security is doing both what is hard and not attractive repeatedly until it looks both easy and fun.
I think Pg is right for not adding a lot of features, or spending the limited time he has working on the UI
I believe HN's plain design is actually an intended feature, not a bug. From one of PG's essays:
So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles.
Execution is important.
But I think many people have the skills to create what ends up being successful.
Take Groupon for example. It made something a lot of people wanted. Could most people on Hacker News have made it? Sure.
But Groupon created it before anyone else (I might be wrong about this?).
Another example is HN. Pg has said that what he thinks users want most are quality articles and discussion.
While it's "just a forum", I think Pg is right for not adding a lot of features, or spending the limited time he has working on the UI, and instead focusing on how people can discover quality articles and make/read quality comments.
"Make something people want." It's simple, but it sure isn't easy.