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A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

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Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#111

Post by danenania »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #104
danenania wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is something that’s ridiculously hard in the beginning when your sample size is low, but as you get more users giving feedback, you will probably start to see some clear patterns emerge in what they like, what frustrates them, what features they ask for, etc. While individual pieces of feedback are often all over the place, with more data points, the solution that they all hover around starts to emerge.…

> “I think the issue is just that truly solving an important problem for lots of people is so absurdly hard that very very few entrepreneurs can manage to achieve it“ But many businesses don’t try to make products for lots of people, just for very small, focused sets of customers. > “People might love that your company is financially transparent and socially responsible, but that won’t get them to use your product. S…

> "But many businesses don’t try to make products for lots of people, just for very small, focused sets of customers."

I don't think this is proportionally less difficult. The advice that YC partners and other experienced founders will give you if you tell them you want to conquer the world is to start with a small, focused set of customers. It's a lot harder to get from 0 to this point than it is to go from a small enthusiastic user-base to a much larger user-base.

So even if you're content with a smaller market or a smaller share of a market than the typical VC-backed startup, it's still crazy hard to get any significant traction at all, and it still requires just about all your creativity and focus to get there.

> "But what if your goal is not to find product-market fit unless it also satisfies other constraints like sustainability or financially ethical behavior? What if, in the absence of those, your preference is to go out of business and shut down?"

The vast majority of founders do impose their own versions of those constraints on themselves. Everyone's ethics are different (as is everyone's definition of sustainability), but just about everyone has lines they won't cross and deals they won't make.

I think the point isn't that you should pursue profit above all else and forget higher values, just that regardless of the type of company you want to build, your first and most important challenge is building something a significant number of people want enough that they'll pay you money for it. Since this is so hard, all the early-stage advice is relentlessly focused on how to do it. And what's the best proxy for how well you're doing it? Revenue. Thus the outsize focus on getting it and growing it quickly early on.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#112

Post by nostrademons »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #94
testb wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm the advice to be a user would apply for startup founders right? I definitely wouldn't expect engineers to be active users especially in a more mature company with PMs.

Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.

It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it.

That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education (in a field other than software), and you're slotting into an existing market structure rather than creating a new one. That means the potential market sizes are smaller, the risks are better judged by people with advanced technical degrees, and the effectiveness of capital is less. All those make them a poor fit for YC.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#113

Post by yesenadam »

dewey wrote: post #43
yesenadam wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could do this with subtitles! I hate waiting years for subtitles to TV series and obscure movies to become available. Ones in European languages mostly e.g. Cordon season 2 has been out for years, no English subs available. Latest season of Rita , out for a year, no English subs. The Colombian Ugly Betty , impossible to find many years later. I waited a couple of years for the latest season of Engrenages etc…

That already exists in a more private form, on sites specialized in smaller movies there’s usually a “subtitle pot” where people can donate their points / upload credit and the person who does the subtitles then receives that bounty once work is done. Usually they leak out to the rest of the internet pretty quickly after that.

Oh, I had't heard of that. I haven't consulted my friend Google yet, but could you name some of those sites? Thanks.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#114

Post by dewey »

yesenadam wrote: post #113
dewey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already exists in a more private form, on sites specialized in smaller movies there’s usually a “subtitle pot” where people can donate their points / upload credit and the person who does the subtitles then receives that bounty once work is done. Usually they leak out to the rest of the internet pretty quickly after that.

Oh, I had't heard of that. I haven't consulted my friend Google yet, but could you name some of those sites? Thanks.

That's one of them: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarg...

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#115

Post by Separo »

hristov wrote: post #57
Separo wrote: post #45

I feel that PG needs to make a concerted effort to use "uhm" less. It negatively affects his ability to eloquently communicate an idea.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the use "umms" is only because he tries to talk off the cuff. This makes his talks much more interesting. Most of the smooth talkers you see on tv and youtube have basically learned what they are going to say. They sound slicker, but eventually what they do say is less interesting because it has been pre-learned and thus pre-filtered. This is a general problem with Television and popular cul…

It's ridiculous to say that to speak off-the-cuff you need to use "umm" or another filler word incessantly. Go to any good, spontaneous, unrehearsed conversation anywhere on the internet and you will see how much time was wasted trying to construct this argument.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#116

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

nostrademons wrote: post #112
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.

It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education…

Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ignorant) idea of what to improve, or to oscillate between different focus points based on possibly incoherent or inconsistent customer feedback.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#117

Post by tomhoward »

peteforde wrote: post #102
d0m wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, when you're being interviewed, how much should you interrupt the interviewee and nitpick on everything? I'd say Geoff made a mistake here and said "The founder" instead of "A co-founder" but was it worth interrupting the flow, etc?

I'm sorry, are you asking if Paul Graham is comfortable interrupting people and making clarifying statements? https://techcrunch.com/video/paul-grahams-office-hours-tips-... Jump to 6:20 and tell me with a straight face that PG is concerned about interjection. He literally could have just chuckled and helpfully offered, "well... co-founder!" Here's the thing: I'm a PG fan and I'm not trying to be pedantic. Jessica ha…

> “I'm not trying to be pedantic”

Nobody likes to think of themselves as being pedantic.

But people can choose to make an effort to avoid being pedantic.

Instead you’ve chosen to use emotive words like “historical revisionism”, “fascinating”, “sad” and “oblivion” to create drama over something that, as I said in another comment, for all we know, PG may not have even properly heard.

If you’re a PG fan, perhaps have a re-read of the “Life is Short” essay and take a moment to think about whether PG (and Jessica and the other YC founders) would think this discussion is the kind of thing life is or isn’t too short for.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#118

Post by nostrademons »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #116
nostrademons wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education…

Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ign…

I have yet to meet a startup for whom hiring a market research firm and depending upon the results in the report gave them useful information that turned into a big opportunity. There's a simple reason for this: if such a report exists, then a big company who actually has money has already hired that market research firm and executed on those results, and that market opportunity is closed.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#120

Post by Razengan »

redshirtrob wrote: post #75
Razengan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good. Look at Apple. Most of how they got where they are is by Jobs, Ive et al. making what they wanted to see, and nitpicking at everything until they were satisfied. Also: "people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Of course you have to address customers' frustrations, but relying on just "data" and marketing feedback all the time often…

This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just not generally true, but it's often repeated as though it were. It's demonstrably not true that you must be a user of a product to build a good product. To pick a random example: I doubt all pacemaker firmware developers have heart conditions that require pacem…

I didn’t mean that you should only hire candidates who are existing users of your product.

Haven’t you ever had moments, while using something, where you encountered some stupid behavior that made you go, “Do the people who make this thing ever use it themselves??”

This is related to the concept of qualia [0], and sentiments like “Be the change you want to see in the world.” or “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Yes: someone without a heart condition will not be able to fully appreciate all the nuances of a pacemaker.

Of course that’s not to say they can’t contribute to the development and production of pacemakers. That’d be absurd.

But unless the thing you make is actually used by you, you will only [need to] perform within the specifications of your job, get paid and get out.

You won’t be able to identify any deficiencies that aren’t immediately obvious, and unless user feedback impacts your profits, you may see no reason to improve something. It’ll be /r/NotMyJob.

But if you’re an active user of your own product, you’ll have a much higher chance of noticing annoyances and shortcommings and fix them before waiting for user feedback to bubble up through the corporate chain to influence a change in the product.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

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