6 ms·

"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists." This is such a

"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists." This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.

chasing 13y ago
cough(Soylent)cough
- wahsd 13y ago
  Soylent lulz as if that hasn't been done and done again. It's just snake oil under different name.
  - aianus 13y ago
    Please point me to an existing product I can buy today. I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      Ensure (http://ensure.com/ http://ensure.com/) Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip// https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)
      - aianus 13y ago
        Which Ensure is formulated to replace food entirely? As far as I can tell, if I drank enough ensure to get 2400 calories, the other nutrients would be out of wack. As in, a given portion does not have the same DV% of each nutrient. I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.
        DanBC 13y ago
        I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to give you potentially dangerous advice for you to fuck about with while experimenting on your nutritional intake. Recommended daily calories are 2000 for adults. One week of soylent is $65. 48 bottles of Ensure Plus is about $80. 6 bottles of Ensure Plus would be 2100 calories.
        aianus 13y ago
        To be fair, $65 is the pre-order price and includes a shaker bottle (worth $10) and free shipping. Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%. I don't think Ensure Plus is a substitute good for Soylent. It's a supplement not a food replacement and it's formulated and priced as such.
        dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150% Most nutrients with recommended amounts are healthy at higher than recommended amounts within fairly wide bounds, but the usually-listed recommended amount for Sodium is much higher than is minimally necessary, and is actually the upper limit recommended for about half the US population. So, actually, I'm not surprised that something intended as a broadly-usable food replacement would go over on most nutrients and under on Sodium. http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/ http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/ Nutrition isn't one-size-fits-all.
        DanBC 13y ago
        > It's a supplement not a food replacement You are wrong. (http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retail http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retai...) > For interim sole-source nutrition. edit: removed unnecessarily grumpy sentence.
    - rusabd 13y ago
      fatty fish or fatty meat
    - gotrecruit 13y ago
      EAS Myoplex? There are a myriad of other Meal Replacement Powders on the market that has been around for decades, some of them designed to completely replace meals with specific ratios such as 40/40/20 (protein, carbs, fat) or more commonly, low-carb versions. Seriously, go to bodybuilding.com and look under the meal replacement category and you'll find a bunch of products that has figured this shit out decades before soylent.
snorkel 13y ago
... And years of work experience to understand organizational dynamics to setup a healthy business helps too. It's more than the idea that matters, but can you build and run the team that will make that idea a reality. I know that when I was fresh out of college I didn't understand organizational dynamics at all. I've read many examples of young startups failing because of rookie management mistakes.
6ren 13y ago
Yes, coming up with the problem is often the hard bit. But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an authority). Fortune favours the delusional.
- thisrod 13y ago
  There's an obvious reason for Einstein to have gotten stuck: the subject of his later research, a quantum theory of gravity, really was too hard. The problem remains open today.
- beat 13y ago
  It's not a matter of "didn't realize it's impossible". The problem young startup entrepreneurs have is they don't realize that valuable problems exist. Valuable problems tend to be industry-specific and narrowly defined, so you need to be at least aware of the problems of an industry, and the existing solutions/workarounds. Without industry experience at anything but being a college student and reading HN, how are you going to find problems to solve? That's why you see so many me-too social apps. You solve what you know, and if your most extensive experience with computers is Facebook and Twitter, that's your space for problems. There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile is opening up another wave of solutions. And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change the whole model. Ain't no college kid coming up with that.

chasing 13y ago

cough(Soylent)cough

wahsd 13y ago
Soylent lulz as if that hasn't been done and done again. It's just snake oil under different name.
- aianus 13y ago
  Please point me to an existing product I can buy today. I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Ensure (http://ensure.com/ http://ensure.com/) Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip// https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)
    - aianus 13y ago
      Which Ensure is formulated to replace food entirely? As far as I can tell, if I drank enough ensure to get 2400 calories, the other nutrients would be out of wack. As in, a given portion does not have the same DV% of each nutrient. I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.
      - DanBC 13y ago
        I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to give you potentially dangerous advice for you to fuck about with while experimenting on your nutritional intake. Recommended daily calories are 2000 for adults. One week of soylent is $65. 48 bottles of Ensure Plus is about $80. 6 bottles of Ensure Plus would be 2100 calories.
        aianus 13y ago
        To be fair, $65 is the pre-order price and includes a shaker bottle (worth $10) and free shipping. Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%. I don't think Ensure Plus is a substitute good for Soylent. It's a supplement not a food replacement and it's formulated and priced as such.
        dragonwriter 13y ago
        > Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150% Most nutrients with recommended amounts are healthy at higher than recommended amounts within fairly wide bounds, but the usually-listed recommended amount for Sodium is much higher than is minimally necessary, and is actually the upper limit recommended for about half the US population. So, actually, I'm not surprised that something intended as a broadly-usable food replacement would go over on most nutrients and under on Sodium. http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/ http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/ Nutrition isn't one-size-fits-all.
        DanBC 13y ago
        > It's a supplement not a food replacement You are wrong. (http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retail http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retai...) > For interim sole-source nutrition. edit: removed unnecessarily grumpy sentence.
  - rusabd 13y ago
    fatty fish or fatty meat
  - gotrecruit 13y ago
    EAS Myoplex? There are a myriad of other Meal Replacement Powders on the market that has been around for decades, some of them designed to completely replace meals with specific ratios such as 40/40/20 (protein, carbs, fat) or more commonly, low-carb versions. Seriously, go to bodybuilding.com and look under the meal replacement category and you'll find a bunch of products that has figured this shit out decades before soylent.

snorkel 13y ago

... And years of work experience to understand organizational dynamics to setup a healthy business helps too. It's more than the idea that matters, but can you build and run the team that will make that idea a reality. I know that when I was fresh out of college I didn't understand organizational dynamics at all. I've read many examples of young startups failing because of rookie management mistakes.

6ren 13y ago

Yes, coming up with the problem is often the hard bit. But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an authority). Fortune favours the delusional.

thisrod 13y ago
There's an obvious reason for Einstein to have gotten stuck: the subject of his later research, a quantum theory of gravity, really was too hard. The problem remains open today.
beat 13y ago
It's not a matter of "didn't realize it's impossible". The problem young startup entrepreneurs have is they don't realize that valuable problems exist. Valuable problems tend to be industry-specific and narrowly defined, so you need to be at least aware of the problems of an industry, and the existing solutions/workarounds. Without industry experience at anything but being a college student and reading HN, how are you going to find problems to solve? That's why you see so many me-too social apps. You solve what you know, and if your most extensive experience with computers is Facebook and Twitter, that's your space for problems. There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile is opening up another wave of solutions. And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change the whole model. Ain't no college kid coming up with that.