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The Good Idea Corollary to @andrewchen’s Dumb Idea Paradox: Why starting a startup with an “obviously good idea” isn’t always a good time. Thread 👇
0/ I see two types of founders start companies. Type 1 are so obsessed with building a specific product that they can’t do anything else. Sometimes their ideas seem dumb. Type 2 are obsessed with building a great company, and aren’t tied to an idea. They look for good ideas.
1/ For the first startup I founded, I was type 1. My dumb idea was social games on Facebook in ‘07. At the time FB was #2. MySpace was the dominant player. Social games were an evolution of those annoying viral apps on the FB platform. Nothing about it was obvious.
2/ It worked out ok for us. Because our idea was so dumb, we were rare experts in a rapidly growing field. Our team of 35 was acquihired by Zynga in 2010.
3/ But this tweet storm is about my “good idea.” 2012, Heyday, a journal on your phone that automatically wrote itself using photos and GPS.
4/ In 2012, there were no consumer cloud photo providers. The photos you took on your phone were trapped on device. The only way to sync was to plug your phone into your computer. No normal users really ever did this!
5/ A good idea occurred to me and my cofounder @blader: why don’t we use all the photos trapped on peoples phones (and the attached metadata) to create a journal of their lives - where they’ve been, who they’re with, what they’ve experienced.
6/ We built our prototype and I’m still proud of the experience we designed to this day - immediately on install we’d crawl your camera roll and instantly start displaying your life’s history. A journal entry in your life for each day, displayed with your own photography.
7/ An investor tried the prototype and got choked up. The first entry our app shows him was a photo of his recently passed dog’s collar hanging. He scrolled further and saw his children on vacay. It was a different experience than the grid of tiny thumbnails in your camera roll.
8/ Our good idea kept getting better. We realized we should store all your photos in our cloud so when you got a new phone your journal was safe. Our product could be the digital shoebox of all your mementos. Retention would be 100%.
9/ We found the sweet spots for reminding you of past memories: notable location clusters outside of your normal travel patterns. Moments from > 6 months ago. Moments from yesterday and today. Last weekends photos. We pushed these to you in notifs.
10/ One thing we kept telling ourselves and our team: We can’t imagine a world in 5 years where this doesn’t exist. Why shouldn’t it be us who build it?
11/ Our fatal error was that every incumbent was saying the same exact thing to their teams. Photo cloud was a very obvious good idea.
12/ Facebook launched a photo syncing service, then Dropbox Carousel came out. Google, Apple... hell, even Amazon launched photo clouds. They all split photos by location. They all had smart “memory highlights”. Even Google Maps gives you a location journal now.
13/ At first we ignored. Competitor are validation of the idea, stay focused on product. Our app was more magical and delightful. We would win on experience.
We ended up pivoting as the incumbents easily ate our lunch.
We ended up pivoting as the incumbents easily ate our lunch.
15/ I was a type 1 founder at heart, obsessed with the product to the exclusion of everything else. We thought competitor focus was a distraction. For “dumb idea” companies it often is, since real competition emerges too late. In “good idea” companies, it’s a necessity.
16/ If you’re starting a company, think about what type of founder you are, and what type of leader your company needs. Good idea companies need type 2 founders, obsessed with competitors and willing to fight a very different fight.
If I could edit tweets, I would rewrite some of these tweets to call type 1 founders “inventors” and type 2 “executives”.
