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What you should know as a founder of a software company

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21–30 of 113 posts

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#21
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch. In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.

Who do you use instead of craigslist?

Exactly

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#22
post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

I worked at LastPass for a while as one of the few engineers. People hated our UX, and we honestly didn't even get close to the UX that 1password offered while I was there (They are working on it now).

LastPass killed it because they had Enterprise grade features people wanted. I totally agree with you. It's about building a product for your customers

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#23
What you should know is that the only thing that matters is solving big problems for real people problems.

If you are solving real problems and you are constantly learning and improving based on your understand why your customers hire/fire you then nothing else will matter.

If you are really customer-value-centric then your UX/Visual design, PR, marketing, SEO won't matter since all of your customers will be telling more & more people why you are awesome and they'll keep paying you for more.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch. In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.

Who do you use instead of craigslist?

I don't live in the US but classifieds are more user-friendly in other countries.

You can't launch Craiglist in 2017 though. I know that there are numerous exceptions from the 00s and even from the App Store 5-6 years ago. But it's not the same anymore because blue oceans are rare nowadays.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#25
post #6
post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.

Gmail was a revolutionary UI by standards of the day. It was one of a handful of apps that ushered in Web 2.0 and AJAX. Facebook was rougher to be sure, but if you compare to the tire fire of MySpace you realize it was relatively quite good.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#26
post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

At the end of the day UX is the product, that’s what the customer sees. Maybe you could get away with it with early adopters. A good UX team will help focusing on core features instead of useless ones and optimum experience. For a startups, a good UX designer could validate a MVP in few days without a line of code.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#27
post #15

Too much content without addressing the real problem with most startups: They do not solve a customer problem. Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.

How do startups exist without customers paying them to solve a problem? From convincing investors that the problem exists? It sounds like the investors are the real customers and a narrative is the product they produce.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#28
post #23

What you should know is that the only thing that matters is solving big problems for real people problems. If you are solving real problems and you are constantly learning and improving based on your understand why your customers hire/fire you then nothing else will matter. If you are really customer-value-centric then your UX/Visual design, PR, marketing, SEO won't matter since all of your customers will be telling…

People buy pain relief :)

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#29
post #7
post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

Agreed. The mantra needs to be selling, selling and more selling. For a CEO everything else should be second.

The best expression I've heard is "As CEO, I'm the Money Guy". Whether it be selling product or raising money, the #1 job of CEO is to do whatever is necessary to keep the coffers flowing.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#30
post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

I think it should be easy to use, not complex and unintuitive. The best way to know whether your UX sucks at early stage is to ask a few friends, both technical and non-technical, evaluate your products.
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