"Take a competitor product, remove all features you don’t need, and make it crazy fast."
Seems to me there are hundreds of lifestyle businesses just waiting to happen by following this formula.
So many good ideas out there could be made so much better by reducing them to their essentials, but making them elegant and "crazy fast".
I think you may have just re-discovered Disruptive Innovation (sometimes also called Disruption Theory): incumbents over-serve their customers by adding lots of features, complexity, and cost. Upstarts can attack them by focusing on only a few core features and/or low price. The incumbents can't respond without annoying their existing customers who have grown accustomed to all the features the incumbent provides.
YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google.
That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?
Up front disclosure, I am the founder of a video hosting company.
I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow.
There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies.
So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.
On the storage front, it seems to me like you could get around that a bit by not keeping content forever. You could make a more ephemeral video hosting site.
As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.
These are good ideas. Our theory is that by simplifying the complexity of video hosting, it makes it viable for more people to test against various business models without having to do the heavy lifting of figuring out video encoding, delivery, and storage just to start. Basically similar to the role that WordPress, et al provided for websites themselves.
There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.
Also manual moderation is pretty expensive, as is dealing with the copyright lawsuits and to top it off the patent licenses for streaming video in the first place.
Content, advertising, and bandwidth (along with other technical services) operate as entirely different types of economic goods, in multiple senses, but especially in terms of elasticities, rivalousness, appeal, and excludability. There's also the role of attention and content and service ranking.
Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable.
Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services.
Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable.
The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.
Well, hosting videos is an expensive operation. You have 2 options to pay for the resources you're consuming: Trade your time (ads) or trade your money (subscribe). The latter is worth it if you're using YouTube a lot.
it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).
I've been running ad blockers for... well, since they were created. I have no idea how anyone lives without them. But YT in particular has started bypassing all of them. I'm down to using just Firefox with the YT enhancer plugin, because it's the only thing that manages to skip the ads for me now. And I'll quit using it if that breaks.
I have personally not seen an ad on youtube in years, bar the video recommendations on the home page and the 'sponsored content' some channels bake into their videos. On desktop, I use uMatrix for more granular blocking + uBlock Origin for hiding empty frames, and I use Youtube Vanced on Android.
I'm using ubo on desktop and adguard on ios/android. No ads on YT ever, and very rarely I see ads on sites. Do you have your lists well-updated? What blocker did you use before?
One place I worked wanted multiple people to "own" a story, but JIRA doesn't work like that, so they implemented a totally new custom "owner" field that did allow it and then told everyone not to use the native owner field. Now you had to track everything two ways.
What makes this worse is when 1/3 of the teams in your org decide that they want a similar feature, but each comes up with their own custom-named tag ("owner", "lead", "point person", "point of contact", "jefe").
And then you want to run some jql queries against those tickets, and you have to use disgusting query generators to de-dupe the tag monstrosity.
They've done an excellent job of giving you just enough features to shoot yourself in the foot with.
How interesting, my experience is completely different - I'm a UX Designer working in a squad and I/we find JIRA super easy to use, allows you to customise ticket types pretty much to our heart's content (including removing stuff you don't need), ditto customising the board and other features, allows us to track changes, comment on tickets, and works reliably. Almost nothing else allows us to do the same. Admittedly Jira has been overhauled recently and is much better than it was, plus some new features have been added. Oh, and there's an app which allows me to do most of what I need to do on my phone super quickly, partially thanks to the notifications.
You're a UX designer. a User Experience designer. User Experience is your profession. And you're telling me: JIRA, the application with massively nested hierarchical layouts and a 2 second response time for every user interaction is easy to use?
Jira has to be the most complicated monolithic issue tracker available. I should think even Jira's sales team would struggle to call it easy to use, particularly when compared to more simple competitors like Trello.
I certainly have not made UX my specialty so I'd like to know what markers I'm missing out on here. What kind of things is Jira putting forward that mitigates its crazy abstractions, its hierarchical layouts, combined with its slow response times? I thought those were the kinds of things that signified really bad UX.
Personally. I'm forced to use Jira as part of my job and have suffered terribly at its hands. If someone is finding it a breeze then it would be a great benefit to me to understand.
I second this. I've been using Jira on and off for years and I'm still having the feeling I haven't fully figured it out yet. In particular, there are some things that I still find unintuitive and which require more brain capacity than they should.
I got so annoyed when someone that I shared JIRA admin credentials with changed the front page to a Kanban board. All I wanted was bloody issue tracking! KISS.
there is no work tracking tool better than .txt and asking people for updates.
Maybe I should sell notepad as a fully extensible work prioritisation tracking platform that integrates with all email providers and now supports slack...
I remember someone here created a service, it may have been paid, that simply emailed you "What did you work on today, what did you complete, encounter any problems?" at a pre-defined time every weekday and then would forward your response back to your manager. Fantastic idea IMO.
That sums up so perfectly what I did with a B2B SaaS product of mine. I never found words so perfectly as this quote does to describe what I was aiming to do.
Really cool product! stevoski, if you see this and don't mind me asking, how do you position/sell a product that does less (but is more streamlined) than your competitors?
When I've tried to cold-sell customers in the past, they often want that one feature (a random integration, feature matching from the service I'm replacing, etc.) and aren't willing to make the switch until I add it.
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if I was marketing instead of selling?
Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic.
That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.
That's exactly the point of this approach. Don't try to solve everybody's use cases like Word. Target one specific group and make the product faster and easier to use by removing all unused features.
Word is a special case and I don't think the model works there - not least because users need an industry standard for content interchange, and it's very hard to build a 100% compatible Word clone.
But there are a lot of opportunities elsewhere to make products that are faster, simpler, cheaper, and more useful than the current industry standards.
Word is not a special case, it's just people getting used to it and that's all. If tomorrow Microsoft goes belly up and their office suite will be dropped by everybody due to always discovered vulnerabilities Libre Office will pick-up quite nicely. I have yet to find a feature of Word that I can't find its equivalent in Libre.
But Libre is a massive product was well, with a tremendous number of work hours put into it over decades. We're talking about alternatives that are nimble and have fewer features.
That's sort of Google Docs/Sheets/Slides TBH (in addition to being hosted/shared). I'm not really a "power user" of any of these tools anymore. I use them a lot but I don't do anything fancy. That said, if Docs didn't have, say, a word count feature, that would be a major annoyance.
The moment your goal shifts from VC-backed acquisition or public offering bid to "I'd like to support myself and some employees comfortably" the things you can do profitably become almost endless.
Want to run a little webhosting business focused on small businesses? Tried and true. Want to offer custom software development for some little vertical? Easy enough. Want to just make a really nice and clean note app? That works too.
When your goal of success shifts from "mind boggingly rich" to "sufficient for the lifestyle I want", it's much easier to be successful.
Seems to me there are hundreds of lifestyle businesses just waiting to happen by following this formula. So many good ideas out there could be made so much better by reducing them to their essentials, but making them elegant and "crazy fast".