{"id":259,"date":"2011-07-22T09:38:41","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T16:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/?p=259"},"modified":"2011-07-22T09:38:41","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T16:38:41","slug":"a-twitter-a-hoverboard-or-something-in-between","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/a-twitter-a-hoverboard-or-something-in-between\/","title":{"rendered":"A Twitter, a Hoverboard, or something in between"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are two very special types of startups that you should know about: the Twitter Startup and the Hoverboard Startup.\u00a0 If you’re one of these and don’t know it, you’re going to screw up your pitch.<\/p>\n

Imagine walking in to hear a startup pitch its goods.\u00a0 The CEO gets on stage, clears his throat, and starts talking about the number of teenagers in western countries, and their per capita disposable income.\u00a0 As he drones on about trend cycles and market prediction, you rudely glance at the company summary and it says “Foot-propelled play device with gravitational repulsion field for friction minimization”, and you realize that he’s trying to pitch you a hoverboard.<\/p>\n

You’re thinking about this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and the slide he’s on is this.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>You seriously don’t care about his viral strategy or exit strategy, you just want to know if he’s invented the secret of levitation<\/em>.\u00a0 If he has, you’re pretty sure the rest will follow.\u00a0 If not, then… well, then you’re going to have some stiff words with the “friend” who suggested you meet.\u00a0 A Hoverboard Startup is one where the problem is screamingly obvious, but the solution is prohibitively hard<\/em>.\u00a0 The only real question in a Hoverboard Startup is – how good is your solution?<\/p>\n

Now imagine a second pitch.\u00a0 Someone charismatic and exciting is painting their vision of a new future.<\/p>\n

“Facebook has hundreds of millions of users.\u00a0 But you know what?\u00a0 It’s too complicated.\u00a0 Here’s what we’re going to do.\u00a0 First, we don’t host apps any more.\u00a0 They’re distracting and a security risk.\u00a0 Second, we get rid of pictures.\u00a0 Too much storage.\u00a0 Third, we get rid of profiles, or at least all but one sentence of them.\u00a0 We also get rid of school and work affiliations, skip all the new stuff like location and checkins, and pretty much kill all the privacy settings so everything is just public by default.\u00a0 Won’t that be AMAZING?”<\/p>\n

You look confused.<\/p>\n

“What’s left?”<\/p>\n

“Well, you can friend people.\u00a0 But of course we removed the feature where they have to confirm that you’re friends, so we’re going to rename it to either ‘following’ or ‘stalking’, we haven’t decided.\u00a0 And you can post status updates to your wall. But we decided to cap those at 140 characters.”<\/p>\n

“That’s it?”<\/p>\n

“Yes.\u00a0 It’s going to be huge!”<\/p>\n

Now think about the questions in your mind.\u00a0 You’d probably look at the technical chops of the founders, consider that what they’re trying to do is a tiny fraction of the complexity of Facebook, and assume that it’s not going to be very hard to solve the problem technically (you’d be wrong, of course, but that’s besides the point).\u00a0 You’d just be sitting at there, staring in wonderment, going, “Why the hell would anybody care?”<\/p>\n

In other words, this startup is the exact opposite of a Hoverboard Startup. A Twitter Startup is one where the solution is straightforward, but it doesn’t appear to actually solve any problem. <\/em><\/p>\n

Now most startups are neither fish nor fowl.\u00a0 Both the problem and the solution seems intuitively reasonable but neither one is totally proven.\u00a0 But recognize if you’re a Twitter Startup or a Hoverboard Startup:<\/p>\n

Twitter Startups<\/span><\/p>\n