I'd guess around 12-14 hours of actual thinking and working time. At a normal startup as an employee, I'm guessing you'd average around 10 hours, but more around crunch time
I think the article is a troll, but I don't think you can fault him for the way he interpreted that sentence. You said you've been working 18 hours a day, and then you implied that the only time you took off was to watch a movie now and then.
Sorry dude, but you must not remember them vividly, because the majority of these sites did actually have a user base and did actually make revenue. In some cases (WebVan for instance), they actually made quite a bit of revenue.
They were simply prey to illogical economics. They had all created machines that were too large for the revenues to support.
As for Friendster, I know it's been fun to say that they've failed for the last 3 years, but as far as I can tell their story isn't even close to being over. They have billions of pageviews and a growing userbase. I'm guessing you'd probably switch places with them right now.
WebVan... not a memorable company... Lycos, Alta-Vista (the original search engine), pets.com, over half of those companies had a good idea...
Friendster, 'billions' of page-views... per month?
I think I'm missing 1% of what your saying... I wouldn't switch places with them, I'm not where they are yet... I'm in the development stage, alpha-stage.
Above all that, these companies are on multiple sites listed multiple times for being 'part of the economic dot com failure'. Is that what your referring too when you say "created machines that were too large for the revenues to support"?
WebVan, for example, bought a fleet of Mercs to deliver groceries with. If they'd gone for Fords, they might have survived. OK, not that alone, but they basically spent too much money on things that customers didn't care about and wouldn't pay for.
It's simple user psychology. So much of traffic on social networking sites is lurking around on other people's pages, especially those that you're 'interested' in. I'd rather not let other people know that I've been looking at their page, especially when I've been looking at their page a lot. If I know that they know, it dis-incentivizes me from surfing around at all, killing page views.
In other words, social networks need to do everything they can to nurture their creepers.
FaceBook had a huge blunder a couple months ago when it seemed like typing a space in the search field apparently autocompleted the people who most recently looked at your profile page. It was never confirmed that that was what was happening, but people were massively creeped out and they fixed the bug within a day.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the hell he's talking about either. The fact that specific funds exist for both iPhone and Facebook applications kind of obliterates his point.
This dissertation on how not to feel like a worthless gnat because of simple turns of phrase makes me think of another mantra I use to feel better about myself:
I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.
this is key. Look at Google. they target technical types, but for joe average, their product is just as usable as the compitition, who explicitly targets the average user.
Joe average is going to have a technical person setup his computer- If that technical person, say, makes firefox the default browser, assuming it mostly works, joe average is going to use firefox. This might also be why OSX is doing so much better than previous macOS versions. Whenever a non-technical person asks me for a laptop reccomendation, I tell them to get a mac, in part because I know they might come to me for help (and I'll be damned if I start rooting around in a windows box that isn't properly backed up. Reboot, reboot, then format and reinstall, I say.)
the other side of this is that it needs to work for joe average... this is why Linux on the desktop took so long to take off (it looks like it's getting a toehold in the low-end- by 'just working' for simple tasks) even now, linux on the desktop only 'just works' if you don't need commercial software.
so yeah, you must target the early adoptors, but targeting the early adoptors alone is not enough. You must make it usable for the average person.
(which is funny, because I've put almost zero effort into the usability of my product. I don't have a support budget, so if you don't know UNIX well, eh, for now I'm not the best product for you.)
"Look at Google. they target technical types, but for joe average, their product is just as usable as the compitition, who explicitly targets the average user."
Do you mean search? Its not the case that yahoo or live search targets only at average ppl. It very well targets you and me too. On the other hand with Gmail, it targets only at savvy ppl. People are not used to conversations or tagging or archiving.
I got the inspiration for this post after talking to some non-tech people about how they find and use new software. You realize that they live in a different world, without all the chatter.
I'm not implying that what we're doing is going to shake the foundations of the planet, because it won't -- simply relaying what I'm thinking about as we work.
It was a solid post -- I'm all for finding real 'paying' customers, as well -- just seems that some of the posts are prodding other web app startups (a lot of your fellow YC compadres actually).
