Magnificent Plans and Promises... and The Emperor’s New Clothes!

I should preface what I'm about to say by stating that it's only right that people be very enthusiastic about their businesses ventures and building their successes.

That's only right and natural.

That SAID...

To be perfectly blunt about it, I don't care if you're building the next interdimensional gateway to Alpha Centauri, the fact of the matter is that the door to the break room in your office is falling off its hinges and and causes people frustration and pain every time they use it… and that just doesn't leave a very good impression. And, as long as you can't even fix your office door, why on earth should I entrust my life to the magical gateway to Alpha Centauri?

Whereas the above, of course, is utter nonsense it is however a metaphorical representation of how a great many startup companies work.

They are so busy innovating and adding new features that they largely overlook getting the existing features to work appropriately and consistently. Then we get a couple of years down the road and they start wondering why they never got the broad based support they thought they were going to get because after all their ideas were great, right?

The bottom line there is that no matter how great the mansion you might be building happens to be... if it has an unstable foundation the entire thing you're working on is at risk of becoming a House of Cards.

What's more, if you feel so unsure that your supporters will stick by you if you're not innovating faster than you can make things solid then we should question the motivations of those supporters, or perhaps encourage you to go look for a different kind of supporter!

But perhaps this is the way the world always works?

That was certainly the way it worked when I worked for IT startups as a contractor many many years ago, and now I watch it repeat itself with the number of crypto and blockchain endeavors. Everybody seems so afraid of falling behind if they don't keep innovating, that all the stuff they've already put out is of dodgy quality at best.

Which brings us to perhaps the next part of the equation.

Typically, the people who are actually being kept happy in this equation are the people who are invested in it, not the people who are actually intended to be the users. Of course this was something we saw fairly broadly back in the dot-com era of the early Internet, where so many companies were started not for the purpose of so much catering to potential users, offering an actual business plan, but for the purpose of attracting venture capital dollars.

”We’ll solve the user issues later!” seemed to be the rallying cry of the day.

From where I'm sitting, it seems like a small wonder that so many things fail and that so many of us end up complaining about the quality of the things we're using.

These days, I'm getting very cautious about where I put my very small stash of investment funds. And, as often as not, even after thorough research I am often left with a somewhat uncomfortable feeling that so many ventures are busier with charging ahead than making sure that what they're currently doing is actually functional and working in a tangible and real world sense.

In politics we talk a lot about having a choice between politicians that are "the lesser of two evils," and it seems like in business we users often end up with a situation where we're talking about having a choice between the least messed up.

That's hardly a particularly attractive user metric to choose with!

Much like Hans Christian Andersen's classic (cautionary) fairy tale of The Emperor's New Clothes, it seems like so many things in our day and age are guided more by hype than by actual substance. And as somebody who really likes for things to have substance I'm finding it harder and harder to choose.

In fact, sometimes I get to the point where I'm almost ready to just throw in the towel and return to the legacy investment markets and put my money to work on simpler things like the stocks of manufacturers of food and beverages, basic materials and pharmaceuticals which are things people actually have to create, in order for the investment to make sense.

The thing I find slightly ironic about it all is that such a large segment of the Cryptosphere presents itself as an alternative to centralized banking where the constant rallying cry is that central banks "just start up the money printing presses and aren't accountable for what they're doing."

Please show me how persuading people to invest in projects that don't actually deliver on anything useful or tangible is substantially any different?

Just because you log your failure to execute on a blockchain doesn't make you some kind of genius who earns the right to be exempts from holding true to promises!

Of course, these situations are seldom simple and straightforward.

Even so, I see a fair number of Hive's 2nd layer projects starting with great hype and slowly failing to execute their promises with a solid and viable and usable/playable product.

But the again, I'm just a nitpicky old fart!

Thanks for visiting, and have a great Friday!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2024-06-07 00:31 PDT
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