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When context changes, so do the prospects of these ideas.

Youtube wasn't the first video streaming service but it was one of the first for the DSL era when people could watch video without lengthy waits.

AI companies repeatedly failed until enough things, specifically data and compute were at enough scale to deliver.

Advancements in battery technology made electric cars practical bucking the trend of decades of failed EV car companies.

So many things - contactless payment, touchscreens, even LCD panels, these were lousy and impractical for decades.

Attempts at mass adoption of handheld computers, now called smartphones, started in the 1980s. Without high speed mobile networks, high density color LCD screens, reliable geolocation, these things were necessary to make the handheld pocket computer something that everybody has.

Even online grocery delivery services, now common place, had its start in the catastrophic collapse of WebVan in the 1990s. Cell phones, the gig economy, mature e-payments, these were all needed.

You always need to look for the context change and how that can untar some tarpits.

Tarot idea number 101: putting information that could be a list of text into a video.

I used to be a schoolteacher, so whenever I read about someone's shiny new EdTech idea, I can't help but think that it's a tarpit idea.

Every developed country has a set of professional standards for teachers, and teachers who don't live up to those standards are pushed out, sometimes by having their teaching accreditation revoked. In Australia, for instance, there's a set number of hours of 'professional development' that teachers have to do every few years, and if you don't complete them, you lose accreditation and have to find a new career. The professional development activities and courses that meet the requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard.

When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades.

So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, probably because someone's seen a paper on spaced repetition. That's nice, but you can't build a business around this. It doesn't matter if all the thought leaders are all in on spaced repetition this year, because next year they'll have moved on to something else, because they need to have something new to talk about. In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads, so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.

If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.

I think an underrated aspect of this is also that YC is ultimately a VC fund and so they're talking about companies that have the potential to be massive, multi-billion dollar companies.

Many typical tarpit ideas (to do apps, habit trackers, note taking etc.) can be great businesses for a couple of people building software together but not have venture-scale outcomes.

I do agree that as soon as you get network effects (recommendations, marketplaces etc.), SOOOO much is tarpit.

It's only a tarpit idea when you don't know it's a tarpit idea. I'm building a bookmarking service. I have no illusions that this will become anything more than a hobby project. Still, I love solving specific problems for myself (specifically, making consumption easier to deal with content overload).

The tarpit idea is very descriptive in hindsight. What makes something a tarpit is an idea that sounds cool on the surface and is accessible (don’t have to be one of a kind founder to do it) and when you talk to your friends and people who might be customers you get very positive feedback. So it all starts to feel like a slam dunk. However, if you are a VC you will have seen this exact idea or close variations in it a hundred times and they all flamed out to a zero. As the VC you have visibility into common failure modes ( not able to charge enough, no scaled market, not sticky enough, etc) what is hard from the founder side of things is all those issues and many more are common to almost any venture until you crack the problem and get market fit. So the tarpit concept is more a description of VC scare tissue than a fully operational definition for founders ,because a former tarpit can become a blue ocean of opportunity ( uncontested market) if some element of the equation changes ( technology shift, culture shift, deep founder insight etc)

So as a founder how can you tell if you are about to jump into a tarpit?

1) do a lot of research on the problem and see what has been done in the space in the past and who is working on the problem now. If you find lots of failure - dig in and try to understand what the core failure modes were. 2) work on something that people will pay you for, even a very ugly early product. Income is a strong validation. 3) reconsider your idea if it requires the incineration of mountains of cash to get people’s attention.

But at the end of the day Tarpit is really a descriptive heuristic that VCs can find to be useful but not absolute.

Is there a way to consume this in text instead? Video is far too slow and cumbersome and requires headphones

dang that was packed with real talk - ive tripped over my share of looks obvious, actually impossible ideas too. you ever get tempted to try the same failing thing hoping this time the timings right?

Maybe YC is the problem

Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck.

Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).

The video has a sequel released nine months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU9iT7MW0rs

B2C is virtually impossible compared to B2B. This may not be immediately apparent but it is so obvious in hindsight.

The biggest reason I think founders are going for B2C is because they have zero clue about how to network and sell to other businesses. It's easy to set up a shopify account. It's hard to cold call your first prospect. Do you even have any prospects? Do you know how to find them?

The advantage of B2B is that once you figure it out for the first customer, you are on an exponential path to happiness. You can practically cancel your marketing budget at that point. B2C requires an ongoing assault on the dopamine economy. Unless you can get someone on a subscription and program them to forget about it, you're gonna get steamrolled by TikTok & friends.

I think it's a good video.

"The restaurant doesn't exist" is an important axiom.

It's why recommendation engines are useless, Netflix has nothing more. Smart users will see TikTok doesn't really have a good recommendation engine, just good content, bite sized so lots can be produced.

> the world seems limitless but for these physical things it's actually fairly limited

This is a really good quote, it also applies to digital.

Anyway, a list of tarpit ideas would be useful. The axiom's are too hard, like software complexity and getting money out of educational institutions.

Why do I feel like YC videos are targeted at really slow people? The combination of discussion in slowmotion and exaggerated gestures reminds me of elementary school. I’m sure there are valuable ideas in there, but I just don’t have the patience to watch.

An idea is tarpit until someone, or some new tech, or regulation cracks it.

YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.

this is a great video

Sometimes a tarpit idea might work because of founders execution. Then the upside is huge.

For instance, some animals who survived the tarpit were naturally selected for evolution.

Philosophically, idea of building a startup is a tarpit too. You need lot of perseverance and courage to navigate out of it, survive and eventually win.

I wish HN had a wiki, and that articles like this could have a list associated with them, with links to the companies that tried and failed under each tarpit idea.

What are some tarpit ideas that y'all've come across? Any AI-specific tarpit ideas?