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Before You Grow

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Before You Grow

#101

Post by qwrusz »

blizkreeg wrote: post #64

Do people have thoughts or pointers for building something users love when your product depends on there being enough users using the product? Dating apps, platforms and such. When a single user gets no utility from your product if there aren't enough already using it, what does one do? You kind of have to spend some money marketing to get the initial word out. This is something I've been struggling with. We've been…

Hard to give pointers without more details of what the product is.

There's all kinds of strategies, like starting hyper local (Facebook started just on Harvard's campus) or other startups have used waiting lists before launching to get a minimum threshold of users before opening the experience.

Be careful of "there just aren't enough other people using this" as it directly relates to Sama's advice. Again it depends on the type of product you are building, but when there's a product users love or see they will love even more if there were more users, they don't drop it so easily rather they go out and recruit more users.

What could you change to get these users to love the product so much they instead help it grow and recruit other users instead of just dropping it? I don't mean give them $20 (though you can) I mean how could you make the product so great they want to tell others to use it too?

Re: Before You Grow

#102

Post by khuknows »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

Not affiliated with this site in any way, but Indiehackers shares many examples of people doing exactly this: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

Re: Before You Grow

#103

Post by tjholowaychuk »

khuknows wrote: post #102
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

Not affiliated with this site in any way, but Indiehackers shares many examples of people doing exactly this: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

Indie Hackers is a great site! I have my first little product on there (http://apex.sh/ping/), making just over 3k/m now (50% each month FWIW), sure it's not millions but now I have time/freedom to work on the next thing.

Plus the freedom is worth thousands alone in my opinion, if I have the choice I'll never go back to startups. It seems like startups are the default these days, and so many of them would probably be just fine as regular small-medium businesses. I have to cram the idea in people's heads haha, you can make money in software and not be a slave working 14hr days.

Re: Before You Grow

#104

Post by yvsong »

fillskills wrote: post #54

Small 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.

Orange, to Make Startups Great Again?

I try to let my own CSS (particularly fonts) on Safari trump the sites I read a lot, such as Hacker News. Safari's reader view is good too.

Re: Before You Grow

#105

Post by eloff »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #98
LoSboccacc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an idea works but you don't scale it to some sort of monopoly using your tech advantage or lock in systems a competitor with VC money will eventually outprice you out of the market, get an unbreakable hold on the business whole then convert some aspect of it to premium to monetize the now huge user base.

Depends on the product I suppose, if it's niche enough you may not have big competitors at all. I choose to entire a SaaS market that is already monopolized but I'm still paying my bills. That's definitely something to watch out for though, I think it's best to have many smaller products for redundancy, at least that's my plan.

This can work and be a great, profitable business. But a lot of these kinds of markets are winner takes all. Which is why companies compete with VC money to be that winner. You don't have great chances of doing that without VC capital if you have VC funded competitors.

But your objective may not be go big or go broke - and you may well end up personally happier for being more balanced in your life. That's perfectly fine in my opinion, and very underrated here on HN.

Re: Before You Grow

#106

Post by ian0 »

coffeemug wrote: post #88
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

While true, assuming the collective mindset of an industry runs close to optimal just because its there is also naive. VCs themselves bet on industries being un-optimised!

Plus in evaluating an industry you would need to see it in context. So returns for investors VS similar asset classes. Or in this case how VC funding compares to other funding methods for founders under relevant circumstances - and looking at relevant metrics (pace of growth, sanity etc).

Re: Before You Grow

#107

Post by keithwhor »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #91
coffeemug wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

Removed my "clueless" generalization. It's anecdotal, but most that I've encountered (relating to SaaS products) don't have much of a technical background at all, just throwing money at buzzwords, meanwhile they think critical services such as logging aren't worth going after, just because it's not trendy. I'm sure it varies from industry to industry.

Hey TJ. It's easy to feel that way coming from a deeply technical background, but trust me, money isn't "thrown" anywhere. It's a high-risk high-reward game where one company (esp. at seed stage) will end up returning the majority of your fund, and every company has to potentially be that company, so outlandish buzzwords that might be the next big thing more often draw capital. Investors are people, paid to move money, with targets to hit and limited partners to provide returns for.

In the same way you or I wouldn't accept a PR that doesn't align with the larger vision of a framework or library we've written, VCs don't want to fund a company if the leaders of the company aren't empathetic with the VCs goals. It's about aligning interests. The goal is really to align technology and people - create something technically amazing, with huge potential, and align yourself and your vision with those who have the capital to fund you.

You don't have to do the dance if you don't want to, but I'd be hesitant to be overly dismissive of it.

Re: Before You Grow

#108

Post by jzwinck »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #91
coffeemug wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

Removed my "clueless" generalization. It's anecdotal, but most that I've encountered (relating to SaaS products) don't have much of a technical background at all, just throwing money at buzzwords, meanwhile they think critical services such as logging aren't worth going after, just because it's not trendy. I'm sure it varies from industry to industry.

Logging is indeed a critical part of many processes, but it's very hard to do it in a way that pleases everyone. Most loggers don't even support renewable inputs like bamboo.

Before you think this is a mere joke, consider that normal people don't even know what computer logging is, much less want to become a user of a logging service. The addressable eyeballs are few, and it's a market chock full of free products already. Plus the most serious consumers always end up with a bespoke proprietary solution.

Re: Before You Grow

#109

Post by dllthomas »

ian0 wrote: post #106
coffeemug wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

While true, assuming the collective mindset of an industry runs close to optimal just because its there is also naive. VCs themselves bet on industries being un-optimised! Plus in evaluating an industry you would need to see it in context. So returns for investors VS similar asset classes. Or in this case how VC funding compares to other funding methods for founders under relevant circumstances - and looking at relev…

> VCs themselves bet on industries being un-optimised!

And they're usually wrong.

Re: Before You Grow

#110

Post by elihu »

web007 wrote: post #33

Who 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

I don't think NPS is all that bad, but the one reservation I have is that sometimes a high NPS might be due to factors that might be unadvisable to emulate.

For instance, Apple has a very high NPS. A lot of Apple customers recommend Apple products to all their friends. Why might they do that? On reason might be that Apple products are high quality and their users have a good experience from using them. Another explanation is that there's a network effect and that Mac users want to be able to share programs and files and be able to get help when their computer breaks from their other Apple-owning friends.

A manufacturer of Windows laptops might see that their NPS score is lower than Apple and take that as a sign that their customers are more unhappy with their products than Apple's (which very well might be true), but it could also be the case that, in general, Windows laptop owners don't particularly care what brand their friends all buy because Windows laptops are more-or-less interchangeable. Company executives might conclude that adding more proprietary features to their products and creating a walled-garden ecosystem like Apple's is a good idea, when it probably isn't.

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