A) If being useful were enough to make a product successful, we'd still have Google Reader

B) We have no way of knowing how well Blume's product actually worked

C) Health insurance is heavily regulated, which means it's not a great target market for AI

Generally the ones that don't sound useful do better. Why Stripe? Why Airbnb? Why Twitter? There's less competition and winner takes all.

How do stripe and Airbnb not sound useful? "Need to get paid" and "find accomodation" are among the oldest business models on the internet.

Paypal was dominant then. Stripe was PayPal with simpler onboarding.

Airbnb is a favorite textbook example of VCs being wrong. They were rejected early on because people were thinking it's risky to rent out your house to strangers, and well, motels exist. But I think that's always been a blind spot with VCs - they just don't understand what it's like to be broke. Airbnb pivoted quite a bit from what made them big; they used to have top tier hosts and hospitality for much cheaper, now they're just alternative motels with no free breakfast.

There were plenty of ways to get paid on the internet before stripe. On paper it didn’t look like they were doing anything new. They just did it better.

Airbnb… idk. Who wants to rent their house out to total strangers? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have thought it would take off like it did.

Airbnb is mostly commercial listings that are basically unlicensed hotel rooms / appartments. I don't think people renting out their personal living spaces is a big part of their income. It's just a story they use to get around regulations.

That's true now, but not when they first took off.

None of that existed when they first started. The pitch was to rent out your house while you're out of town.

But they only got big when the commercial "hotels" came on and saw they could "work around" laws like that.

Yes... later. They couldn't have predicted it when they started. It sounded like a stupid idea when they started.

That's the point--their utility wasn't obvious at first, until a new market showed up.

It was commercial version of couch surfing and/or web2.0 version of vrbo. I was highly skeptical of it taking off because it was “a copycat”! How wrong I was…

Man, I used to use couchsurfing.org to get free places to crash in grad school.

Target audience is very niche

Hmm. Charge high, better profit margins. To me that sounds exactly like the sort of thing a startup should do. Maybe my instincts are off.