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What was your first "tar pit" idea?

YC released a pretty good video that helps come up with better ideas:

YC Avoid These Ideas!

Tar pit ideas seem like a good idea, something people want, and famous companies are not solving them already. The death of everyone that attempted it is hard to see and all you see is a freshwater pool!

My one was "Uber for Jobs", I thought I was a genius in high school.

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    I built a discovery website for cafes https://goodworkcafes.com/

    Everyone who sees it says it's a great idea, but actually, it's only a problem for nomads who travel to new cities all the time.

    If you stay in one place for more than a couple weeks you quickly find all the good places to work from and don't need the website again.

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    I am fascinated by those products that a lot of people use, a lot of people complain about (usually for usability / complexity issues), a lot of better alternatives have been created, yet almost no one changes to one of the better alternatives. Those are the tar pits.
    On top of my mind:

    • Goodreads: network effects are huge forces, so better something not-so-great with a lot of content, than a flashy empty thing.

    • Anki: once someone does the hard work of learning how to use it, they just build an habit around it and don't look for anything else.

    • HackerNews clones / frontends: no one cares enough?

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        Truly. The popularity of Jira has always been a mystery to me. A whole generation of managers think of Jira as the main bug reporting system in the universe.

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    Hey Michael what happened to your uber for jobs just curious ? Was it any job or any in particular?

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      It was specifically for high school students to do things like lawn mowing, dog walking, pretty much anything neighborhood related.

      Tbh I didn't launch or anything cuz I was like 16 without any actual skills :P but have since saw 3-4 different products like taskmate in NZ.

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        I had a similar idea at uni but came across the this site...

        www.taskrabbit.co.uk

        All the good ideas are taken aye! ;)

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          Well depends, you could always localize it. I think some ideas are not about the product but how you grow the network. Competition is a sign of a healthy market.

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            The reason why I asked is caused I though of something similar but focused more on property services here in Australia. I know there is a few competitors like airtasker, hipages and oneflare but I think it could be done better.

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              In that case read The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen, it will give you first principles to understand marketplace dynamics and why competition isn’t actually that important (usual case in startup land but more so for network effect products)

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                Thanks Michael will do

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