Tarpit Ideas: The Sequel

This is Dalton plus Michael. And today, we're gonna talk about Tar Pit ideas again. Tar Pit the sequel. Part two. Part two. So we've gotten a lot of feedback from our first Tar Pit video. Was it about a year? It was a while ago.

Maybe a little bit more. It's like, oh, this looks like a nice pool of No.

one's no one's here drinking at it. I'm gonna I'm gonna go get a drink of water from this pool. Right? Like, no. Danger. Quicksand. What.

have you learned about Well,.

I think a lot of people watch that video. Yes. And I've met a lot of people in the real world that have watched it. Yes. And the most common question I get is, hey, Dalton, is my idea a tar pit? Then they tell me their idea.

And maybe the first thing that I noticed was a lot of folks I feel like didn't exactly get the definition that we had and they're they interpret the term tar pit to just mean an idea that I don't like. Again, maybe I'm Dalton and Michael don't like. Yeah. It's sort of like An idea that came up in the last video. I think, you know, we try to define a different way.

Why don't you try to give the definition and you should watch the video. Yes. But.

we should we should restart. Right? So the idea behind the Tarpit idea is we would see a lot of founders applying with the same idea over and over and over again. And often we would fund many of them and often the idea wouldn't work. And after a while, we we started seeing this trend.

We're like, wow, there are these certain idea spaces that seem to always attract a lot of applicants and they never work. And like that's how we kind of came up with this concept of a tar pit idea. And in the video, I explained that like that's how tar pits were for dinosaurs. Right? It looks like a body of water from afar.

And as the dinosaur gets close, they go to drink it and it's tar and they get stuck and they die. And that's why we have all of these dead founders Yeah. In these tar pit pools. All these dinosaurs in tar pit pools. What was interesting though was that,.

like you said, people interpret it as almost like a static list that doesn't change over time. Well, also that an idea that is bad and an idea that's a Tarpit are the same thing. Yeah. A Tarpit is a pretty small If we imagine the Venn diagram Very small. Tarpit ideas are a small ish set of ideas. Yes. There's lots of ideas that are neither good nor bad. They're just normal.

Yes. Yes. And so.

Yes. There's something about Tarpon ideas that are insanely attractive.

Yeah. Like Like if some If other founders don't come up with them all the time constantly, it is not a Tarpon It has to be it has to be something that you're like, yeah, I had that idea too. Yes.

I think there's another part about tarpon ideas which like they sound it's really funny. Most turnip ideas when you tell your friends and they're being honest, they're like, that's not a good idea. Tarpon ideas get like a lot Oh, they love it. Of praise. Yeah. Like the second one your friend's like, that's a great idea. Yeah, like food discovery. Like Yeah.

You know that problem where you can't decide what restaurant to go to? Yeah.

That's a great idea. You pitch your friends on it and like, I totally have that problem. I have that problem all the time.

I think that the other thing you brought up is there's a characteristic of a startup idea where it's been done before. Right? And I think this is an area where a lot of founders avoid research to not learn things they don't want to learn. But it's been done before a lot, and nothing has changed.

Like there's no you know, I would argue that there are a number of ideas that at any given time in the, you know, last hundred years might have been tar pit and then technology changed. Yep. And suddenly these are not only possible, they're great businesses. But I think that the kind of characteristic of it's been done a lot, a lot of people have failed and nothing has changed. That's.

very And there's just like an endless supply of folks that haven't even started a company that tend to come up with a similar idea. It just is one of the first ideas to pop into people's minds. Now, think what's interesting is what's happened since we recorded that video is.

LLMs Yep. AI. I think that when I'm reading applications, my first thought is like I am open to even classic tar pit ideas no longer being tar pit. Like I'm open. What I love to see is when a founder can explain to me why the new technology might make something accomplishable that wasn't accomplishable before. Yep.

What I hate to see is a founder that's not even acknowledging that like many people have tried Yep. And failed before. Like it's like, oh, history that happened before I'm alive didn't happen. Wait. It didn't? It was like, I've been alive and then that's when history starts. Right? And actually, I wasn't even aware.

So it's like, since I've been like 18 ish, like that's like when history The.

only good music is when I was 18. Exactly. Literally.

I think another area that that you brought up is kind of the the x for y. Right? You like the copilot for.

know, hey, copilot's working great for developers. Yep. Should there not be a copilot for fill in the blank? Yeah. And and this one, to be very clear, I don't think that these are tar pits. Fair. But they are common. So to be very specific, everyone says copilot for x.

And then, like, we can play Mad Libs. Copilot for real estate agents, copilot for investment bankers, copilot for lawyers. Pilots. Co pilot for pilots, co pilot Surgeons. Surgeons. Yeah. Co pilots for, you know, basically any Who doesn't need a co pilot for dentists? Co pilot for dog walkers?

Who would not want a co pilot? And so, again, these are not tar pits because not enough people have tried them. Exactly. But they are common ideas, would say. Again, doesn't mean you shouldn't try it. But a lot of people, just from first principles trying to come up with AI startup ideas,.

these are the type of things they tend to cook up. Yeah. This is not meant to try to like screw with your dreams. Right? Like I think that a lot of people start companies because there's a problem they see in the world they really want to fix. And I think that the pressing thing I've learned is that whatever current set of technology is available can address only a current set of problems.

And like some problems are going to fall outside of that set. And every time there's a new chunk of technology, have to re explore. Right? Let's re explore what problems are available. And I think that what's cool is that, like, there are lot of companies this batch where I would say, I would not have funded this idea in the pre LLM world. Okay.

