Actually, can anyone give some insight to if the LinkedIn (cringe) posts actually work (converting sales, etc)?
Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who’s on research, I do hundreds of prototypes each year. My time optimizations include having a backing hypothesis for each prototype, and prototyping one hypothesis at a time, even if two hypothesis touch on the same domain problem, I spin a fresh new prototype for each. Usually I’m able to validate the hypothesis even before finishing the prototype, as merely getting the hands on the process reveals the…
Having a research background - for me, doing this in research was always easier. Because you generally have very straightforward ways to validate your hypotheses. Validating things with customers - in my experience - can be extremely tricky as they might not even know what they want
Absolutely. In this case this means your pre-process will be less deterministic, hence your success ratio will be lower (maybe a lot lower). Perhaps improving your communication and data analysis skills would do good, as this sort of context is characterized by asymmetric information. Even though you’re in the market, this is still research, just of a different kind. I would try and find the “hidden variables” for each candidate hypothesis. Assuming “performance” to be the true abstract metric you’ll be striving for, it’s important to identify what particular concrete performance metric is worthwhile improving. For instance, consumers may suggest interest in feature A and B, but once you analyze their yield you identify they are time-saving features at their core. If time is the hidden variable, then where in the product lies the best opportunity for saving user time, even though the customers might not be mentioning it? I would guess that most requests or indications coming from customers will fall more or less in the same few buckets in respect to hidden variables and related metrics. Overall you shouldn’t take customer feedback as prescriptions, but as symptoms, and those symptoms might not even be related to what they’re being vocal about, since they might be stuck in a corner not by the lack of improvements in that existing domain but maybe by the lack of an entire novel domain. Think of it like a Tetris game, locally, each region in the bricks stack require some particular piece to solve that region, but globally, that’s not a good strategy, as a whole different piece in a whole different region would solve a larger portion of the stack.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#43Can absolutely relate to the linkedin cringe. I need to continue to increase my presence there, and I feel an almost physical resistance. Feel dirty whenever I put my marketing hat on and wade into that pool of narcissists. I'm seeing as many people as I can in person to try to keep myself sane, and in the meantime reminding myself that most of the stuff on there is (thankfully) paid/ghostwritten/chatgpt and not orga…
Is there any evidence that churning out cringy linkedin posts leads to increased revenue or any other tangible benefits for a startup?
Only anecdata from my side, and even that is very industry specific.
I'd guess that for another company which is B2B but with an audience more technical than ours (easily achieved) it wouldn't be/seem as important.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#44> Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it. Is this what people that create all Twitter and LinkedIn cringe content tell themselves? Why do it? You really can't come up with any way to market your company that feels good? Can't you think a bit more about the problem and frame it as "what can I do that is net positive, doesn't make me feel like crap while doing it…
Both Twitter and LinkedIn are optimized for hot takes and fomo. It’s like a high stakes gambling of attention. I think the value of these places should be measured long term, in which case psychological biases wear off a bit. Noise is not always meaningful for a business.
My product was featured in random tech blogs, the “PC magazine” stuff that a lot of techies look down on. At one time, it was also featured in a high-profile trendy tech magazine. Initially, it drove a lot of traffic. But after only a few days, things were back to normal, and the user uptick was minimal. It turned out that even though not cool at all, the tech blogs were much better for me, because they had visitors that needed my product.
The point is: the spaces you hang out can make you think that “every important thing and person is here”, which can distort your view of the world. As a business you want to be where your customers are. You don’t have to be a “thought leader”.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#45I prefer to formulate goals as something I want to achieve, not something I want to do. For me, this year, the number one goal is to become competent at marketing.
When I started last year, I told myself I need to get competent at sales, or I will always need some CEO by my side and never have a business that's truly my own. Now I'm pretty decent at sales, but I can't fully leverage that since I don't have enough prospects to truly scale things. So figuring marketing out seems like my biggest lever.
How, I don't know yet. Pretty sure I won't post anything on LinkedIn I consider to be cringy :) What I already did is hire a fractional CMO to coach me - getting help from people already good at this seems like a reasonable tactic.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#46> Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it. Is this what people that create all Twitter and LinkedIn cringe content tell themselves? Why do it? You really can't come up with any way to market your company that feels good? Can't you think a bit more about the problem and frame it as "what can I do that is net positive, doesn't make me feel like crap while doing it…
I will probably insult some people with this but here it comes anyways..
I think we just have too many trash products (software and non-software) which no one really needs. This is why there are massive spam/ad campaigns everywhere to convince people that they need "new trash product xy".
One of the problems being that you cannot really build wealth today by doing your job as an employee in most cases. The result is that more and more people want a piece of the "founders pie" even though they don't have any valuable product to add.
And this not only applies to founders/start-ups.. when I look around I see 95% of all products as trash. Established big corps are guilty just the same. If you bought a washing machine 20 years ago there is a good chance it is still running. Today my washing machine has AI but dies after 3 years..
Sorry for the rant.. I hope some founder has as a resolution to make actually useful and durable products.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a research background - for me, doing this in research was always easier. Because you generally have very straightforward ways to validate your hypotheses. Validating things with customers - in my experience - can be extremely tricky as they might not even know what they want
Absolutely. In this case this means your pre-process will be less deterministic, hence your success ratio will be lower (maybe a lot lower). Perhaps improving your communication and data analysis skills would do good, as this sort of context is characterized by asymmetric information. Even though you’re in the market, this is still research, just of a different kind. I would try and find the “hidden variables” for ea…
Then there’s, of course, the issue that the whole of current customers feedbacks might be blinding you from what the product really needs to grow beyond that base, since a startup’s ultimate goal is growth, and fulfilling the current customer’s needs might make them happier but result in zero overall growth.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#48> Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it. Is this what people that create all Twitter and LinkedIn cringe content tell themselves? Why do it? You really can't come up with any way to market your company that feels good? Can't you think a bit more about the problem and frame it as "what can I do that is net positive, doesn't make me feel like crap while doing it…
1) My target frequents Linkedin and Twitter so it's important to have a minimum presence there.
2) I don't think that everything on Linkedin is cringe, there is a lot of very interesting people out there. I find my own posts cringe like for example, I find celebrating my birthday narcissistic, but I love celebrating other people's birthdays and I don't think their posts are cring. It's just a weird cognitive bias I'm trying to fight.
3) Of course there are other ways of marketing my product, and most of it doesn't come from these networks. But building an audience is always useful.
4) I was only sharing good resolutions, i.e. actions to stop procrastinating on specific points. However, my goals and plan of attack for my company are very different from that.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#49I prefer to formulate goals as something I want to achieve, not something I want to do. For me, this year, the number one goal is to become competent at marketing. When I started last year, I told myself I need to get competent at sales, or I will always need some CEO by my side and never have a business that's truly my own. Now I'm pretty decent at sales, but I can't fully leverage that since I don't have enough pro…
Did you find the fractional CMO's advice useful? I'm always worried that it's too high-level or not adapted to early-stage start-ups.
Re: Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?
#50> Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it. If marketing is making you cringe, you're marketing to the wrong audience
It's not really marketing posts, it can be anything. Like saying we are attending this or this conference.