A less grandiose version of this aphorism: timing the market matters just as much as what product you ship.

People tend to focus on product attributes and pricing because compared to timing, it is more in your control.

An example of this that I think about a lot is Zoom. Zoom nailed video/audio quality more than most of other competing products, but otherwise they didn't offer anything that new compared to legions of other enterprise A/V platforms. They just happened to offer unlimited free meetings for <= 100 participants right as the pandemic happened. This was all pretty much lucky timing and some good choices around freemium growth mechanics. This window of opportunity closed quickly for competing products as behavior changed and network effects took hold. The only new competitor that emerged mid-pandemic was Teams, because MSFT could literally force install it on every Windows machine.

It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results.

Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"

It sounds like what it's intending to get across is that there are market conditions that lead to a product taking off, and market conditions by nature change, which means a product taking off today doesn't necessarily mean that the same product would take off tomorrow.

So I'm curious about your opinion. How does it mean nothing to you?

You may find this statement obvious and as such uninteresting but it does have a clear, simple meaning. And while it is simple, I see people who think that they can "build the next X" by replicating X's features all the time.

["X" is used as a placeholder and not to refer to the ridiculously named social network]

“Peter Thiel, thought leader”