6 comments

  • Martin GlassMartin Glass, almost 10 years ago

    Looks attractive, but I am (and I'm guessing the rest of the world) is so incredibly burnt out on these kinds of app. There are so many hard technology problems out there, why are we still making things like this?

    Allan likes to bring up this point regularly, and it describes this perfectly: We have graduated past the point where better technology and design are competitive advantages for Easy Problems (like the problems this app addresses). The reason solutions to Easy Problems succeed has nothing to do with them being better designed.

    The only two choices for us are (1) to either become better entrepreneurs and compete on something other than technology/design or (2) work on Hard Problems.

    5 points
    • David MDavid M, almost 10 years ago

      The notion you've mentioned in the last part is really interesting..could you elaborate a bit more on what this "other" is to you?

      0 points
      • Martin GlassMartin Glass, almost 10 years ago

        As in, things other than the product.

        The classic example of this is the dating website. There are 10,000 services for dating, yet designers/developers are constantly saying "Dating websites suck, let's build a better one". 99% fail hard, and the reason isn't because of the product. It's because the raw materials sucked: The people.

        Same goes for social discovery services and review services. Why do most fail hard? Because the Easy Problem wasn't waiting for a new technology solution.

        A marginally better product for an Easy Problem means squat. If I design a 20% better social recommendation app, I'm going to fail as hard as every other shmuck in the marketplace. If I make a 20% safer vehicle, a 20% more effective tool to detect illness, a 20% more efficient energy source, a 20% faster way to get to the moon... that's huge.

        Good news is that the world is now saturated with technology people. The bad news is that they're working on hundreds of different (not better) solutions to Easy Problems.

        Being dead set on solving Easy Problems means that you either have to be much much better than everyone else (which is unlikely) or you need to think well beyond product design and technology. That's not something we're used to doing. We've been babied by the last decade of technology (plenty of new, Easy Problems without solutions) and convinced that good products rise to the top.

        3 points
    • Connor Tomas O'BrienConnor Tomas O'Brien, almost 10 years ago

      Absolutely agree.

      This app is a pretty good example of something we were discussing on here a couple of days ago, about apps/services in which too much attention is placed on visual aesthetic, and not enough on refining the core value proposition (i.e. determining the existence of a real problem and figuring out a new/better way to solve it). (https://news.layervault.com/stories/4090-when-design-doesnt-matter)

      0 points
  • Nicola RushtonNicola Rushton, almost 10 years ago

    Nice site design. Pretty gross app idea.

    1 point
  • Roy WalkerRoy Walker, almost 10 years ago

    Slider porn!

    0 points