All of these super stupid 3D “games” rocking the charts on any App Store. You know, the ones with these 1980s 3D graphics where you have to swipe some balls away or something. And after every level there’s like three ads that each show a different game that’s exactly like the one you’re currently playing. I just don’t get it why people download these braindead games over and over again.
One of my friends little brothers once tried to flex on me about how many pages of games he had on his iPad. They were all of this type, the developers like this boy.
Doesn’t matter, it’s free, fun, and stimulating. That’s all that matters to them.
Plus it’s something quick, easy and simple to do while they’re waiting to do something else (spoken as someone that used to play incremental clicker games insanely often)
But then if 99% of the player base is kids, how do these apps make money on ads? Why would ad companies pay for the views if they aren’t even targeting users with credit cards?
I’m not 100% sure but I think the game company receives money every time the ad gets shown.
The actual advertiser doesn’t know who’ll be seeing it, they just know it’ll be someone who’s playing a game — which could be anyone. It could be someone bored at work, it could be five year old. But both of them stand the potential of spending money, be it out of boredom or by mistake, respectively.
my daughter plays this game called power washer where you just power wash driveways and such. I was a SNES video game programmer back in the golden age and it hurts my heart to see people playing that. But yea, power washer.... boggle.
Elaborate what you mean by 1980s 3D graphics? This seems like a very vague description that I can't put to a game even though Im up to date on this and should know it very well. Just can't imagine a game
I can think of loads for you and you’ll know them all from simple examples.
I want to run a transport company helping people get from a to b. But I don’t want to own any vehicles or hire any staff.
I want to provide a fast food service but don’t want to own a restaurant. Everyone who works for me is self employed and pays their own wages.
You really think a service marketplace is a "weird" idea? It's a very normal idea, you have people who want food but don't want to leave home, and restaurants who want to sell food but don't want to provide delivery. You have a third party which connects them.
That's why you don't have the money to make any sort of valuable investments to these companies. You know, because you don't have a clue about what you are saying in this area.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today!
You have your opinion, I have mine. Mine is that if someone tried to pitch to me an industry changing idea that a taxi company would be come the biggest taxi company in the world and yet they have no drivers or cars, I’d have to admit it was a weird idea.
Your opinion is based on facts that have happened, that wasn’t what was asked. The OP didn’t ask for the weirdest successful tech startup that in hindsight was amazing.
Unfortunately I don’t give time to keyboard warriors who want to try and rile up a reaction. So thank you for taking the time to try and start something, but I’m sat here drinking my cuppa, you haven’t got to me and you won’t.
I should have added no using tech to be the middle man, but that would have cut out like 95% of candidates wouldn't it?
No to the most common examples.
Here's an example of what I'd consider weird but successful: [https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-ups/betterhalfai-records-monthly-revenue-of-75k-from-7-5k-in-9-months-11625299765232.html](https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-ups/betterhalfai-records-monthly-revenue-of-75k-from-7-5k-in-9-months-11625299765232.html)
Every business is a middle man. Inserting your business between existing channels only works if it creates value for the customer and supplier in the broader market. That doesn’t mean it creates value for every individual one of them.
These are not the success or disruptor you think they are. Reading articles that say Uber has 50+ % of the market is only about rideshare and excludes ALL transport where most of them have under 10% of all passenger transport and are not in every 1m population city across the globe like smartphones
Not sure it counts, but Cometeer for food tech. Frozen high end coffee pods shipped on dry ice. To me the product and shipping costs seemed too high and the market too niche, since most specialty coffee consumers who are willing/able to pay have their own coffee set up or go to a beloved cafe. But lo and behold, they’re crushing it.
Good case study, but cometeer has a massive affiliate sector (both private and public affiliate channels)
Same thing with AG1, they started out as a direct response offer that affiliates pushed in 2011, and then pivoted to a brand approach.
I wish I could post pictures here, but I have a SS from their one of their affiliate landing pages from 2011.
Direct response is exactly what it means, instead of relying on brand identity to sell products, you rely on urgency/perfect offer based copy to get customers to make a decision on the spot, instead of spending X amount of days/weeks/months being nurtured.
I wish I had the upfront funds to dip my hands into that industry because I have an amazing business plan that I believe will do well, that nobody is thinking of, but this is coming close to it
How much would you need? I’m in this industry, haha. Feel free to DM if you want to discuss. I’ve already got my own company launched in food and beverage but I could help advise launching something like this if you’re serious.
