This is a meta-comment, and I'm meta-sorry for that, but I wanted to say that HN has got to be the only social news site that has articles sit at the top for some time before anyone comments on them. Is it that people are actually reading and digest the content first?

In addition to typically not commenting without reading the article, comments on HN overwhelmingly take the form of (1) expanding an argument (rare), (2) asking a question (less rare), or (3) expressing reasoned disagreement. Thus, the presence of an interesting article without comments that is at or near the top mostly indicates a reasonable level of agreement between what was written and the people on HN at the time.

I can think of 2 reasons for this. One, like you said, people don't seem as quick to post the "first thing that comes to my mind" sort of comment, which tend to be fairly shallow, or pun or meme-based.

Also, it doesn't take much for a story to get to the top, if only briefly. 5-10 up votes on a story shortly after it was submitted can get it near the top of the front page. It takes many more votes to get to the front page of a site like reddit, so more likely one of those up-voters commented as well.

This is likely because you must open two separate windows -- one for the article, and a second for the comments. often when i read an article in a separate window, i want to make a quick comment but decide it's not worth the effort to find the comments page again!

of course, this is remedied by some FF plug-ins, but i doubt most users have those installed.

when i first moved here from reddit i ran into this problem a lot. then i got slightly annoyed at having to have twice as many browser tabs open as before. i still don't use the plugin, but it has ceased to be a problem. my friends and i joke about having to get through all our tabs before getting down to the brass tacks.

comments that aren't at least reasonably well thought out tend to be voted down. in a community where more points = more features/access/privileges/etc., it hurts you to post mindlessly and helps you to construct good posts.

content is king, etc..

If I had to guess, the problem behind most failed companies (by young and old people alike) is building something people don't want.

Also, don't forget that it is the same fiddling around that leads young people to develop products that older folks could not come up with.

YC has a t-shirt that reads "Build something people want."

Lots of people want YouTube and it is on track to lose nearly $500 million this year. The fact that Google bought it doesn't mean they've created a business.

Build something people want. That's not good enough.

Build something people will pay for. That should imply enough want and will keep you around long enough to keep providing it.

"The fact that Google bought it doesn't mean they've created a business."

A business can lose money and still remain a business, even a great one. Companies go public all the time while in the red.

And that $500M figure you have for YouTube is the epitome of fuzzy-math.

Amazon.com lost money for 7 consecutive years before first posting a profit in Q4 2001.

That was all part of the business plan though - there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and they knew what it was. Whereas I don't think anyone knows how to make money off of YouTube.

"In June 2008 a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at US$200 million, noting progress in advertising sales."

We know two things for sure: a) youtube IS making money b) youtube is making money in tens of millions.

What we don't know--and what makes the argument that YouTube is a financial burden on google very difficult to prove--is the knowledge of YouTube's expenses.

Build something someone will pay for.

And that t-shirt inspired an essay.

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

More like the other way round. It was while writing this one

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

that I decided what to put on the t-shirts.

Is there somewhere that these T-shirts are available for the general public to buy? I would totally snap one of those up.

That's why I believe there is such a low success rate of websites. The itch you are scratching is unlikely to be one that others will a) want solved and b) want to pay to be solved.

The best serial entrepreneurs (multiple 7+ exits) I know all have a structured approach to picking a project, and it always starts with a statistics backed market test of an either fake product or hacked together prototype.

Who are they?

I would love to say but I'd have to ask them first as the sales probably aren't public knowledge.

Likely people who heed Steve Blank's "customer development" approach.

Possibly, they were promoting crossing the chasm at the time I got some mentoring with them.

There is a reason to be technology driven. Most markets are mature and hard to break into. The only good time for startups to break into a market is when there's a technological disruption they can take advantage of. Otherwise, GE or Microsoft can do it better than you. So it is actually a good bet to take brand new technologies and find a use for them.

Technology is only one source of disruption. Changes in demographics, industry structure, public perception are probably more important. The focus on green technologies is as much a function of public perception as it being a "new technology."

Microsoft do a lot of things well, like sales and marketing, but I'm not sure technology is one of them. I cannot think of any technology they have done really well. Browers, phone/computer operating systems etc.. IUnknown - please! I guess c# is a well designed and thought out language, but I've been a software engineer for 20 years and thankfully haven't had to go anywhere near a MSFT technology in many years. I have nothing against them as a company, they just don't make anything that I have found to be relevant for quite a while.

I'm also not using Microsoft's stack, the Unix world having grown on me, but I think you're mistaken.

Their flagship product, Windows, has some poor design decisions in it, decisions that were dictated mostly by their customers ... you can read "The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows" by Raymond Chen for some insights on this.

But otherwise the Windows programming model is pretty solid and consistent (usually).

There is a difference between "best" and "well".

