71–80 of 113 posts
> The market doesn't care what's under the hood as long as it works and solves problems. This is a hard truth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My intent wasn't to trivialize, only to prioritize. You're right; none of those alone are sufficient for success. But IMO the single most important priority for a founder of a software business was not mentioned.
"Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.
Look at twitter. Fundamentally people do not want to pay for it. They still haven't figured it out.
Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.
"Have I solved a problem serious enough for people to bother to become my customers?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.
To OP's credit, it's something that people forget semi-frequently. I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later). It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage w…
Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.
I don't suggest to learn it all before starting. But I wrote #1 in the "Marketing" part: "Have I solved a problem serious enough for people to bother to become my customers?"
Thanks for the added clarity and article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I guess Gmail brought it to the masses, along with a decent amount of free storage.
> 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.
However, for all these projects, the UI may be relatively primitive, but the UX is outstanding because it's stripped to exactly the things the user needs to accomplish what they're trying to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To OP's credit, it's something that people forget semi-frequently. I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later). It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage w…
I feel like I should place the "Marketing" section higher. There's a list of questions to do a market research before even starting and discover if the fundamentals of your product are correct.
Most start-ups aren't solving any huge problems, and sometimes market inefficiencies are there for a reason (see all the start-ups involving the field of law, for example).
Even for the ones that are solving a big problem (that people are willing to pay for), it's very uncommon to have no competitors.
So typically the way to make a successful company is to be better than your competitors, and the way you do that is through customer support, UX, etc.
So to your credit, I think for most start-up founders this is the way to move forward. But it's definitely a bit of a sunk cost fallacy - it's really hard to admit your idea will never be successful and to start over from scratch.
It's easier, and has more obvious ways to measure success, to adjust relatively minor things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. The UX -is- part of the sell. You can sell the implementers on features, but to sell to a business (especially a traditional risk averse enterprise), you have to wow non-technical people. To do that, having an amazing UX for the features the non-technical people care about goes hand in hand with a sales pitch ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make be…
> ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!") That's one of my pet peeves. This literally is goes in the opposite direction most of the time - the prettier the graphs presented, the more useless they are. They show less, take more space, omit units, scales, or well... even useful data. Not to mention connecting things that should not be connected,…
The intersection of those too groups is too small to make any difference, thus tools will be heavily optimized for one of those.