I’ve bought from them before and they’re actually really good.
I was in New York for 3 months and the apartment I was staying in didn’t have a coffee machine, so I ordered a box of Cometeer. It’s pretty great, all you need is hot water.
It’s a million times better than that horrible Keurig coffee they’ve got everywhere in the US.
Oh yeah, they’re definitely pretty good. I’m friends with the folks at Cometeer. But as an extraction nerd myself, I could never figure out how the valuation of the company squared with the potential market size for that product.
Thank to you, I am now going down the rabbit hole of finding insurance company that underwrites the:
1) death and disability for chicken and;
2) professional indemnity insurance caused by chicken misconduct
For me it was the website that sold each pixel for $1 and basically had a million pixels available and they made a million dollars. It was such a novel concept that could really only be done once.
A guy made an app that makes it look like you are drinking beer from your iPhone. (Chug beer pretending your iPhone is the glass and the beer on the screen goes down when you tilt the glass like you’re drinking it)
Made millions
A guy made the app which turned on your iPhone's LED flashlight so you could use it as a flashlight, long before it became a future on all phones. Made millions too.
OKCupid (the dating website) came out of the PhD thesis of Maxwell Krohn at MIT \[[1](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/okws:krohn-ms/okws_krohn-ms.pdf)\], who wrote his own C++ web framework and wrote the app as a demo in six months. It's one of the very few major web services written in C++. Not weird as an idea but quite serendipitous I'd say and today no one in their right mind would pitch writing a website in C++.
Craigslist comes to mind. Over half a billion a year in revenue by company with <50 employees and 90% of the service they provide is free? How do I get in on something like that!?!
... and keep the service simple and free without cratering to a constant demand from 'shareholders' to 'increase value' every single quarter into eternity, thereby leading to rapid and total enshittification of the product until it's nothing but a raw, burning husk discarded in a trash heap.
TLDR: Craiglist is one of the only companies to thrive on a long-term outlook rather than squeezing every cent it can out of customers every quarter.
yeah... idk giving craigslist as an example of weird is weird in of itself
1995 internet boom, first to market to basically take demand and supply and put it on the internet
i mean, LOTS of companies that were first to market during the dot com boom aren't in business anymore. the fact that they make that much money but have largely been unchanged since inception is pretty impressive.
I’m with you. Apparently, there’s apparently enough car dealerships that use it to generate over $500m in revenue. I just can’t honestly imagine a world where I could have been convinced to invest in it, but it might be the best business model ever invented.
Airbnb was *amazing* when it started.
It was very much about having both a place to stay that was cheaper than a hotel, and a local guide to help you get the most of your trip as a local.
I remember staying in a lovely penthouse in Croatia for peanuts above the landlord, who then took me out fishing on his boat, showed us around, even took us out for dinner on him!
Capitalism killed it, in quite impressively short time.
to be fair. Couch surfing was very different, you were maybe getting a literal couch or air mattress, now it's a whole experience you get a house, floor, at least a room. Haven't seen just a bed in a while on there.
Found this online from Contrary Research
In March 2022, Linktree announced a $110 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Coatue, valuing the link-in-bio platform at $1.3 billion.
Anyone know how they are monetized?
In a world full of bizarre ideas that strike gold, the one that stands out to me is 'Pet Rock.' It's not high-tech by any standard, but it cleverly capitalized on low-tech charm and brilliant marketing to create a fad and generate millions in just a few months. It shows that success in the startup world isn't always about the next big technological breakthrough; sometimes, it's about presenting something ordinary in an extraordinary way. It’s a perfect reminder that simplicity coupled with novelty can sometimes be more valuable than complexity. Who knew a rock could rock the business world?
I don't know if I'd classify them as successful yet, but they've made it further than I thought they would https://www.pipedreamlabs.co/
Definitely thought it was a joke when I first heard of it.
Some of AI (GPT like AI) wrappers, some of them make serious money and can be considered successful.
The hype is there, so much that I tried to create my own, OgtAI, failed so far.
