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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

The software piece of this is not the hard part. The social piece is.

Admirable goal, but good luck getting wide enough adoption to achieve viability.

This explains just about everything. Can’t remember all the times I’ve read some pompous HN comment “pah, I could build it” and then thought, “well, you’d be just 0.01% of the way there.”

Nothing kills this delusion more than spending a year building something that you can’t seem to successfully market... multiple times. Then you realize there’s almost zero value in the technical part, and you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business.

yet there would be nothing to market without the technical part so how can it have zero value ?

maybe your marketing has zero value because you're doing it wrong

If you have good marketing/sales but terrible tech, you can still be incredibly successful. It's much harder to go the other way around.

And that's a darn shame. As a result we have markets saturated with snake oil while the good stuff (medicine) rots away in obscurity.

This is the game we've invented and which rules we usually play by. This area is waiting to be peacefully disrupted.

How valuable is air?

It's worthless to everyone except a drowning man, to whom it's priceless.

Supply and demand are highly dependent on context. A strong technology base in a business is usually only required after you're starting to see scaling problems.

don't know about you but air is essential for my wellbeing and I live entirely on land

And if someone were to create an air company that sells air to the average consumer, how successful do you think it would be?

These guys sold out in 2 weeks.

“Canadian start-up sells bottled air to China, says sales booming”

https://www-m.cnn.com/2015/12/15/asia/china-canadian-company...

It happened with water. Who would have thought 15 years ago how much bottled water is sold today?

There’s a difference: I don’t always have nice cold water to hand in a carryable form; I pay for the convenience of getting that. I always have air in exactly the form I want it.

Thaaaat's probably not true... You just don't know enough about the air you're breathing!

Marketing will take care of that. Half-kidding.

> you can only chuckle at HN comments arguing about Python vs Node as if that’s the crux of a new business

I definitely relate to this. I use Go a fair amount, and any conversation about Go on /r/programming invites a whole bunch of "every product built on a language without generics is doomed to fail". While generics would be a nice feature to my mind, I like Go for the tooling and the ecosystem, which are still an insignificant contribution to the success of a commercial product, but still many times more significant than the type system (and I'm a fan of type systems too).

Interesting...the simplicity of the language appeals to me. If the tooling and ecosysstem is as great as you say it is I'm in ;-)

To add, we mostly use pre generics Java at work. The product was built around 2003-2005 and is very successful inside company. It is also most reliable among dozen on or so other enterprise project in our group. So this obsession with Generics or other language feature is by people who are less interested in product and its success.

You just explained why time to market is so important, which really does justify discussions about languages that focus on developer productivity.

Sadly developer productivity is a problem to have, only if you have a legit business case, which most startups don't have.

Truth is, Python or Node or Go doesn't matter. Your customer won't care if it takes some input and output something they expected. Technology is cheap.

Startups absolutely have time to market and cost of developer time. Using a language that can get you there in 1 month instead of 1 year is very important and has nothing to do with the cost of technology.

There's very little to no correlation between "difficulty to get adoption/sales" and "time to market". This very article is about displacing Amazon (founded in 1994) in the ecommerce space and the very top comment is about OpenBazaar (started in 2016). You can develop your business in golang or rust or f#, but if the business idea is irrelevant or unviable then your developer economic productivity is exactly zero.

OpenBazaar started in 2014.

I don't think either language I mentioned there could offer you 12 productivity against the rest. Yeah, people have preference, for sure, but if you can build something in a month time using Node, someone else could probably clone it with Python/PHP in a month time as well.

Whether you can sell your startups or not, is a completely different matter

social is difficult to get but amazon success is not built on very high value... lots of weird products, lots of weird sellers ..

I think it's not absurd to picture a different market

As others have pointed out in this thread, the software part is more or less already built. It's called OpenBazaar.

And you're right that adoption is the hardest part. OpenBazaar has had about 55k people using it since last November when the 2.0 version launched.

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