When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas.
Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits.
AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver.
Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies.
So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades.
Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has.
Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed.
You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.
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.
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.
I think many of the "fun" ones will always be tarpit ideas. e.g. "an app to help find something fun to do with friends"... that's just your chat app of choice.
Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck.
Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).
When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas.
Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits.
AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver.
Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies.
So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades.
Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has.
Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed.
You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.
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.
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.
I think many of the "fun" ones will always be tarpit ideas. e.g. "an app to help find something fun to do with friends"... that's just your chat app of choice.
Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck.
Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).
The video has a sequel released nine months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs