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Before You Grow

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Before You Grow

#21

Post by blazespin »

maximp wrote: post #2

"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".

No, the rule still applies. Get it out fast so you can find out if your users love it. Just don't push it to a broader audience.

Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this. They release in foreign markets (Canada, Australia, etc) and make sure their users love their apps before releasing in the US.

Re: Before You Grow

#24

Post by ankimal »

maximp wrote: post #2

"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".

The way I understand it is:

(build -> deploy -> feedback -> build -> deploy -> feedback ..) until you reach love, when you can start focussing on growth.

The lean philosophy is to make sure your (build -> deploy -> feedback) loop is tight.

Re: Before You Grow

#25

Post by logicallee »

Comment withdrawn. I've withdrawn this comment, but per site policy / encouragement I'm leaving my original comment below the lines.

Pre-edit:

---

I liked your comment but you won't believe how I felt about one part:

>Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this.

I'm sorry, I just found it very distracting... like you use clickbait title interspersed in your writing. I tried to replicate the effect for you at the top of this comment. There's nothing wrong with what you said, it's just kind of like the format of clickbait titles, you know? Thank

EDIT: got voted to -1 but I'm keeping this - it's genuine feedback for someone. the phrasing "do this one neat trick for this" doesn't come from normal writing or conversation and I find it distracting in an otherwise nice and informative comment.

Re: Before You Grow

#26

Post by pinky07 »

statictype wrote: post #23

I'm curious about how this maps to enterprise products? Can you create an enterprise-targeted product that users truly love? Any examples of this?

Yes: https://www.Odoo.com

But we did not follow Sam's path. 1/ we made resellers and developers happy (being open source played an important role early on) 2/ we grew 3/ we made end users very happy 4/ we grew much faster

The reason we took this part is that it takes a lot of time to both build the enterprise features, and make it great. We built the scope first and made it great after, which is not an usual path.

Disclaimer: I am the founder.

Re: Before You Grow

#27

Post by codingdave »

epberry wrote: post #12
maximp wrote: post #2

"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…

Part of the reason there is so much dissonance is the conflicting goals -- startup founders want THEIR product to succeed. VCs just need SOME products to succeed. So the advice that is tossed to cohorts of founders is designed to help some succeed, not to ensure the personal success of each individual founder.

Re: Before You Grow

#28

Post by Mahn »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #5

You’ll have to rely on inorganic means like ads, marketing, or PR to maintain your growth, and this gets very hard to sustain This is a point that I am always curious/skeptical about because growth will always become marginally harder. So ads, marketing and PR are always going to be necessary at some point. Using his examples, facebook is creating airplanes to deliver facebook to people they can't reach otherwise - t…

The point is not to never do paid marketing, but to make sure that you have something in motion that doesn't rely 100% on paid marketing before you do. If people are talking about your product, paid marketing can help amplify the signal and the reach (facebook, AirBnB), but if you can get no one excited about it, if no one talks about it, then going all in with paid marketing is akin to shoving down people's throats something they don't want; it's unlikely to be sustainable even if you have large pockets.

Re: Before You Grow

#29

Post by CalChris »

blazespin wrote: post #21
maximp wrote: post #2

"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".

No, the rule still applies. Get it out fast so you can find out if your users love it. Just don't push it to a broader audience. Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this. They release in foreign markets (Canada, Australia, etc) and make sure their users love their apps before releasing in the US.

I remember seeing supermarket checkout scanners in Vancouver BC and wondering what this space age (now there's a dated term) technology was and why it wasn't already in use in Silicon Valley in 1980. George Bush was similarly amazed ... in 1992. The UPC was developed in the US starting in 1966 starting from freight car identification.

Yes, late product release in the US even if the product was developed in the US is an old technique.

Re: Before You Grow

#30

Post by madgar »

user5994461 wrote: post #15
tsunamifury wrote: post #9

I 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…

Google had Orkut which was famously very popular in Brazil and India. Network effects couldn't sustain them when Facebook successfully went global and mobile.
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