Why can't Justin.TV fix their platform so that people can find the videos?
Every single time there is a startup school thread on HN, there is a sub thread of Justin.TV urls passed around like dodgy bittorrent urls. Surely the platform should support this?
The titles on the URLs make it even worse: "Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv" - hours & days after it isn't being broadcast, isn't live and is only on Justin.TV because they happened to record it.
</RANT>
I'm pretty ambivalent about the public display of votes on HN, but it might be useful for the Justin.TV people to know how many people agreed with my complaint.
I don't have any hard stats, but I think that a majority of justin.tv's traffic is gaming related. In my observations, a single gamer can produce hours of content a day, most days of a week. For these types of streamers, it is more of the exception than the rule that someone will go back to watch the stream.
In the case that there is an interesting game that people want to link to or whatnot, they do end up passing around crazy urls and mentioning time offsets. If it is a really popular thing, someone will rip it off of the site and post it to youtube.
One commonality that I see (at least for the partnered streamers) is that in between games, they will run a commercial (they have the ability to choose when commercials happen). That would be a natural point to split the video on justin.tv's side, and then you could at least directly link to a particular game. Giving the ability for streamers to title a video after it is completed would help discoverability as well.
This brings in lots of traffic to Justin.tv (there are ads on each video). Because you can't really search for these, it becomes very difficult to get caught (unlike youtube).
Example of what you get when a broadcaster uses these features: http://www.justin.tv/naslseasontwo/videos
Likealittle, with zero revenue model, exemplifies what everyone is complaining about.
Hardly a convincing condemnation of what Likealittle are doing.
Goes to show how good an actor he is too - I never would've imagined that the same person who played the doofus Kelso in That 70's show, or the guy from punkd would be giving solid, down to earth business advice at such a young age.
and continues into Part 2: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298680010
One of the truly undervalued assets in this world is learning from other people's mistakes instead of having to learn from your own. It can be the difference between winning and losing.
Why?
If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for.
Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question.
Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought to be immovable.
You know what's funny about that, though? Larry and Sergey wouldn't have had a great answer for that question when they started. They had a relatively primitive technology demo, and were taking on massive competitors with deep pockets (hell, even they tried to sell the idea before they gave in and started Google). There's absolutely no reason that one of the major search companies couldn't have focused their resources on search, come up with something similar to PageRank, and smothered Google in the crib. They just didn't. Oops.
Frequently, the correct answer to your question is: "our competitors are bureaucratic and slow, and while our approach could be replicated by any good, two-person team, history suggests that won't happen"...but that always seems to be the hardest answer to sell. Everyone is looking for the deterministic solution to the problem of innovation, when the solution is actually stochastic.
This is not something you just change, and it was a very real benefit for Google (but perhaps one that was difficult to see).
So I'd argue that the answer wasn't bureaucratic and slow, but "our competitors are set in their ways".
No matter how nimble you are, if you've stared yourself blind on your own perceived solution of a problem, you might be unable to react to the challenge of some little startup coming in and solving the problem in a different way. You might even have tied yourself down with partners etc. in ways that makes changing your model incredibly much harder even if you do realize.
If you're solving a problem that your stronger competitors could be solving, and everyone knows that it's a valuable problem that needs to be solved, they'll probably squash you. Or be willing to buy when you offer up your solution.
MVPs and customer interviews and everything else are great, but at the end of the day, what's most important is that you target a market large enough to sell to enough customers to make for a sustainable business model. Even a perfect product can fail if a market is too small or worse, completely non-existent.
Also, there was a good discussion about profit[2] a week ago. I recommend to take a look.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/30/us-venture-bround-...
I also think that building something cool in the hopes that you will get bought out by a large company is the hip thing to do.
Selling and marketing is boring to many of the people that want to start a company.
And if those things need a company as a vehicle, make that, too.
For myself, failure is quite okay. I spent the entire weekend at a hackathon where I failed to have anything to demo. My teammate and i were the only ones there to fail to have a demo. I had had success at other hackathons so this hurt. Ultimately it doesn't scare me though, as I'll explain later.
And on the billion dollar company, I have to say I can't relate. My friend and I come from middle class (blue collar working town middle class) families, so we've never had much money and we don't really chase it.
So for us, it's not about the money, it's always been about building great things that we want for ourselves. And with each failure and each success, we learn more, and what we make becomes better and better from our learning. I like the idea of failure because it's only ever made the things that I make better, and helped me to be sure that I am doing what I love. Ultimately every time I ready one of these articles, and I realize that I embrace failure as an opportunity, and see money as a distraction, i feel more right with myself that we should indeed be starting a startup.
Disclaimer: I am a student who has no idea what I'm talking about.