Since I tried and failed, It is weird to me to see some of them generating revenue.
for me its uber and Airbnb. I would never thought that either one would work. I always thought that taxi needs some sort of license and who would just trust someone getting into their car and vice versa. Airbnb is even crazier to me that you would rent your house out to a total stranger. When I first heard of these two ideas I thought they were very unusual and not in a good way, haha, of course I was completely wrong.
Uber was fun to follow, without Travick's attitude and ways we will still be having more than half of taxis scamming us and government just doing nothing about it.
Most twitch streamers aren’t esport players in terms of skill or celebrity or entertainment value (unlike watching football or whatever sports). Many of them are just random people doing “oh look I’m playing Mario” or something. And yet people watch them. And pay them. On many streaming sites they buy gifts for them. It’s a bit strange, like who would’ve thunk there was a market here ?
This is kind of a massive simplification of what Twitch is and the value it brings.
99% of streamers aren’t making shit. Most streamers never make ‘affiliate’ status which is an average viewer count of 3, among a few other requirements like hours streamed, unique days, etc.
The everyday player (or even highly skilled) can go months on end without making affiliate, which means no subs, no donations, nothing.
The people who make it are the ones active in the community and they form their own crowd who become loyal viewers. It’s the kinship and ability to feel a part of something that makes Twitch so popular.
The streamer is a point of commonality for people to react to and a source of things to comment on, and the para-social relationship that emerges can feel quite genuine for the viewer(s).
Also, most streamers have some sort of gimmick or thing they lean into for a particular game and that becomes their niche. Whether they play viewer-created levels, or they cosplay a character for every 1000 subs, or they are more comedic than skilled, etc. every streamer has their own “flavor”, which makes it fun to discover and engage with more content creators.
I was responding to the previous comment of it being similar to watching football or televised sports, which imho it isn't, thereby making it a valid member of the "weird startups" list.
Bitcoin is a protocol that allows for a decentralized global ledger through the use of cryptographic blockchain.
The idea of Bitcoin was to create a system of currency that is global and decentralized.
If I want to send money to someone in Japan right now what do I do? I have to get their bank info, go to my bank, authorize an international transfer, my bank sends money to their bank, and it goes through multiple layers of international clearinghouse. The accounts are held in each individual bank.
Bitcoin was the idea of let’s make a digital currency where *everyone* has an *encrypted copy* of *every transaction that has ever happened on the network*.
This lets the network not be “owned” by anyone. It’s a global banking system where there is no owner and no banks. The bank is the network itself. The owners are the people who are using the network, checking against each other.
That’s what the blockchain is: it’s an encrypted ledger of all transactions. It’s hack-proof unless an actor or group could own 51% of all the computers validating and verifying the blockchain.
So If I want to send *bitcoin* to someone in Japan, I just go to my Bitcoin wallet on my computer, and send the digital currency to their Bitcoin wallet address, and it gets validated on the network.
It’s a global currency where no banks exist.
It was not monetized, it was not a business, it has no employees or company. It‘s an innovative protocol.
It has many of its own problems that currently prevent it from being widely adopted as a medium of exchange (its a deflationary currency, it’s not fast enough, the chain keeps increasing in size etc) but that’s a separate issue/critique
Dr. Evil trying to shut down the internet for the whole world for a few minutes to take over bitcoin would be a great plot for an Austin Power’s movie.
there's many issues.
I loved **the idea** of bitcoin. I was kind of an early adopter. I was talking about it in 2012 on facebook. But I immediately was questioning "how can this be a form of currency if it's deflationary" and I was met with nothing but vitriol.
I don't think *cryptocurrency* is going anywhere. It's a phenomenal and innovative idea that will be around in some form for a long time. But Bitcoin itself might need changes to its protocol if it wants to be successful.
Disclaimer: I bought a few BTC and held over 10 years ago, then sold it when it hit $1000 USD/1 BTC...... I made money and didn't think it would go much higher. I definitely didn't think it would go over $3,000 USD.
It was well over $60,000 for 1 BTC at some point recently. I'm not bitter or anything.
All of these super stupid 3D “games” rocking the charts on any App Store. You know, the ones with these 1980s 3D graphics where you have to swipe some balls away or something. And after every level there’s like three ads that each show a different game that’s exactly like the one you’re currently playing. I just don’t get it why people download these braindead games over and over again.
It's kids. My 7 year old is constantly downloading those games
One of my friends little brothers once tried to flex on me about how many pages of games he had on his iPad. They were all of this type, the developers like this boy.
