The post has gotten a fairly large number of upvotes since it was posted on Reddit. While, sure, many others in the startup space can just as easily write up a post about what he or she believes are terrible ideas for startups, tianan comes from the unique perspective of a programmer. According to tianan, 95 percent (likely hyperbolic) of the people who jump into the startup space come from a non-tech background hoping to find a tech cofounder to help them build one of the ideas from this list of bad ideas. From a programmer’s perspective, it’s much more easy to recognize how likely an idea can be executed and what the timeline for that execution actually looks like; this unique perspective is likely what’s contributed to the popularity of the Reddit post. In the post, tianan writes that he/she has had previous experience starting and exiting one successful company and is currently working on a second one. He/she writes: So, what are the seven startup ideas that tianan believes are almost always terrible? Check them out below:
1. Textbook Exchange
2. Gift Recommendation
It’s hard to change consumer thought processes – most of us never think to go to an app to help us in determining the right gift to buy. And even when this startup idea is turned into an actual idea, they often turn out to suck at what they do:
3. Event Suggestion
Because there are way too many of them and they keep failing.
4. Travel Recommendations
Tianan attributes the failure of these kinds of products due largely to the frequency of usage, hence the rate of user acquisition; they simply can’t grow a big enough user base to allow them to succeed.
5. Social Network for X
Remember when people thought Ello was going to actually compete with Facebook? Yeah…no. And niche social networks simply won’t go anywhere. According to tianan, people don’t want to actually join a social network with people with whom they share one specific interest or trait.
6. Networking Made Better
7. Craigslist But Not Shitty
These kinds of apps tend to face the problems associated with textbook exchanges/marketplaces and demands a lot of critical mass. It’s also a matter of dealing with something that many people have been using for many years – that’s something difficult to replace. But tianan doesn’t necessarily think that it’s at all hopeless:
