Words I will never forget from Paul Graham: "Out of all the ideas you could build for this platform, this one is quite possibly the worst idea ever."
Wow. Where to begin?
Back in February, we weren't working on Fuzzyshot at all. We were actually building an application for Google's Android platform called QuickMeet which we hoped would revolutionize the way people scheduled events/meetings with each other.
The idea was simple, build a cell phone based invitation service that let users share their estimated time of arrival (ETA) with each other. Imagine you are meeting a couple friends for dinner at 6 p.m. and at 5:50 you could already tell that two of your friends are going to be 30 minutes late!
Isn't that an amazing concept? We came up with this idea because we hated waiting for our friends and wanted a way to know exactly when someone would arrive at a predetermined location.
Between February and April, we toiled away on QuickMeet and managed to submit a working prototype to Google for their Android challenge. Needless to say, we didn't win. After the submission, we scored an interview with Paul Graham and his associates at the Y Combinator office in Mountain View.
At this point we already recognized many of QuickMeet's shortcomings. The biggest one of all was the fact that Android didn't even exist yet. Genius level. We went into Y Combinator with a couple backup ideas but we wasted time talking about QuickMeet when we should have stopped short and pitched something else.
That's when Paul told us how bad our idea was. The idea itself isn't bad, it's just way too early for something like QuickMeet to take off. How many of your friends actually have smart phones? I can't count more than 2-3 of my own friends.
We spent two weeks brainstorming all of our customer pains. A great analogy that helped us out came from one of Kevin's professors at Cal, Jon Burgstone. Don't put the cart in front of the horse. That's when you start out with a technology and then try to find a customer pain that matches it. Great ideas are usually never born because a new technology becomes available - great ideas come from real problems.
Are we solving a customer pain with Fuzzyshot? We think so. We're trying to take photo blogging to a whole new level and our early users like it. We try to keep things really simple and make it easy for users to organize and post photos in a nice blog format. We have tons of neat ideas for Fuzzyshot which we hope to test with our users in the future. So Hacker News, what do you think?
Check us out at Fuzzyshot.com.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
PG might want to go to the hospital more. Every doctor has a smartphone. Treo or iPhone.
The iphone didn't solve a real problem, but it seems to be doing fine.
Thoughtful, self analysis goes a long way. Putting something like a feedback link (subtly) on every page will also be quite helpful to finding the biggest pain you can solve most effectively.
Never stop listening, and best success
@dhimes, the iPhone did solve a real problem: cell phones suck. The iPhone has its own problems, but its interface is _far_ better than anything that was out there at the time.
Putting the cart before the horse is good when you can see that the horse is going to pass the cart soon. Just be ready to hitch it when it does.
The concept of knowing whether your friends are late isn't a bad idea. In fact, that's one of the many results of Loopt (check the phone, see your friend is really 15 minutes away).
I think it's just that the solution would have required passive polling to be really useful and seems limited in scope since it only applies to smartphones.
Post a Comment