The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#2I can see what he's saying: to make a great product, basically consider market forces your local gradient, then follow the steepest descent. Surely, though, that suffers from the same problem as the classic version of the gradient descent algorithm: it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum. So I do think your starting point matters.
His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline email clients before gmail, the key to its success was its integration with an excellent search algorithm. Without that starting point, it would have most likely been pulled towards some local optimum which had already been discovered. Okay, so Google is full of search experts, so maybe internal market forces would have been different than those of the worldwide market. Most startups don't have that kind of micro-market which takes them to some kind of new optimium though.
Taking the algorithmic analogy further, in practice you would probably not want to do pure gradient descent if it feels like you're heading for a known local optimum, and instead stochastically/heuristically "go against the flow" and experiment with idiosyncratic features.
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#3It's interesting to me that Paul lists humility as an (the?) important factor leading to successful product design. It seems like there would be a natural tension between the courage it takes to found a startup and the humility it takes to be successful.
I also wonder if honesty might be another word for the skill in question - i.e., being honest with yourself about what works, what doesn't, and what's truly necessary.
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#4I can see what he's saying: to make a great product, basically consider market forces your local gradient, then follow the steepest descent. Surely, though, that suffers from the same problem as the classic version of the gradient descent algorithm: it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum. So I do think your starting point matters. His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline email…
I don't think getting stuck in a local optimum is as important as the speed with which you get there.
Techniques for finding a global optimum of a numerical function are expensive, time-consuming, and often find worse solutions before they find the best one. Do this in a startup, and your local-optimum-seeking competition will crush you.
Seems to me that thinking there is a better solution that your users don't know about (which led you to the local optimum) is exactly the lack of humility that Paul was warning against.
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#5I can see what he's saying: to make a great product, basically consider market forces your local gradient, then follow the steepest descent. Surely, though, that suffers from the same problem as the classic version of the gradient descent algorithm: it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum. So I do think your starting point matters. His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline email…
I don't think getting stuck in a local optimum is as important as the speed with which you get there. Techniques for finding a global optimum of a numerical function are expensive, time-consuming, and often find worse solutions before they find the best one. Do this in a startup, and your local-optimum-seeking competition will crush you. Seems to me that thinking there is a better solution that your users don't know…
Sorry, I didn't actually mean you should try to go straight for the global optimum (I'd argue there's probably no such thing) - I'm just wondering about known local optima. Solutions that already exist. I don't necessarily know about startups, but in open source software, it seems that a lot of the time, there's some slick and cool new take on a problem. As it becomes popular, it eventually just grows in the direction of all the other solutions that are out there, becoming yet another bloated clone. It seems to me that if you find yourself going down that road, you should steer against that trend. Or should you?
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#6"if people don't want it, then you will fail"
Maybe the best advice you'll ever get here.
So find a customer early. Very early.
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#7It's interesting to me that Paul lists humility as an (the?) important factor leading to successful product design. It seems like there would be a natural tension between the courage it takes to found a startup and the humility it takes to be successful. I also wonder if honesty might be another word for the skill in question - i.e., being honest with yourself about what works, what doesn't, and what's truly necessar…
Strong opinions, held weakly
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#8Eric Schmidt walk around Google and says:"Dont fight the internet, man" :)
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#9"if people don't want it, then you will fail" Maybe the best advice you'll ever get here. So find a customer early. Very early.
My view is that startups aren't easy because there are no natural forces to guide you. Not customers, not markets, nothing. All can mislead.
And I've become distrustful of one line advice.
Re: The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
#10This doesn't work for web startups, but for people selling real products I think the best thing to do is apply the baggie test. That is, when Richard Garriott made his first computer game he put the diskettes in clear plastic baggies and gave them to the local computer store to sell. Similarly, O'Reilly started his publishing empire by selling stapled xerox copies of a unix FAQ he wrote at a trade show.
The idea being that if people would buy your product if they saw it in a baggie, you probably have a good product/market.