| ▲ | dgs_sgd 2 days ago |
| The video has a good heuristic to apply that I think works even within changing contexts: "avoid things with a high supply of founders who want to work on it but zero consumer demand for the thing itself", the classic one being a discovery/recommendations app. |
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| ▲ | f3b5 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In central Europe our biggest tarpit are sustainability / climate topics. Even founders that are smart enough to realize the difficulties still pursue these topics because of an unfoly feedback loop where government agencies almost exclusively fund those "societally important" areas. There's no other risk capital available so most founders align their goals, just to fold 1-2 years later. |
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| ▲ | vanattab 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean that's better then funding a bunch of startups that try and use psychological traps to capture the attention of your kids and ruining their ability to focus. Most of them also fold 1-2 years later. |
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| ▲ | Enginerrrd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah this is actually a really useful idea in general. I learned this when I was put on a team for a modeling competition in college. You had like 72 hours to solve the problem and write the report. It was really stressful but a LOT of fun. There were a range of topics that you could choose from. Some were really obvious how to apply mathematics to, and some... weren't. I was the math talent on the team... but my team members talked me out of going for one of the problems that were easy to apply math to. We instead picked the problem where it was LEAST obvious. And... we ended up winning the competition against a field of 10,000+. I think that lesson applies in business all over the place. There's actually a lot of good comfortable money to be made in unglamorous industries. |
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| ▲ | nine_k 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Discovery and recommendation apps for music and videos, such as Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok, are big hits. You just have to have a colossal inventory, and a reasonably good algorithm. |
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| ▲ | bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Discovery and Recommendation in those apps seem to be features, not the purpose of the app itself. | | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can't have a discovery app _that doesn't host the content_. | | |
| ▲ | quinnirill 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Google and/or IMDb don’t count as discovery apps or not hosting the content? | |
| ▲ | doubled112 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Last.fm did it, or did they host content and I've never realized this in 20 years? | | |
| ▲ | bondarchuk 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah last.fm was a streaming webradio type thing. You could also scrobble your own mp3s but (as I remember it) the whole point of that was so you could then listen to the stream tailored to your preferences. Just like Pandora which was also really great for a while. | | |
| ▲ | diggan 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You could also scrobble your own mp3s but (as I remember it) the whole point of that was so you could then listen to the stream tailored That's not how I remember it at all. The biggest features (that at least made me and my friends use it) was that no matter what player you used, it probably had a "Scrobble to last.fm" features (which sadly, seems Spotify at least removed), and then you'd use Last.fm to find new songs to play via your own player. I don't think I remember anyone using the Last.fm radios/playlists, but instead just as a data-browser to find new artists/albums/songs, then play those somewhere else. But this was around 2005 sometime in Sweden, we basically just had Spotify and maybe Grooveshark available for streaming, maybe things typically worked differently elsewhere. |
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| ▲ | immibis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The main purpose of these apps is to click on them and watch/listen to some $foo. Not to just tell you what to watch/listen to. |
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| ▲ | anself 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem |
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| ▲ | saulpw 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "It's a problem they want to solve for themselves", but note that they haven't tried all the alternative recommendation services and are only creating one as a last resort. They want to solve the problem, which is a different drive from wanting a recommendation app. Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :) | | |
| ▲ | fc417fc802 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I could see that being successful in this market I guess SaaS aimed primarily at founders makes it a meta startup? The snake is eating its tail. |
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| ▲ | petesergeant 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool. However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis. The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard. | | |
| ▲ | plastic3169 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more. | | | |
| ▲ | quibono 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Interesting. I wonder if this is the right way though. Firstly because the RT critic score was gamified a while ago, and secondly because there's often a big gap between what the critics think and what the audience thinks. (One of the things I like to do is find movies on RT where the difference between the two is the biggest)
Even if you ignore the fact that some reviews will be sponsored and not made entirely in good faith this is assuming that critics' judgment is a good signal in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | petesergeant 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think all of this is addressed by matching you to critics who like and dislike the same shows as you like. | | |
| ▲ | actionfromafar 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Still doesn't solve the problem of finding content I don't like, but it's so good, that I start liking it. This doesn't seem to happen much anymore. |
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| ▲ | immibis 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations. | | |
| ▲ | flir 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's also the fact that more data == better recommedations. Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it. | | |
| ▲ | immibis 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here" This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace. For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server. I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything? | | |
| ▲ | fc417fc802 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services. Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each. | | |
| ▲ | bjelkeman-again 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point. | | |
| ▲ | andreasmetsala 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator Isn’t this what Netflix used to be | | |
| ▲ | sgerenser 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. And the whole reason all these other services popped up is the IP holders realized they could make a lot more money with their own service vs licensing to an aggregator. I think it worked out pretty well for Disney+, because they have a huge back catalog of very popular IP. Not sure if anyone else is really making money with this new model, but they still don’t want to go back to ceding all control to Netflix. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I agree (and would also like to see that sort of info if it existed). But, I’m pretty sure the same folks who were in charge of cable when it became insufferable are now in charge of streaming. So, less-annoying business models… I’m not hopeful. |
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| ▲ | wavemode 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Amazon Prime Video is already this. You can subscribe to Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, etc. from within the Prime Video app, and watch content normally exclusive to those services. | |
| ▲ | nottorp 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We could go back to the olden days when everything was on Netflix instead :) |
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| ▲ | stevage 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, what was Zomato if not this? |
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| ▲ | dcow 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Recommendation apps would work a lot better if we weren’t so collectively hing up on copyright. |
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| ▲ | nradov 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That seems like terrible advice. First, many founders are targeting business or government customers rather than consumers. Second, when it comes to disruptive innovations, consumers don't even know what they want until you show it to them. |
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| ▲ | ozim 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even worse if you show it to them they still might not know they want it. You need like critical mass of early adopters so that people would see „hey this is useful, maybe I can use it too”. |
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| ▲ | kristopolous 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I guess. Successful executions become so endemic you have to take a step back and recognize it. Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix. Almost everybody looks at food and accommodation reviews and people bring up IMDb and rotten tomatoes when considering whether to watch a movie. Search engines and llms make decisions on what to surface, those are a kind of recommendation as well. So although I understand the sentiment, it's not really a great example - there's plenty of successful executions beyond the dreaded "for you recommendations" engagement bait slop on social media feeds. You're using the successful executions dozens of times a day without noticing it. |
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| ▲ | fakedang 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Hn is a discovery/recommendation site as is Reddit. Amazon makes a lot of margin on theirs and arguable it's part of the major value add for Spotify and Netflix. Nope, HN is just an online forum. I can't tailor what I see on HN to my tastes, and there's a subset of posters who get preferential treatment on the frontpage (YC companies), so nope, HN is not a recommendation site. |
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| ▲ | ijustlovemath 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| is there a difference between this and product market fit? |
