A Conversation with Paul Graham [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#121

Post by Razengan » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:54 AM UTC

goshx wrote: post #74

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…

There are a lot of CEO’s that use the Steve Jobs argument to justify their approach of thinking they know what customers want. Chances are you are not really building a product that is reinventing a market and creating new solutions for previously non existing problems, like the iPhone. Then you fall into the hole of thinking you can imagine how people want to solve a well known problem and end up finding out later t…

“Pulling off a Steve Jobs” is not really about knowing what customers what – most of the time it will be faster horses – but putting your passion into what YOU recognize a sore lack of.

“”Market research”” won’t tell you what’s missing, only existing trends. “Vision” on the other hand is identifying a need for something that doesn’t exist yet.

You don’t need to be Steve Jobs to do that, but if you aren’t charismatic (or rich) enough to convince a bunch of other people to work on your vision with/for you, you may only be make what you can make on your own.

Which is why I stick to my personal hobby projects. :)

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#122

Post by ghufran_syed » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 12:58 AM UTC

mayankkaizen wrote: post #36

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales is grim work for introverts, you can do it but if it's most of what you are doing then you need to question what the point of it is.

This seems to be the issue with me. I am more like 'laptop' guy who is rather good in researching. I am also keen on observing things. But sales stuffs, cold calling give me chills. How do I overcome it?

“Resistance is Useless - the art of business persuasion” by Geoff Burch from England is a great and approachable introduction on how to start doing sales

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#123

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 1:00 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #118

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can scarcely believe this response!

The same would be true of any activity the start-up could do to gather intelligence on a market opportunity, whether it is incubating a prototype and obsessing over user feedback, consuming market research, getting feedback from potential investors, etc. etc.

If doing X could reliably lead to growing the product revenue underpinning the startup, then there is an arbitrage opportunity for any better capitalized actor to swoop in and do X first/better.

I also think your claim is implicitly very narrow in imagining a certain type of startup.

For example, my sister opened a popup restaurant that participates in a weekly farmer’s market in a large public park near where she lives. She absolutely spent money on marketing reports and restaurant consulting to understand if her ideas for menus and how to operationalize cooking the food quickly, on-site had any likelihood of being profitable.

The idea of just piloting the menu and kitchen strategy, then hoping to pivot based on feedback, makes no sense for a startup business like that, where you need hard research data on the market before even prototyping a product.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#124

Post by nlowell » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #119

Paul Graham says that long time employees from certain companies make really poor entrepreneurs. Does anyone know to which companies he is referring?

Did he say certain companies? The part I remember was just that people who have been employees for 20 years probably wouldnt be good founders. I assumed the implication is that a founder is someone with too much angst, ambition, or arrogance to be comfortable working for other people for 20 years.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#125

Post by peteforde » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #109

peteforde wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fascinating and a little sad that anyone who spoke up about this point was downvoted into oblivion... even though my point is entirely valid and easy to verify. I don't think PG would disagree with my suggestion, and he certainly doesn't need people to defend him.

Perhaps it's because you/they are focusing on some minuscule act of wording instead of on anything significant in the video. We don't need to play the internet gotcha game on HN. In fact, it's off topic by the site guidelines, since it isn't done out of intellectual curiosity ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ).

I appreciate the reply. I'll accept your wisdom on the subject, given your role and perspective.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I tried.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#126

Post by peteforde » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 2:55 AM UTC

tomhoward wrote: post #117

peteforde wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair enough.

Thanks for the comment; I appreciate your perspective.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#127

Post by nostrademons » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #123

nostrademons wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can scarcely believe this response! The same would be true of any activity the start-up could do to gather intelligence on a market opportunity, whether it is incubating a prototype and obsessing over user feedback, consuming market research, getting feedback from potential investors, etc. etc. If doing X could reliably lead to growing the product revenue underpinning the startup, then there is an arbitrage opportu…

The difference is that if you do all the research yourself, nobody else on earth knows it, and hence nobody is going to sell it to the highest bidder. If you've discovered a huge untapped market that can be served in a scalable way, you're certainly not going to sell that information; you capitalize on it yourself.

A popup restaurant is not a startup in the sense that is normally discussed on this site - namely a scalable business that focuses on owning an asset that you can sell access to lots of different customers, over and over again. When you own a popup restaurant (or any other small service business), your customer base is limited to the number of people you can physically serve. If, however, you own a software app that is the go-to place that people go for meals on demand, you can sell access to those customers to many small popup restaurants, and charge them a good fraction of the additional profits generated by customers you bring in the door.

That has a big effect on the market dynamics. There's room for many popup restaurants, because each is limited to a small number of customers. There's only room for one or two Yelps, or DoorDashes, and they all tend to get in each other's business, because there's no limit to the number of customers they can serve. If there's going to be thousands of companies in your space anyway because each of you is limited by your work ethic, there's no harm in buying information from a commodity information provider (who, BTW, is going to be making a lot of money). If there's only going to be one winner in your space, you better be it, and the existence of a market research firm who's aware of your market is a good indication that you're already too late.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#128

Post by pouta » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

JesseAldridge wrote: post #103

anoncoward111 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I fell asleep :) In the future, if I was serious about accepting an anonymous person's money for this service, I would have made an email address solely used for this purpose that is linked to paypal or venmo or whatever :) Thanks for the offer. I have free time today so if you are dying for this synopsis I will do it for free just because I find it so funny that someone wants this

I am not dying for a synopsis. But I would still like one. Mostly because I've been trying to stick all of my knowledge into draw.io diagrams. And the first step of doing that is getting a textual version of the information.

Don't just throw that random fact like it's nothing. It deserves it's own Show HN

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#129

Post by pouta » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

ffwacom wrote: post #56

hristov wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is cringeworthy for you, you can just play it in the background while doing something else. I kind of liked it. It is a genuine unprepared for interview and you see very few of these nowadays. Whenever you try something this spontaneaous there will always be a lot of hesitations, a lot of ums and ahs, and some arguments as to which direction the conversation should go in. But you still get something more intere…

True, the content was great. Issue is with the dynamics between the interviewer and pg, fidgety/supplicating shit, you can feel it. It goes beyond an unprepared natural awkwardness into something more gross. But like you said, the info is great so you put the tab in the background

I completely missed it, would you care to elaborate?

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#130

Post by ruang » Sun, Sep 02, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

GomatiTech wrote: post #86

One thing I got out of this video is the concept of "quantum of utility". It was to answer the question "When to launch?" -- launch when you have something that someone can use that wasn't there before, a new feature.

Much better than vague concept of “MVP”