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Ask HN: What pain point did Twitter solve?

8 points by rajacombinator ↗ HN
Entrepreneurs are often asked what pain point their product solves. (I think it is even on YC apps.) I think that's a great question that can help clarify what a business is doing. But it got me wondering ... if you were pitching Twitter to a seed stage investor and they asked you what pain point it solved, what would you tell them?

12 comments

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lmm
People enjoy that feeling of achievement when they've written a blog post. But writing is hard. By limiting posts to 160 characters, we make blogging easier but just as fulfilling.

(Though if you're asking about the historical pitch, I believe it was originally about having a blog that people could follow on a dumbphone)

taprun
As someone that has not used Twitter much and often made fun of it, your response was very close to my initial answer.

Thinking about it more though, I would say that Twitter should not be compared to blogs. I think Twitter is more like IRC. Twitter is a simpler version of IRC for the masses that can be used via dumb phones. Add in hash tags, search and an easy to use filtering system, and Twitter actually seems pretty good.

mattm
Sorry I down voted you by accident but agree with this. It's like how anyone could have written a blog in the early days of the Internet but didn't. Blogging software gave people a framework. Just like twitter except twitter doesn't really require thinking, hence the popularity.
kappaloris
A high throughput (via length limit) communication method where you don't have to specify the recipient(s).

It's a good way of broadcasting news in realtime.

benologist
Twitter solved phone-to-internet and one-to-many communication when text message communication was expensive, internet access from a phone was limited and expensive, and free public wifi was rare.
gregcohn
Twitter made it easy to post in broadcast mode, as well as fun and easy to consume the broadcasts of others.
mindcrime
I'm going to go against the grain here and ask people to consider this: Maybe Twitter doesn't "solve" any "pain point" at all. IOW, maybe this whole analogy with painkillers is flawed and not the best model for looking at the world.

OK, yes, you can pretty much always twist and manipulate semantics and express anything in terms of a "pain", but is something getting lost in translation? I don't have the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about.

"What problem does your startup solve"? Important question, no doubt. But if you go back to the "vitamin or painkiller" analogy, sometimes it's OK to be the vitamin. And sometimes something becomes popular just because it's fun and novel.

All of that said, what made Twitter so interesting? I think originally it was the idea of a "near real time" way of distributing messages to a group, coupled with the knowledge that A. the messages you receive would be short, so you could parse them quickly, and B. the messages you would be composing would be limited, which meant that tweeting couldn't turn into too much work, the way writing a blog post might.

andretti1977
Twitter allows public mass-messaging better than any other media, but this was just a feature before being a pain solution. Now it is also a pain solved for some kind of people (politician for example need public mass-messaging so now it is a pain it solves too but now, not at its beginning). I think maybe twitter didn't solve any pain. That's it: you don't always have to solve problems to get "success". Really, sometimes it's just because it's something cool or amusing or new or becomes a fashion for some strange reasons.
flavmartins
Twitter allows you to interact anyone in the world (that is on Twitter, of course).

I'm going to NYC for the first time this week. I want to eat at places where the locals eat, not what's trendy on the Web or TV. How did I get recommendations?

Twitter.

I reached out to NY food bloggers and they happily responded with tips.

I don't need to get introduced by someone else. I don't need to personally know them or "friend them". I don't need to pay for 3rd party services to hunt down a phone number or an email address.

People often miss on what I think is one of the most fantastic features of Twitter.

tptacek
It's valuable to broadcast a message to large numbers of people, but hard to get people to tune in.

One way to mitigate that problem is to make messages cheaper to listen to, and broadcasters cheaper to find and follow. In a medium more carefully optimized for listeners, audience sizes will be sufficiently improved to make it worth the extra effort demanded of broadcasters.

The result is a new kind of broadcast channel: one in which broadcasters don't need to invest millions of dollars into to overcome the cost of acquiring listeners (like television, or even news websites), so many many more broadcasters can profitably use it; a virtuous cycle ensues where more listeners are attracted, attracting more broadcasters, and on and on.

I don't think that was the original thesis of the site (original thesis: "users will enjoy a site that lets them tell their friends what they're doing right now"), but I do think that's where the value turns out to be.

firebones
1) ESP with anyone you care to follow. 2) As someone tweeted today (paraphrased): a venue to directly scream at famous and important people.