They make their products solid enough that there isn't a mass exodus. If Vista destroyed people's data at an unacceptable rate you better believe Apple would be even better today. But they made Windows well enough that the problems are only an inconvenience not a crisis.

@zaidf At least the founders of the company must want their own product, like @hwijaya was saying. However that doesn't mean anybody else does.

Also a great quote on the need/want subject: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” [Henry Ford]

You don't have to do the @thing. We have nested comment threads.

It's a nice, glib quote, but really anyone with common sense would ask why do you want a faster horse. Ask "why" a few times and you get to the root of the problem and then you can think of a solution.

I am always amazed at how many things "regular people" want that I would never have thought of because I don't have insight into their jobs/hobbies/needs. Hang out on a few non-techie forums for a few weeks and you'll probably find tons of ideas.

"Most of the time, this leads to the well-known case of solutions looking for problems - beautiful technology that can’t become a profitable business."

OP dances around the solution, but never gets there:

Find a customer.

They're everywhere. And they need everything (or so it seems sometimes). And they're not bashful.

Once you have a half dozen customers in any industry, identify something they would all love. Pretty good bet building a business around that, not what you love.

Isn't that what he's doing? I took the article as a piece of marketing, written so that someone who identifies with that problem will pick up the phone to have a talk with him. I like the cut of your jib, young fellow-me-lad!

I actually added that later to make it clear to our customers that I am not talking about the product they're paying for.

But I like your train of thought =))

Well, nothing wrong with signaling that you as a business person have decided to focus on value-add. Honestly, many business books are thinly-designed resumes so you could do worse than coin a few buzzwords and just write a book with some provocative title like 'Escaping the foxhole, or how I learned to love the recession'.

Not a bad point but he says: "Steve Jobs wanted to build a computer that could show the beautiful typography that he likes so much."

From what I've read this wasn't the purpose at all - he (or perhaps more Woz) liked the technology and so wanted to find a way to make a living making great technology.

and I'm pretty sure Larry Page did not design pagerank to be used for ranking academic papers, it was for the web since the start. There was actually previous work on a similar ranking system for academic papers that was referenced in pagerank iirc.

I wish I could call them up and ask, I stand corrected

Well you can't call them but here is their paper on pagerank http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/

There is a short mention of previous work done with academic citation analysis and there is also a bit at the end about the original purpose of the algorithm (displaying ranked backlinks.)

The Woz didn't want anything but to own a computer. He couldn't afford one, so he designed them on paper, and then he found out that his designs are far superior to what was being sold. Then he sold some kits, and then he built the Apple I.

The brilliance of the man is astounding: http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

When I started out, I pitched a technology solution to my (now) advisor. He answered: "What problem are you trying to solve?"

I learned a lot from this question, and ask it any time a newcomer pitches me a technology solution.

Me myself being a young entrepreneur (20), I can definitely see this guys point. However, I think that there are many (probably unsuccessful) entrepreneurs like this, no matter what age or market segment. Maybe the young ones just haven't been burned and given up/changed careers yet.

Some people just don't understand that a 'good idea' is only a very small fraction of what goes into making a good business. The real judge of an entrepreneur is NOT the ideas they come up with, but how they execute them, and also WHICH ideas they execute.

Not sure if he's right with regards of building great company. We're also on our ways of solving our own problem at the moment.

So far, i can say that, the only concern that i personally have with solving our own problem is, "is it just us that have the problem or other people got the same issue?" (a.k.a is this a big enough problem where we should spend our valuable time on? or should we move to another project).

From my own experience, 2 benefits that i personally have with solving our own problems are: you understand exactly on what is the 80% of the pains and when things get tough, you can encourage yourself that worst case scenario is you use it yourself.

That's why you test to see if your target customers have the problem and are willing to pay for it. Do this before building your product if possible (and it usually always is).

I think there are as many successful companies started by careful market analysis as there are company's started by an entrepreneur's mission to solve a personal problem.

Jeff Bezos coldly examined markets and decided books were the right entry point into ecommerce. However, these don't make the best pr stories, and so aren't told...or in some cases, the story is just fabricated after the fact, such as Pierre Omidyar building ebay to sell pez dispensers.

The root of the issue is not idea-centricism, but self-centricism.

People think their ideas are unique, but they're not. They think that their implementation of a pre-existing thing is different or better, but it's not. They think their service is worth paying for or acquiring, but it's usually not.

That's why there's so damn much me-tooism in the "startup" world (and everywhere else):

"If it feels special or new or exciting to me, it must be exciting or new or special."

We live out our entire lives looking out of our own skulls, mired in our own viewpoints, so everyone feels like he or she is the center of the universe (for better and for worse).

It's basic human nature, and therefore people who are not like that are a very rare item indeed. Overcoming it can make you an immensely powerful force.