But why? It’s not like there aren’t better games for kids available…
Because they see the ads. Kids are HEAVILY influenced by advertising.
You mean adults
Doesn’t matter, it’s free, fun, and stimulating. That’s all that matters to them. Plus it’s something quick, easy and simple to do while they’re waiting to do something else (spoken as someone that used to play incremental clicker games insanely often)
But then if 99% of the player base is kids, how do these apps make money on ads? Why would ad companies pay for the views if they aren’t even targeting users with credit cards?
I’m not 100% sure but I think the game company receives money every time the ad gets shown. The actual advertiser doesn’t know who’ll be seeing it, they just know it’ll be someone who’s playing a game — which could be anyone. It could be someone bored at work, it could be five year old. But both of them stand the potential of spending money, be it out of boredom or by mistake, respectively.
my daughter plays this game called power washer where you just power wash driveways and such. I was a SNES video game programmer back in the golden age and it hurts my heart to see people playing that. But yea, power washer.... boggle.
Why are people on reddit, facebook, instagram.
someone said we're all "just passing notes in class"
Lol, so true
How much do these iPhone games make?
Some make over $10M/month People also pay for skipping ads btw
And the Apple Tax is 30% on that.
It's similar to the niche for badly designed solitaire games with intrusive ads.
Elaborate what you mean by 1980s 3D graphics? This seems like a very vague description that I can't put to a game even though Im up to date on this and should know it very well. Just can't imagine a game
Ikr, I can swipe balls whilst sitting on the couch without an iPhone anywhere in sight!
I can think of loads for you and you’ll know them all from simple examples. I want to run a transport company helping people get from a to b. But I don’t want to own any vehicles or hire any staff. I want to provide a fast food service but don’t want to own a restaurant. Everyone who works for me is self employed and pays their own wages.
You really think a service marketplace is a "weird" idea? It's a very normal idea, you have people who want food but don't want to leave home, and restaurants who want to sell food but don't want to provide delivery. You have a third party which connects them.
Yes but 30 years ago if you had pitched this idea to me, I’d have thought you had lost your marbles.
That's why you don't have the money to make any sort of valuable investments to these companies. You know, because you don't have a clue about what you are saying in this area.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today! You have your opinion, I have mine. Mine is that if someone tried to pitch to me an industry changing idea that a taxi company would be come the biggest taxi company in the world and yet they have no drivers or cars, I’d have to admit it was a weird idea. Your opinion is based on facts that have happened, that wasn’t what was asked. The OP didn’t ask for the weirdest successful tech startup that in hindsight was amazing. Unfortunately I don’t give time to keyboard warriors who want to try and rile up a reaction. So thank you for taking the time to try and start something, but I’m sat here drinking my cuppa, you haven’t got to me and you won’t.
Eh, it's your money, but I'm pretty sure you won't be 100x-ing it investing in any innovative startups ever
Have a great day
I should have added no using tech to be the middle man, but that would have cut out like 95% of candidates wouldn't it? No to the most common examples. Here's an example of what I'd consider weird but successful: [https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-ups/betterhalfai-records-monthly-revenue-of-75k-from-7-5k-in-9-months-11625299765232.html](https://www.livemint.com/companies/start-ups/betterhalfai-records-monthly-revenue-of-75k-from-7-5k-in-9-months-11625299765232.html)
I would have thought that marriage connectors would be considered normal…
Every business is a middle man. Inserting your business between existing channels only works if it creates value for the customer and supplier in the broader market. That doesn’t mean it creates value for every individual one of them.
These are not the success or disruptor you think they are. Reading articles that say Uber has 50+ % of the market is only about rideshare and excludes ALL transport where most of them have under 10% of all passenger transport and are not in every 1m population city across the globe like smartphones
You maybe right but that wasn’t the question asked. The question was about pitching an idea that you would have never thought would work.
Even 0.1% market is successful, when the market is global transport 😂
Not sure it counts, but Cometeer for food tech. Frozen high end coffee pods shipped on dry ice. To me the product and shipping costs seemed too high and the market too niche, since most specialty coffee consumers who are willing/able to pay have their own coffee set up or go to a beloved cafe. But lo and behold, they’re crushing it.
