I recommend using https://www.promoter.io/ to measure NPS. It's a brilliant starting point for getting useful feedback too. I've ended up using it for the conference and coworking community that I run as well as for a software product.
Before You Grow
11–20 of 175 posts
Re: Before You Grow
#12"And if you’re just starting out, take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes. " There's this weird balance between the lean "get it out as soon as you can, fail fast" and "make sure it's a good product before you ship".
Yeah the cognitive dissonance of startup advice can sometimes be jarring. In this case though I think you could say that fail fast refers to iterating on a product and changing it until people love it. Then the growth starts.
The poster child for not doing this in my mind is Adora Cheung. I remember watching her "growth at all costs" lecture from Startup School shortly after Homejoy shut down and thinking well, there you have it folks. Seems they suffered from exactly the leaky bucket problem Sam talks about here.
Two caveats: 1) I'm sure there are many other examples of leaky bucket companies, Homejoy just came to mind first 2) I still think Adora is brilliant and am really excited about her new cities project.
Re: Before You Grow
#13"And if you’re just starting out, take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes. " There's this weird balance between the lean "get it out as soon as you can, fail fast" and "make sure it's a good product before you ship".
What Sam meant was "take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes, before you focus on growth " (addition mine).
You should absolutely release your product to customers to gather feedback as early as possible, just don't fuel growth by spending before you're sure you've got the product 100% right and people love it.
Re: Before You Grow
#14It's a delicate balance, for sure. Focus on product until you have something that really works. But don't fall into the 'build it, and they will come' trap.
As a side note: the new UI for blog.ycombinator is really ...uncomfortable. 3 columns? 4 if you count the social share buttons jutting out on the left. Designed on a > 21" monitor :(
The list of tags doesn't need it's own column... each with it's own row. Just make it a tag cloud above or below the blog list, and give a little breathing room to the actual article.
Re: Before You Grow
#15I have an even harsher take. In the old days if you didn't have a product that "sold itself" (i.e. loved) then you'd just make it cheaper than the competition. These days software products are by and large free (your users pay in time), so there is no obvious competitive strategy on similar products. If you don't have evangelical user base that loves your product and spreads it or at least a well defined niche use ca…
There's plenty of room for other Facebooks. In fact, there are major competitors to the likes of Facebook & Linkedin & Google.
They just happen to be national companies (russia, china, some european).
If anything. The thought that they have no competitors/alternatives is just a display that SV totally ignore the local non-english competitors (no matter how engrained they are in their market) and generally disregards anything that is under 1 billion unique users.
Re: Before You Grow
#16I have an even harsher take. In the old days if you didn't have a product that "sold itself" (i.e. loved) then you'd just make it cheaper than the competition. These days software products are by and large free (your users pay in time), so there is no obvious competitive strategy on similar products. If you don't have evangelical user base that loves your product and spreads it or at least a well defined niche use ca…
There's plenty of room for other Facebooks. In fact, there are major competitors to the likes of Facebook & Linkedin & Google. They just happen to be national companies (russia, china, some european). If anything. The thought that they have no competitors/alternatives is just a display that SV totally ignore the local non-english competitors (no matter how engrained they are in their market) and generally disregards…
I think Facebook acknowledges that they have competitors in china such as weibo,renren and wechat. That's the reason Mark Zuckerberg visits China so frequently to persuade chinese govt in allowing facebook access there to gain that enormous market share.
Re: Before You Grow
#17I have an even harsher take. In the old days if you didn't have a product that "sold itself" (i.e. loved) then you'd just make it cheaper than the competition. These days software products are by and large free (your users pay in time), so there is no obvious competitive strategy on similar products. If you don't have evangelical user base that loves your product and spreads it or at least a well defined niche use ca…
There's plenty of room for other Facebooks. In fact, there are major competitors to the likes of Facebook & Linkedin & Google. They just happen to be national companies (russia, china, some european). If anything. The thought that they have no competitors/alternatives is just a display that SV totally ignore the local non-english competitors (no matter how engrained they are in their market) and generally disregards…
This is only for ad base products.
Tesla has far under a billion users and SV loves it.
Many b2b startups have a few hundred to thousand users.
If you want to sell Ads and be free, you need billions. If you have an actual product you charge money for, you need far less.
Re: Before You Grow
#18I have an even harsher take. In the old days if you didn't have a product that "sold itself" (i.e. loved) then you'd just make it cheaper than the competition. These days software products are by and large free (your users pay in time), so there is no obvious competitive strategy on similar products. If you don't have evangelical user base that loves your product and spreads it or at least a well defined niche use ca…
There's plenty of room for other Facebooks. In fact, there are major competitors to the likes of Facebook & Linkedin & Google. They just happen to be national companies (russia, china, some european). If anything. The thought that they have no competitors/alternatives is just a display that SV totally ignore the local non-english competitors (no matter how engrained they are in their market) and generally disregards…
Silicon Valley (or at least the large corps) is very aware of the regionalization of software adoption. Its simply that how success is defined for them is by, as you said, large numbers that often require something larger than small regions.
One of the difficulties of SV is that several people have made the "Facebook for Brazil" or the "X for Y region" but over long term iteration, the regionalized product gets overtaken by a supra-regional product's momentum.
Re: Before You Grow
#19"And if you’re just starting out, take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes. " There's this weird balance between the lean "get it out as soon as you can, fail fast" and "make sure it's a good product before you ship".
i don't think there is too much tension between "lean" and focusing on product quality before growth. the best way to improve the product is to get people using it and use their feedback to improve it. that's what lean is all about.
airbnb's 1000 days are mentioned in the article. it is not like they were just coding in their living room during that time. they had a product out, and they were flying to NY to talk to every possible host, improving the listings, and so on -- learning what made the product awesome. it was probably tempting at the time to work on getting more hosts on the platform, or to optimize the number of bookings, and other growth stuff. that's what Sam is cautioning against.
Re: Before You Grow
#20I recommend using https://www.promoter.io/ to measure NPS. It's a brilliant starting point for getting useful feedback too. I've ended up using it for the conference and coworking community that I run as well as for a software product.
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