Like I funded a company that's basically doing like completely AI generated podcasts. And it's like without LLMs and the ability to do like voice generation, that would Yeah. I would have never considered funding it. With that, I'm like, okay, let's see. And so I think that's the other thing that you should kind of understand from our perspective. We're definitely in a okay, let's see phase. Yeah.

Compared to like ten years into b to b SaaS, it was like, we've seen a lot of, like, we've seen a lot of forms and like, yeah.

So I think that like that's another fun part of this And I guess AI generated video and audio, we have seen YC companies working on those since 2016, '20 '7. Like the early generative AI stuff. We've been funding that consistently. And it seems like it's getting better. The quality is getting better. One funny thing about these things is they always train them on YouTube video.

And guess guess who has a lot of YouTube video of Yeah. And so all these new demos that we see, it's us. Yeah. It's quite embarrassing. It is a little bit embarrassing. But they're getting they're getting immediately kind of good. Yeah. Well, I was thinking, I played like I played this personalized podcast.

It's called PocketPod. I played this one to my wife.

and she's like, oh, like you're listening to NPR or like some other thing. And then it played a quote of me talking to the reporter. And she's like, oh, did you give an interview? I'm like, this all is Yeah. This is I didn't I'm learning for the first time that I'm on my own podcast. And so it's it's I would say it's fun for us to see all these new things.

But like still, if you can't draw any connection between the two technology and why your problem can be solved today, and it's one of these ideas that have been tried many times, tricky. Yep. Maybe the last thing we should talk about is like where, what are the flavors of tar pits? You know, we were talking about this before. There are multiple flavors of tar pits. Like what do you see?

I think there's, the two most common vectors are one,.

just a belief that the world should work differently than it Yes, better. And this is all coming from a good place, but it's basically, wow, the way x works is bad. We should do it y. And everyone simultaneously needs to adopt this scheme. So I'd put the idea of coordinating with your friends to see who you can hang out with and do event planning Yes.

Is one of these where wouldn't it be cooler if all your friends wanted to hang out all the time Yes. And you can coordinate with them on an Like it's We'd have more fun. We'd all have more fun. Yeah. Yeah. We wouldn't be sad. Yeah. It And so the way you want the world to work is that everyone's like, yeah, I want to install a new app to see what all my friends are doing and hang out with them.

Yep. Sadly, it does not appear that people want to do that, or at least no one that's tried this idea Has figured it out yet. I'm sure someone is watching and being like, but I'm gonna figure it out. Yes. God bless you. But again, it's coming from this really good place, this utopian sense of changing the way that we live our lives Yes. And.

running into that it's just hard to change human behavior. That's a perfect example of Tar Pit because it's the perfect example of something where like nobody would say no.

Yeah. Nobody wants to discourage you. Yeah. No. When you're working on something that's really good. Yeah. So that's number one. What what about number two?

Number two is, I don't know. You you did a better version of this earlier. Yeah. I I think it's tricky. I think it's.

it can be summarized as like some form of arbitrage Yeah. Or getting rich very quickly. There's like a limited window where like I have some secret knowledge and like I can get very rich very fast. And like I would be working for Google, but because of this moment in time, I can kind of like fast forward through the entire startup thing and like kill it.

And I think that that also sounds really attractive. It's like, right? Like, you have to work for fifteen years to make your start up work. But like, if I just do the right thing at the exact right time,.

game on. Grand Slam home run. Like, I can be rich, you know, in Miami like Yeah. This is where you you just end up doing an idea that's like whatever is raising money Yeah. Or you find some sort of arbitrage where you've you know, lot of ad tech stuff was like this Yeah. Or anyway, like, you see these momentary things where you want to just immediately make tons of money from it.

But there were lots of people influenced by Wall Street Bets during the pandemic where a lot of startup ideas were like someone saw Wall Street Bets and was like, hey,.

I'm gonna make a startup out of this somehow. Like that was the that was the input. My favorite one is like, I'm doing so great on Wall Street Bets and my friends are all seeing it. And they just wanna give me their money so I can invest it for them. So what is the like fastest way I can create like an investment advisory business? Excuse me.

So I can just just shove my friends money into the market as fast.

Michael. Don't know. I don't know why you're laughing. Like, I was gonna pitch you that idea. I I got some great stock tips. And I'm just like, God, like, am I like,.

I watching the car crash in real time? Don't see the problem. It's like, don't markets always go up forever? Isn't that how isn't that how graphs work? Aren't graphs like this? When you're young, yes. The market only goes up forever if it's your first And I'm thinking about this poor founder's friends who just dump all their life savings into their investment advisory business.

and the market crashes. I even know what company you're referencing. Well, there's many. I mean, there's more than one. I'm thinking of Yes. I know.

I know what you're saying. So, yeah. So that's like, you know, the mercenary. So wrapping it up, right, I think maybe the big takeaway here is this is not a static list of ideas. Maybe ideas that we had mentioned in our last video are no longer Tar Pit. Technology has changed. Maybe ideas we made fun of in this video won't be Tar Pit six months from now. Technology changes.

If it looks too good to be true, like if you're getting too much positive feedback, if it feels like, why does this already exist? It seems so easy. That's not like the shape of things that we see working. Right? Like, maybe you should be a little skeptical.

One is funny. When some of the people ask me, oh, is my idea tar pit? I'll be like, hey, well, have you talked to any users? And they're like, no, I just no. I thought you would tell me though. It's like, haven't you been watching the videos? I think what we say in the videos is, you should talk to users and get a customer. And they're like, yeah, I guess you did say that.

Yeah. Interesting. I I thought I would just pick a bitty, an idea based on what you said in the video.

Alright, Carlton. Good chat. Alright. Sounds good. Thanks, man.