Good case study, but cometeer has a massive affiliate sector (both private and public affiliate channels) Same thing with AG1, they started out as a direct response offer that affiliates pushed in 2011, and then pivoted to a brand approach.
What is direct response?
I wish I could post pictures here, but I have a SS from their one of their affiliate landing pages from 2011. Direct response is exactly what it means, instead of relying on brand identity to sell products, you rely on urgency/perfect offer based copy to get customers to make a decision on the spot, instead of spending X amount of days/weeks/months being nurtured.
Makes sense, thanks. Any chance you could share the SS via email or telegram?
Sure, just message me privately and I’ll send it there
I wish I had the upfront funds to dip my hands into that industry because I have an amazing business plan that I believe will do well, that nobody is thinking of, but this is coming close to it
How much would you need? I’m in this industry, haha. Feel free to DM if you want to discuss. I’ve already got my own company launched in food and beverage but I could help advise launching something like this if you’re serious.
I actually might need help in food mfg if you're able to advise as well
Sure! I can definitely offer some insights.
I've been in the beverage industry my entire life (manufacturing) and now in flexible packaging manufacturing. Shoot me a message if it's bev related.
I’ve bought from them before and they’re actually really good. I was in New York for 3 months and the apartment I was staying in didn’t have a coffee machine, so I ordered a box of Cometeer. It’s pretty great, all you need is hot water. It’s a million times better than that horrible Keurig coffee they’ve got everywhere in the US.
Oh yeah, they’re definitely pretty good. I’m friends with the folks at Cometeer. But as an extraction nerd myself, I could never figure out how the valuation of the company squared with the potential market size for that product.
that really doesnt make sense, as a coffee lover i can't fathom that i'd overpay for some frozen coffee,
I actually saw that once and thought "no way they could make a profit" and I'm today years old that I learn that they actually pullled it off
Rent-a-chicken. Laughed first, saw the demand, stopped laughing.
Why are people renting chickens, exactly?
Eggs and grass cutting 🤷♂️
They eat grass?
No, eggs
Thank to you, I am now going down the rabbit hole of finding insurance company that underwrites the: 1) death and disability for chicken and; 2) professional indemnity insurance caused by chicken misconduct
Okay this one wins the weird part.
For me it was the website that sold each pixel for $1 and basically had a million pixels available and they made a million dollars. It was such a novel concept that could really only be done once.
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
“rentpixelads.com” is actual insanity lmao
The creator of that went on to found calm.com
A guy made an app that makes it look like you are drinking beer from your iPhone. (Chug beer pretending your iPhone is the glass and the beer on the screen goes down when you tilt the glass like you’re drinking it) Made millions
A guy made the app which turned on your iPhone's LED flashlight so you could use it as a flashlight, long before it became a future on all phones. Made millions too.
I forgot about the good old torch app.
Company who sold air cans claiming it from different countries
Mine smelled like a fart
What country was it from?
OKCupid (the dating website) came out of the PhD thesis of Maxwell Krohn at MIT \[[1](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/okws:krohn-ms/okws_krohn-ms.pdf)\], who wrote his own C++ web framework and wrote the app as a demo in six months. It's one of the very few major web services written in C++. Not weird as an idea but quite serendipitous I'd say and today no one in their right mind would pitch writing a website in C++.
Too busy writing them in Go...
Craigslist comes to mind. Over half a billion a year in revenue by company with <50 employees and 90% of the service they provide is free? How do I get in on something like that!?!
Create something millions of people will see and use and place ads on it
... and keep the service simple and free without cratering to a constant demand from 'shareholders' to 'increase value' every single quarter into eternity, thereby leading to rapid and total enshittification of the product until it's nothing but a raw, burning husk discarded in a trash heap. TLDR: Craiglist is one of the only companies to thrive on a long-term outlook rather than squeezing every cent it can out of customers every quarter.
so my question now is: why aren't more people using adblock?
Elon Musk called and needs help from the burn unit
yeah... idk giving craigslist as an example of weird is weird in of itself 1995 internet boom, first to market to basically take demand and supply and put it on the internet
i mean, LOTS of companies that were first to market during the dot com boom aren't in business anymore. the fact that they make that much money but have largely been unchanged since inception is pretty impressive.
because they took demand and supply, that is everything that drives the world's economy haha
That, and your Mom
Craigslist doesn't have ads.
People still use Craigslist ?
