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• Nobody likes to listen to advertisements in songs. In fact, people hated it. Lack of basic market research.
• Nobody in India likes to pay for music, let alone for independent rock music. Market was tiny.
• With no experience in music or corporate industry, we had no clue how to bring in advertisers. Lack of business and marketing plan.
• Finding good bands and signing them up was a non-scalable, extremely laborious task. So, our inventory of music was small. That meant even if we found an advertiser, our reach wasn’t so appealing. The chicken-and-egg problem.

How will this make money? Who will pay for it? Is market big enough? And most importantly: do competitors exist?

So, next time you get a startup idea, ask yourself if established competitors (not other startups) exist in the market. If not, you better think twice because it could be an indication that the market doesn’t (or cannot) exist and you will never be able to make money in it.

　与走娱乐社交的微信和米聊相比，除了线上聊天，“在这儿”还增加了针对商务社交的“活动聚集”与“交换电子名片”的功能。虽然聚焦商务应用用户基数小，但是大都属于产品经理或CEO等的高端用户，活跃度与忠诚度随着参与活动的增多也带来了眼前一亮的表现。

　　IM产品都在尽可能的扩大自身的交友平台，为用户积累更多的人脉资源。单从积累效果来看，微信在社交方面为用户营造了“全民”关系圈，不管是熟人还是陌生人。而“在这儿”则打造的是“商务”关系圈，基于工作背景的人脉资源积累。在同类互动模式下，目的与圈子不同，这些都为“在这儿”奠定了差异化的基础。

　好的技术人才偏向于去大公司，而处在创业初期的陌陌，唐岩通常是给他想要的人才画一个饼，告诉他未来这个市场有多大：“社交移动化未来会形成一个社交帝国，你想不想亲手搭建起来？”这句很具鼓动性的话语帮唐岩聚集了一批包含80后和90后的年轻团队。

　　正是因为人才的缺乏，让陌陌到现在仍聚焦在IPhone平台。唐岩认为，目前陌陌团队的人手只够做好一个平台，“不想一下子铺太开，希望用户数慢慢成长，毕竟用户来了并且留住了才是有效用户，这也是产品策略方面的问题。”

“I know of no reputable investor who invests based on data. I once heard of someone who planned to, but I forget who it was; probably nothing came of it. [...]

We are the far opposite end of the spectrum from an analytical approach. We decide based on gut feel after a 10 minute convo. It may seem ironic that we who have the most data make the least use of data. But perhaps not: perhaps it’s because we have so much data that we know it all comes down to the personalities of the founders. Or maybe we’re just lazy.”

The major challenges seem to include:

 
• A lack of good data (unlike baseball, where stats for some players go back to Little League)
• A more complex and different “game” than baseball, which is played for 162 games per year and has clear, objective winners and losers, unlike tech startups which can build for years before they win or lose
• A “draft” in baseball that doesn’t exist in tech, unless programs like Y Combinator and TechStars effectively turn into that sort of thing
• Different incentives to work together than in baseball

17) iPhone

iPhone is a big deal, and I'm bummed because Apple are jerks. There are two problems startups have that aren't their own faults: immigration and AppStore approvals. They're like something out of Kafka.

(Sidenote: We're not giving our startups too little money: they can all afford iPhones.)

Android will be crushed under Steve Jobs' heels, because Apple cares about the iPhone like Google cares about search.

iPhone (or something similar) will do for laptops what laptops did to desktop.

18) Design

Design is why the iPhone wins. 20 years ago, it would have been surprising to say American companies can beat Japanese companies in consumer electronics devices. Core competency moved from manufacturing to design after people got microprocessors to shoot themselves in the foot with. Plus, China commoditized manufacturing expertise.

19) Real Time Stuff

Web 2.0 doesn't mean anything. Real time does. Google Wave will actually be important, not just somebody's 20% project. It is like Google-branded Etherpad, and Etherpad is useful, so Wave will be a gamechanger. See also Twitter, useful in a way different than Wave. If you make the convex hull around Twitter/Wave, and see a space which is unoccupied, that is a worthwhile opportunity.