What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product, actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they use it?
Before You Grow
51–60 of 175 posts
Re: Before You Grow
#52Building something users love is, of course, the challenge. 99% of startups are unable to do this, and some of those that can't still manage to raise money because someone involved went to Stanford or is otherwise well-connected, only to inevitably fail later on. Generally speaking, these days if you don't have rabid fans of your product almost immediately among some group of users - however small - the product as you have implemented it is destined for failure.
If you fail to attain at least some group of rabid fans right after launch, then you have to ask users and find out what changes you could make that would turn them into rabid fans - if anything. If you don't get some sense of agreement among users from the responses, odds are that you should move onto another project. Products that the masses love are very rare. Creating them is hard, and because it involves a tremendous amount of subjectivity and pure luck, it will likely take far more than one try. But you can only fail at it if you stop trying or let yourself get bogged down with attempting to make something work that users simply don't and will never care about.
Re: Before You Grow
#53Who finds actual value from Net Promoter Score? It's a vanity metric, just like asking "would you pay $10 for this?" instead of getting someone to actually pay $10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS
It's a vanity metric, until you realize that for your business, it predicts churn.
A lot of SaaS businesses have proved this for their customer base and found it's worth driving by. If it's not true for you, that's fine.
Re: Before You Grow
#54Small nitpick: The blog is hard to read with so much bright orange distracting from the main content. I use a script to fix that on my browser. Thought the feedback might help with the new blog.
Re: Before You Grow
#55i don't mean to be a dick but citing airbnb and facebook seems like bad taste. those companies are massive outliers with billion+ dollar valuations. nowhere near your average ycom startup. i think i'd be smarter to cite maybe smaller companies that exited in the million/100,000 dollar range. seems more accurate. i understand that ycom wants the people they're funding to focus on ideas that generate billions as that's…
FriendFeed focused on being loved more than growing users and had a $50MM exit.
Re: Before You Grow
#56What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product, actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they use it?
Raise your prices/get acquired?
Re: Before You Grow
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Distinct actors and players have interests that are sometimes aligned or disjointed, but often contradictory. Though it may sound obvious, it clearly has not been fully internalized by plenty of folks. And when it has, few dare to draw the necessary conclusions that follow from it: always take everything you are told with a massive grain of salt. To be clear, I am not arguing that you should be a complete cynic, only that you ought to recognize that there can be a healthy dose of it. In particular when the stakes are high. Listen, but do not take everything at face value.
I am in an environment that has a particularly high density of genuinely enthusiastic, but naive, people; I am inclined to think that it is a mindset that's also predominant in other circles, besides University campuses.
Indeed, there seem to be quantities of people who are looking for silver-bullet secret sauces that will let them reach Steve Jobs status. Perhaps that's precisely because of the various personality cults that our industry subscribes to. I can't know for sure. And while I am sure there are some good anecdotes showing the contrary, it seems that, all in all, this is overall hurtful both to innovation and to the ones that try to accelerate it.
If you are going to be captain of a ship, you better not embrace any gust of wind that comes your way. Otherwise, you are more drifting away than going anywhere. And like Paris, you would rather be tossed by the waves than sink.
Re: Before You Grow
#58that's actually why best startups are those who make products for themselves, so they tested on themselves first; they don't really need public launch date; because the product is already being launched and getting instant feedback during development
examples are airbnb and dropbox
Re: Before You Grow
#59I'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. Di…
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Re: Before You Grow
#60I 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.
I would love to see a comprehensive list of all of these tools to measure NPS. Does one exist?
You could try AlternativeTo: http://alternativeto.net/software/promoter-io/