Tarpit ideas: What they are and how to avoid them (2023) [video]

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

What makes an idea a “tarpit”

  • Described as ideas that look obviously good, sound cool, are easy to start, get positive feedback from friends/customers, but repeatedly fail in practice.
  • From the investor side, they show up again and again with the same failure patterns: weak monetization, no real market, not sticky, costly to acquire users.
  • Commenters note this is more a VC heuristic than a precise founder tool: a “tarpit” can later become a real opportunity if something important changes.

Timing, context, and “it wasn’t time yet”

  • Many examples where repeated failures turned into successes after environmental changes: YouTube vs earlier video sites (DSL), AI after data/compute scale, EVs after battery improvements, online grocery after phones/payments/logistics, smartphones after screens/networks/GPS.
  • Advice: if your idea has been tried, assume prior founders were smart; unless you can clearly explain what’s different now, don’t assume you’ll “out-execute” them.
  • Some see context change as chaotic and only obvious in hindsight; others think careful first-principles analysis can reveal tipping points.

Recommendation/discovery apps as a focal example

  • The video’s heuristic: avoid ideas with many eager founders but little intrinsic user demand (e.g., recommendation apps).
  • Pushback: recommendation is everywhere and valuable (commerce, media, search, reviews), but typically as a feature attached to content, not a standalone product.
  • Several founders share experience: good recommendation quality is achievable, but standalone B2C apps struggle with:
    • Acquiring and retaining users
    • Getting enough behavioral data
    • Convincing people to trust and act on recommendations
  • Consensus: “pure recommendation app” is usually a tarpit; bundling it with content or core utility sometimes works.

Other commonly cited tarpits

  • Social apps (“X, but with a twist”), dating apps, “things to do with friends,” to‑do/habit/note apps, generic trackers, many EdTech products, climate/sustainability plays chasing grant money, and “wrapper over OpenAI API” AI products.
  • EdTech is singled out as fad-driven, with shifting pedagogical fashions and hard sales dynamics; solving unglamorous admin problems in schools is seen as more promising.

B2C vs B2B and scale

  • Many argue B2C is much harder: constant attention acquisition, huge marketing needs, and low willingness to pay.
  • B2B is portrayed as more tractable but sales skills are rare and hard to learn from books; large customers can dominate your roadmap.

Meta: YC content and missed opportunity

  • Several dislike the video format (slow, gesture-heavy) and want transcripts or well-edited text.
  • One commenter argues YC underuses its unique view of repeated startup failures and should publish “maps of tarpits” and postmortems to steer new founders away from them.