Dalton Caldwell: uncertainty

Transcript context

…This is a good segue to something I definitely want to spend time on, which is you have this concept of tarpit ideas, which are essentially ideas people all gravitate towards and get stuck in and either pivot into and then can't pivot out of or try to pivot out of. And essentially it's just consistently bad startup ideas that people continue to try to start. Can you just talk about this and then what is examples of just bad startup ideas that people should stop trying to start? For people that are familiar with this terminology from us, sometimes they get defensive and don't get what we were saying. By definition it is only a tarpit if it seems like it's not. If it's just a regular idea that is hard, that is not a tarpit. The weird aspect of what we call a tarpit idea is an idea that a lot of people come up with and then it seems like an unsolved problem and you get lots of positive feedback for. Right? And you have a really good set of arguments that it's a really good startup idea. And that's different than a bad startup idea. Do you get what I'm trying to say? A bad startup idea is, I don't know, something that is obviously bad or something where you just can't get any positive feedback on. But some of the most common tarpit would be something like building an app to coordinate with your friends to decide where to go out at night or where to meet up with people, which is really, it's coming from a good place. It's a good idea. If you ask your friends, "Hey, would you like an app for us to coordinate to hang out more so we can be friends?" They're like, "Yeah, I would love that." You'll get all this positive feedback from the world. And man, people have been starting that startup since the '90s and so you can validate it. Part of being a true tarpit is that you can get good initial validation. Do you get what I mean? And so anyway. And honestly I worked on tarpit ideas myself as a founder, which is a music discovery. This is something I did in my first startup. Music startups are hard and trying to be like, "Oh, we're going to fix music discovery." This was classic things where you can get lots of positive feedback and even get users to work on those things, but there are aspects of it that make it a very hard idea. So does that make sense? Absolutely. I'm also guilty of this. I had this startup called Localmind that allowed you to talk to people, check-in in various locations around the city, on Foursquare and Google back in the day and asked them, "How's it going?" And everyone when they used it, they're like, "Holy shit, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. I could see what's happening at this bar that I'm about to go to." And then they never use it again.…

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