"The real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem."

That, and it kind of makes you look like an asshole.

The original idea never made any sense, and then they never fully committed when they decided to pivot. (The new version was much better, but they never built out the features that would have been needed to make it go viral.)

I do think there are other markets they could go after by repurposing the technology platform they've already created. For example, I could easily see the technology being used by an MLM company as a social network for their salespeople or something.

And it seems like they have a quality team, so I think there is still potential for the company despite the dubious first idea.

Most important line in the article, IMO: "But hopefully he’s taken to heart the real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem."

If you don't solve a real problem people have, you will fail. People may not know they have the problem, but they must have it. If you can't articulate the pain, it's time to pivot.

What pain did Twitter address?

I can come up with broad, hand-wavy justifications. But those justifications apply just as well to Blippy.

Perhaps eight or ten years ago I had a Polish girlfriend and visited her in Poland and lived with her friends for a bit. I noticed how they mainly used the Internet. They had an ICQ-like polish IM (GaduGadu) running and they ONLY changed the status messages on that thing to inform people what they were doing.

I found it amusing at that time. Later I saw Twitter, and it was very similar.

So yes ,it does solve a problem: Broadcast short pieces of information to friends without having to start a conversation.

At least I think that was the original idea.

It allowed people to update their social status pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction.

I'm not convinced that is more of a pain point than:

"It allowed people to share their recent purchases pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction"

As far as I can tell, Twitter was built on the idea that (some) people want to get advertised to by the brands (corporate or personal) they admire. Until Twitter came along, the "best" way to do this was basically through giving over your email address and waiting who-knows-how-long for a who-knows-how-lengthy newsletter, and hoping they don't sell your contact information to spammers in the meantime. Twitter enforces brevity, which encourages timely little facts rather than big, polished PR-jobs, and it's a pull-based, rather than push-based model, meaning that you can always unsubscribe from anyone whose channel becomes more noisy than signally.

Twitter boomed primarily because its target early-adopters were precisely the kind of people who already had lots of followers to advertise to (celebrities, reporters/bloggers, "personalities", etc.), and who wanted a more streamlined, more informal, lower-expectation medium to push out their little updates. Twitter was such a channel, but although they were on it, their users weren't—so, since they were all of the getting-the-word-out bent, the next thing they all (simultaneously) got the word out about was Twitter itself. If not for this clever bit of social engineering, Twitter would never have become the "thing that comes after Facebook in 90% of sentences about social media."

"As far as I can tell, Twitter was built on the idea that (some) people want to get advertised to by the brands (corporate or personal) they admire."

i'm not sure i believe that this is the idea that spawned twitter.

By "Twitter was built on use-case X", I meant "Twitter built up most of its early user-base by doing X, and became popular because of X", not "Twitter was conceived in hopes that it would work for X."

Twitter indulges people's need to feel like they're being heard. Giving people a voice is a very powerful tool.

"What pain did Twitter address?"

It allowed people to keep up to date with people and services they cared about in a format that they could quickly consume.

Wanting to send group emails to people, but not wanting to burden their privacy, and trying to get more friends in the process: getting social proof. Also, tying it in with escaping the rss reader eco system: news pushed to you. Also, making web publishing simple: self-expression for plebs.

The purpose of innovation is only to relieve pain? Seems rather bleak.

And if we don't know that we have the problem, how are we supposed to find out besides speculating and experimenting?

I'm sure Blippy thought they were improving people's lives somehow. They just guessed wrong. It happens.

Without knowing anything about what has really gone on a Blippy, I would question whether they asked anybody else if Blippy was improving their lives.

I wouldn't say the only purpose of innovation is to relieve pain (even if I did just say it ;). Rather, humans are motivated by fairly basic things, and reducing pain and increasing pleasure are pretty much at the top (details come in defining those terms). If you can't identify what is going to motivate people to use your product, you are in trouble.

When I posted the parent comment, I thought about pulling out the reference to Blippy, because they may have done everything right and just had craptastic luck.

I'm just trying to figure out how the "solve a problem" principle should be interpreted when evaluating an unrealized idea.

It doesn't mean "solve a known problem" because people aren't aware of their problems and are notoriously bad at predicting whether they will like new things.

And the "problem" doesn't have to be a bad thing that exists, it can just be something good that we are missing out on because it doesn't yet exist.

And we know that many great things are created by people just to scratch their own itch.

So it boils down to "make something that you think might be fun or useful to others or yourself", which seems entirely self-evident to me.

I could understand "solve a problem" as a method for discovering ideas -- look for an obvious need and fill it. But many successful ideas, and I would say the most successful ideas, don't come from that process but from a more imaginative place.

