I'm not impressed with the complexity of Uber as a business, at least not to first order. You could hire out contractors in India to make a ride hailing app for $20k with maybe a 20% chance of success. Before Uber came out I knew people solving much more complex problems like routing a fleet of trucks to refill vending machines. I'd also say making a web site like AirBNB is not difficult at all -- being at ground zero for startups might have gave them a year and a half lead technologically.
Uber, AirBNB and such were really remarkable because they could fight city hall and cartels like taxis and hotels (for better and for worse.) Also those businesses have a huge amount of "dealing with bullshit" in the sense of the Uber driver assaulting a passenger, a passenger assaulting the driver, the people who have a party and trash your apartment, etc. If I'd tried to pitch businesses like that anywhere outside the bay area any investors would be like "are you kidding?"
I think you misunderstand how two-side consumer marketplaces are bootstrapped from a startup perspective. It's not really about cost of development or legal compliance. Initially it's just about getting users on both sides of the marketplace. This can't be done with a complex product, in fact it needs to be dead simple.
Also, it's baffling to me that you consider fleets refilling vending machines to be a harder problem than what Uber did. Sure maybe it's harder in a leetcode sense, but the economics are much easier to reason about, and customer acquisition in B2B vs B2C is much more straightforward. The idea that you could build a random MVP and have 20% chance of success is laughably naive. I estimate thousands of attempts at this (I know of at least 3-4 personally), it's not easy to be Uber (or even Lyft).
I agree with you. My point was that Uber and AirBNB's success was not about technology but rather the attitude about business.
VC leads in the Bay Area because VCs there will get behind high risk/high reward ventures that others won't.
At certain times and places it has been relatively easy to reach consumers. Circa 2001 we got a list of 10,000 emails in a developing country that got a better >20% response rate to join a voice chat service. I saw amazing success stories with SEO. There was a time that companies like King could get games to spread virally on Facebook. Those kind of opportunities have dried up as the gatekeepers have been able to capture more value out of their ecosystems.
But yeah, you're right, marketing is often 100x the work that people think it will be.
Uber, AirBNB and such were really remarkable because they could fight city hall and cartels like taxis and hotels (for better and for worse.) Also those businesses have a huge amount of "dealing with bullshit" in the sense of the Uber driver assaulting a passenger, a passenger assaulting the driver, the people who have a party and trash your apartment, etc. If I'd tried to pitch businesses like that anywhere outside the bay area any investors would be like "are you kidding?"