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Overview #

Tarpit Ideas #

• Ideas that a lot of founders encounter but are time wasters
• If you find yourself in a tarpit idea you have to pivot out it quickly
• Tarpit ideas attract founders because they are wide open problems! But there are a ton of failed companies that have already tried them!
• Most tarpit ideas are consumer ideas
  • The bar is really high in consumer products
    • You basically have to have insane traction with these products almost immediately without any marketing to be a really iconic consumer company
    • This is really hard to do nowadays with how many competing products are out
  • Timing tends to be really important in consumer
• Tarpit ideas will likely get some positive feedback and you’ll want to work on it
  • A true tarpit is one that you will be defensive about when you get challenged on it (thus the tar part of tarpit)
• Theory:
  • Startup ideas have supply and demand
  • Supply
    • Some ideas lots of founders want to work on
    • Some ideas are hard to start and not many people want to work on
  • Demand
    • Demand for an unlaunched undifferentiated social app is 0
    • Demand for high quality software in a niche industry is really high
  • Tarpit ideas have the largest oversupply of a startup idea relative to demand
  • The best pivots are when founders recognize they are on the wrong side of the supply and demand curve and pivot to something that is on a better space on the supply/demand curve

Tarpit Examples #

• An app to discover new things (e.g. events, restaraunts, concerts, music, etc.)
  • The # of restaraunts, etc. are by definition limited which makes this idea very hard to work
• Software to help people bet, gamble, or trade
• Web3 – this theoretically opens up the possibility for everything to be rebuilt
  • This makes it a sexy idea to work on but this is a very hard problem to work on