So, "it didn't solve a problem", whatever that means, is not sufficient to explain why an idea fails.

First, I would leave Twitter out of the calculation, not because I don't think they solve a real need, but because I think it actually solves many for different types of people[0].

Beyond that, most companies are solving a real need:

- Can't find anything worth finding on the Internet? Google.

- Need a way to commoditize software for users? Microsoft.

- Need to use a car on occasion in a big city? Zipcar

- Have a spare room or need somewhere to crash? AirBnB

Yes, you can get lucky by throwing darts and seeing what sticks, but much better to have a known problem to solve (and known by more than the founders ;).

[0] Alternatively, they may just be lucky or a hype filled machine. Or, they might understand the market in an Apple-like way and are driving it. We may never know, because it could be the latter, but poor decision making at some point make it look like the former.

Well said. I never understood the point of Blippy from the beginning. Never saw what problem it was solving. Apparently nobody else did either, heh.

Wow. Spectacularly wrong conclusions.

1 - "The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.”"

#%^&*! A site where people post their purchases. Does anyone really believe it would be hard to "monetize" that? If so, you're not cut out to be CEO.

2 - No one wants to share their purchases? Really? Tell that to the women that post youtube videos of the stuff they bought. Or tutorials explaining what make up to buy and how to apply it to look like celebrity X. Buyosphere is making that easier.

I didn't see a trend to people posting their credit card statements online. Making that easier is absurd.

"Looking through your friends credit card bills is really, really creepy, but what if we put it ONLINE."

I never even heard of this thing and I keep up with stuff to a certain extent. Definitely not anything I would want to use, the idea of broadcasting all my credit card purchases to a subscription list seems like a really bad idea that no one would want to do.

Wow, there have been a lot of "blippy is dead" "no we're not" postings and messages over the past few months.

I think merely sharing purchases is a non-starter, but aggregating data from consumers, blinding it, and helping people make decisions (the way creditkarma does for a single variable of credit score and a limited number of levers, and the way mint, etc. should do, but don't) is what Blippy should have done.

Yes, we thought about adding some social layer (purchase sharing etc.) to our e-commerce site http://www.happybuy.com/ but have always been skeptical of the notion that people want to share purchases.

We've focused on trying to help people get the best prices on their purchases (currently through price tracking and alerting) and potentially users would be more willing to share bargains/good buys as finding bargains may be something that a certain type of user would want to share, inform or brag about to friends.

However as Blippy has shown I think the model of simply sharing your purchases without a reason for that sharing does not provide any particular user value.

> What we failed to ask was, “Who cares?”

truth be told, nobody really wants to share that level of information nor be responsible for the purchases made by others in their social graph based on their recommendation. Or better yet, it could've worked, to an extent, if an amateur wasn't the driving force behind it. That being said, I have to congratulate Pud in convincing someone to plunk $13M down on his idea, vagina-selling t-shirts aside.

Oh, it was the Pud FC dude behind this, the dude who did all the porn videos staring himself where he paid the actresses, and then stuck it on his website. Huh, interesting, I didn't know that guy was still around doing stuff.

I think you mean "owned a really cute gray cat and was able to get a lot of models to pose semi-naked and only wearing his brand t-shirts while holding the cat". Maybe there was real porn too.

He also did AdBrite and a few other things; pud is pretty damn prolific, and a smart/nice guy (I've seen him speak at Founder Institute and other startup events). The other people involved in blippy are earlier in their careers but also pretty involved in online forums, clueful, etc.

Oh, actually he was working with the Little Grey Guy guy. He did not actually own a cute gr[e|a]y cat.

I spent some time as a contractor working for a "Social/E-commerce" startup. They were heavily customer development driven and found out early on that chasing after Blippy, and similarly Swipe.ly (who was doing the same thing at the time but looks pivoted now) would be a waste. They found this because everyone (potentiel customers) they talked to showed no signs of interest in the idea at all.

Blippy in the FC deadpool = irony.

'What we failed to ask was, “Who cares?”'

I think that's the first thing I asked myself when I heard about Blippy. Is it their over-enthusiasm towards funded startups that blinded them, or just shortsightedness?

"And I Feel Fine..."

I am no psychic, but seriously - when this came out I knew, I said to myself "this is retarded, this is going to fail -- too many people are actually afraid to let people know what they spend money on - how much they have."

I am not surprised at all - and honestly, I think that a service like this adds absolutely nothing to the world.

What value would this add? Clearly - nothing.

"afraid to let people know what they spend money on"

I doubt it is about fear for most. How about it's none of the other people's business. This meme about how people are "fearful" of whatever corporate agenda has been decreed is kind of annoying actually.