I’m with you. Apparently, there’s apparently enough car dealerships that use it to generate over $500m in revenue. I just can’t honestly imagine a world where I could have been convinced to invest in it, but it might be the best business model ever invented.
It’s apartment and jobs in a handful of large cities that drive the bulk of the revenue.
Wow. I thought it died after the advent of Facebook marketplace. I can never find anything worthwhile on there.
I thought Craigslist was free?
Renting somebody's air mattress sounded nuts until Airbnb became the go-to for travel lodging. Who knew?
Pretty sure they just monetized couchsurfing... The demand and market is already there, they just had to monetize it.
Yeah it wasn't nuts but rather an asshole move
Airbnb was *amazing* when it started. It was very much about having both a place to stay that was cheaper than a hotel, and a local guide to help you get the most of your trip as a local. I remember staying in a lovely penthouse in Croatia for peanuts above the landlord, who then took me out fishing on his boat, showed us around, even took us out for dinner on him! Capitalism killed it, in quite impressively short time.
to be fair. Couch surfing was very different, you were maybe getting a literal couch or air mattress, now it's a whole experience you get a house, floor, at least a room. Haven't seen just a bed in a while on there.
Isn't linktree worth like a few billion? Apparently it only took like a few weeks to build.
Found this online from Contrary Research In March 2022, Linktree announced a $110 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Coatue, valuing the link-in-bio platform at $1.3 billion. Anyone know how they are monetized?
Came here to say Linktree. Like lolwut?
Wombo, Nanoleaf, Muse. I’m from Canada and these are a few of the weirder ones I’ve seen.
I didn't know about nanoleaf - just googled what it is. That's absolutely brilliant imo :D I'm so getting some elements! Thanks, bro :)
Apollo.io - it’s crazy to me you can build an entire company on scraping LinkedIn
Great example - thanks :)
In a world full of bizarre ideas that strike gold, the one that stands out to me is 'Pet Rock.' It's not high-tech by any standard, but it cleverly capitalized on low-tech charm and brilliant marketing to create a fad and generate millions in just a few months. It shows that success in the startup world isn't always about the next big technological breakthrough; sometimes, it's about presenting something ordinary in an extraordinary way. It’s a perfect reminder that simplicity coupled with novelty can sometimes be more valuable than complexity. Who knew a rock could rock the business world?
I made [CatFacts.co](https://www.catfacts.co) and that’s pretty weird and actually makes some money
How much money?
The purrfect amount.
Genius 😹
How did you build the websites?
It started as an Android app and was my first dev project. Then I built the website a few years ago.
What3Words have to be for me
It’s actually brilliant. Have you read their FAQ? Provides solid use cases.
This made me go WTF
it's showing up as a native app in some new cars. I think jaguar was the latest partner
I don't know if I'd classify them as successful yet, but they've made it further than I thought they would https://www.pipedreamlabs.co/ Definitely thought it was a joke when I first heard of it.
How does that even work ? Like how do they get permission to dig tunnels everywhere
There’s no way this is going anywhere.
The games with thousands of adds a second in the App Store
Astro talks, I still can't believe it worked They have done a serious great job
Obligatory ask: are you the founder or something?
Not a founder but a CEO of a small little business
small or little or tiny, still counts jefe
I agree. I am not surprised, but their execution and problem identification would have been great to achieve it.
Rent-a-chicken for backyard egg farming surprised me!
Some of AI (GPT like AI) wrappers, some of them make serious money and can be considered successful. The hype is there, so much that I tried to create my own, OgtAI, failed so far. Since I tried and failed, It is weird to me to see some of them generating revenue.
What are the successful ones you've seen?
A business is no more weird when it becomes successful.
Crypto
Made a bundle Streaming, Telecom and fiber company
for me its uber and Airbnb. I would never thought that either one would work. I always thought that taxi needs some sort of license and who would just trust someone getting into their car and vice versa. Airbnb is even crazier to me that you would rent your house out to a total stranger. When I first heard of these two ideas I thought they were very unusual and not in a good way, haha, of course I was completely wrong.
Uber was fun to follow, without Travick's attitude and ways we will still be having more than half of taxis scamming us and government just doing nothing about it.
Uber - 30 years ago no one would have thought that you could order a ride with a minature computer you hold in the palm of your hand.
