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:-)
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.
Brad Feld likes to say finds the diamond in the turd. Meaning to pull out the one or two good ideas and focus on those. When you said turd, it reminded me of that.
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
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.
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.
So that's what business is for you? Are you making a product for yourself or for investors? Why should I care what investors care about - I'm trying to make a product for users, and not for investors. A few thousand people following my product is EXCELLENT, because out here in RL, a thousand people are not following me.
You have the wrong attitude if you are only focused on what investors want.
Check your Compete toolbar when you visit their site.
Plus it is a steady traffic which tells you that every single morning someone is woken up by the social alarm clock.
EDIT: To answer your other question, I am not a co-founder, but looking at pure numbers they are doing better than my last two trials and those of a lot of us.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Firstly, not everyone has smartphones, and not everyone text messages people enough to justify even $5/mo. Secondly, I said "slow" not because transmission is slow, but the typing of the message (or finding and selecting templates) is a rather slow process, especially for those of us who don't use smartphones. Thirdly, you can always set your phone to vibrate and/or let the voicemail take the message if you're in either situation...
I'm not sure from your posts, but it seems that you're implying only smart phones have texting capabilities? If this is true, your definition of smartphone is very different than mine. If I'm wrong, I apologize for misinterpreting your statements.
In every group there are always outliers, and I see this in some cases with techies who for some reason or another simply REFUSE to acknowledge that their cellphone is anything more than a $20/mo voice communicator. You can't really solve for those situations.
Amongst all the people I've known/worked with, SMS-enabled cell phones and monthly service packages are the norm. Building an app or service on top of the premise that people can easily and cheaply send and receive SMS messages is not, to me, all that grand of an assumption.
My solution above also somewhat applies to your situation, as you would be the potential SMS recipient from someone with an app-enabled phone. Also assuming that the SMS messages is of the "I'm running late" variety, which would be most common for business meetings and social gatherings, the 20c surcharge would not seem to be something that adds up to a ridiculous monthly accrual. As a proportion of the cost (as in cost of a normal social gathering where timeliness is of some value), or value (as in the potential value of a business meeting), I think 20c is less than a rounding error.
I used smartphones as a point because most smartphone users have a data plan with unlimited text/instant messages, and because smartphones generally have full keyboards, or at least better data-input mechanisms. I have a Razr that I use for everyday communication, and the process of sending/receiving a text message is a royal pain in the ass. Sending a message is slow and laborious, because a number pad wasn't designed to send fulltext messages, and predictive typing still requires lots of manual corrections for common words (good vs home, in vs go, etc).
As for business meetings, SMS messages almost seem incredibly informal and curt, especially when money is on the line ("We're settling a business deal and you don't even have the courtesy to actually talk to me?").
I'm most certainly not saying that no one should be texting, just that to some people, a phone is a phone, and would prefer to hear someone and chat with them, rather than having short, expensive, impersonal messages flying about. Granted, 20c by itself isn't that much, but when us poor Americans get slapped with charges on both outgoung and incoming messages, it can add up pretty quickly.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Your comments seem to indicate you have an axe to grind about lisp, but there is not much evidence that lisp programmers (or old programmers) are any better or worse than other kinds of programmers in building products people want or starting companies that survive.
Perhaps you should shorten your meme to "be cautious of programmers" or just "be cautious".
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.
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.
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.
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.
