The Boneyard Principle: Why the Next Big Thing Will Emerge From a Failed Idea

“A couple of things plagued Vine, and it all stems from the same thing, which is a lack of unity and leadership on a vision,” said Ankur Thakkar, who was Vine’s head of editorial from 2014 until May of this year. He told me he was proud of the work the app did to highlight rising stars, including Ruth B, who earned a record deal after his team gave... See more

The user experience around new stuff always sucks and who wants to play a game with a shitty UI? It is also hard to take on the existing social nets. Why would someone with a million followers on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter leave those behind for a new social net? So the existing incumbents are the defensive line. They look impenetrable. Until t... See more

To us the choice is clear: as an app becomes more bloated, more unfocused, prioritising monetisation over intrinsic user experience, the bigger the opportunity becomes for a simplification, an unbundling, a new experience built on a core user insight.

The need for "10x" improvements on products falls away because there's so little switching cost between applications - the underlying data stays the same. Every experience can be constantly improving, with iterations coming from anyone rather than only the original creator or company. The web becomes more composable, with more builders.

Coupled with this stemming of developer space for innovation, the place for startups to “ship” things and users to find new things — the app store — has atrophied. Maybe we have reached a natural apex for innovation on the UX of this device, or maybe discovery was badly implemented. Regardless, as the chart below illustrates, getting

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