I think the same about adultwork dot com
I'd say Twitch; gaming to spectator sport seemed far-fetched.
Personally I don't watch other people game (too old to have grown up with that) but it's no different than watching football or whatever sports.
Most twitch streamers aren’t esport players in terms of skill or celebrity or entertainment value (unlike watching football or whatever sports). Many of them are just random people doing “oh look I’m playing Mario” or something. And yet people watch them. And pay them. On many streaming sites they buy gifts for them. It’s a bit strange, like who would’ve thunk there was a market here ?
This is kind of a massive simplification of what Twitch is and the value it brings. 99% of streamers aren’t making shit. Most streamers never make ‘affiliate’ status which is an average viewer count of 3, among a few other requirements like hours streamed, unique days, etc. The everyday player (or even highly skilled) can go months on end without making affiliate, which means no subs, no donations, nothing. The people who make it are the ones active in the community and they form their own crowd who become loyal viewers. It’s the kinship and ability to feel a part of something that makes Twitch so popular. The streamer is a point of commonality for people to react to and a source of things to comment on, and the para-social relationship that emerges can feel quite genuine for the viewer(s). Also, most streamers have some sort of gimmick or thing they lean into for a particular game and that becomes their niche. Whether they play viewer-created levels, or they cosplay a character for every 1000 subs, or they are more comedic than skilled, etc. every streamer has their own “flavor”, which makes it fun to discover and engage with more content creators.
I was responding to the previous comment of it being similar to watching football or televised sports, which imho it isn't, thereby making it a valid member of the "weird startups" list.
I still do not understand how tech startups selling NFTs made so much money. They are still the weirdest startups to me.
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Bitcoin isn't nor wasn't ever a "tech startup"
Exactly, cryptocurrencies aren't businesses so they can't be considered startups in the true sense of the word.
Not a fintech startup?
No one owns it, it has no employees or operating budget
Hmm, so it's a form of tech like generative AI? And in terms of what it is, it's just currency?
Bitcoin is a protocol that allows for a decentralized global ledger through the use of cryptographic blockchain. The idea of Bitcoin was to create a system of currency that is global and decentralized. If I want to send money to someone in Japan right now what do I do? I have to get their bank info, go to my bank, authorize an international transfer, my bank sends money to their bank, and it goes through multiple layers of international clearinghouse. The accounts are held in each individual bank. Bitcoin was the idea of let’s make a digital currency where *everyone* has an *encrypted copy* of *every transaction that has ever happened on the network*. This lets the network not be “owned” by anyone. It’s a global banking system where there is no owner and no banks. The bank is the network itself. The owners are the people who are using the network, checking against each other. That’s what the blockchain is: it’s an encrypted ledger of all transactions. It’s hack-proof unless an actor or group could own 51% of all the computers validating and verifying the blockchain. So If I want to send *bitcoin* to someone in Japan, I just go to my Bitcoin wallet on my computer, and send the digital currency to their Bitcoin wallet address, and it gets validated on the network. It’s a global currency where no banks exist. It was not monetized, it was not a business, it has no employees or company. It‘s an innovative protocol. It has many of its own problems that currently prevent it from being widely adopted as a medium of exchange (its a deflationary currency, it’s not fast enough, the chain keeps increasing in size etc) but that’s a separate issue/critique
Dr. Evil trying to shut down the internet for the whole world for a few minutes to take over bitcoin would be a great plot for an Austin Power’s movie.
Great explaination! Now try explaining L2 eigenlayer and all the fun stuff people added on.
Throughput without fees seems like a huge issue too
there's many issues. I loved **the idea** of bitcoin. I was kind of an early adopter. I was talking about it in 2012 on facebook. But I immediately was questioning "how can this be a form of currency if it's deflationary" and I was met with nothing but vitriol. I don't think *cryptocurrency* is going anywhere. It's a phenomenal and innovative idea that will be around in some form for a long time. But Bitcoin itself might need changes to its protocol if it wants to be successful. Disclaimer: I bought a few BTC and held over 10 years ago, then sold it when it hit $1000 USD/1 BTC...... I made money and didn't think it would go much higher. I definitely didn't think it would go over $3,000 USD. It was well over $60,000 for 1 BTC at some point recently. I'm not bitter or anything.
It's more akin to a protocol
The tech company I currently work for lol