I've seen a lot of good comments on this page, but we really need to start looking at the problem from a customer's point of view.
Why should the end user care about this problem?
Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online complain about this problem?
If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point simply is not large enough to fix.
And, as a potential success case to model our strategy off of, we should be looking towards DuckDuckGo, they've written some good material on how to do it.
This thread provides a wide enough sample population of people who have a problem with these services. Additionally, this population is getting bigger. I do hear friends and family concerned about facebook -even in the early days. Does grandma care? no. She doesn't need to. We just need to create replacements for these services that replace the need to use them (facebook and google for instance) to 100% satisfaction for those interested. Then we can worry about growing them. We don't need to worry about the entirety of mankind... yet. Startups 101
It's getting there. Facebook is now a monopoly and is not improving their service in ways that benefit the users, they have no need to. They are only working to keep you locked in and to serve those who actually pay the bills, advertisers.
So what if Facebook as stagnated with user features? Why should your average Joe care? It's already serving their purposes, most if not all of their friends and relatives are on the platform. Again why is this bad for the end user?
Why should the end user care about this problem?
Have you heard your non-entreprenuer/engineer friends or others online complain about this problem?
If the answer to above two questions is Negative, then the problem/pain point simply is not large enough to fix.
And, as a potential success case to model our strategy off of, we should be looking towards DuckDuckGo, they've written some good material on how to do it.