Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

derrickreimer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 221 posts

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#101

Post by derrickreimer »

wpietri wrote: post #73
ErikAugust wrote: post #24

"Every large team I spoke to had an exceptionally high bar and was unwilling to entertain Level until it was significantly more “mature.”" They all made the right decision, as it folded only a couple months later.

I don't think that's the kind of "mature" they were talking about. From context, I think it's pretty clear they were thinking about product maturity. If customers are suspicious of organizational stability, they use a different set of excuses. E.g., they'll ask about funding, large customers, track record.

That's correct, I was referring to feature-richness.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#102

Post by derrickreimer »

ErikAugust wrote: post #24

"Every large team I spoke to had an exceptionally high bar and was unwilling to entertain Level until it was significantly more “mature.”" They all made the right decision, as it folded only a couple months later.

Every company has a "first customer"

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#103

Post by m0zg »

IMO there's a ton of untapped potential in good old email still, with chat being last resort when realtime response is really necessary. There were a few startups years ago that tried to tackle some of the warts of email UX (e.g. Xobni) but nothing came of it it looks like.

Slack is cancer. I'm working with a client right now that uses Slack, and I bill every single minute I have to spend on Slack, so I know exactly how much time is wasted there. It's an open invitation to just shoot wind all day never accomplishing anything, which is, unsurprisingly, how people use it, mostly. Especially people who get paid a fixed salary.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#104

Post by closeparen »

brainpool wrote: post #96
bluGill wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal. When we are sued (we make equipment used in dangerous environments, and we have a lot of money, so if there is the slightest chance we can be blamed we will be sued) US law says we need to give all relevant information to the other side. That includes any saved chat logs and emails. However if something was deleted before we are sued we don't have to give it out. We lost a law suit once because a [not native E…

Sounds wrong to me. Hiding chat logs or other business information from the company itself as well as customers (albeit suing ones) seem stupid. How would the company ever be able to audit its own operations? Getting sued is sometimes also not too bad as it can reveal bad practices within an organization. An analogy would be an X-ray, not entirely healthy but very revealing.

Normal companies do not operate voice recorders in offices/conference rooms or even telephone wiretaps, except for specific regulated positions. Text may be more convenient to collect and search but I don’t think it’s morally any different.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#105

Post by brainpool »

My take is that this was a case of hubris. Can happen to the best of us. Where it really derailed was here:

“Others were not decision makers, so I had to take their feedback with a grain of salt.”

Most users of this kind of product are not decision makers, at least when it comes to selecting the product. But they are the ones that have to use it and their opinions are critically important.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#106

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

brainpool wrote: post #105

My take is that this was a case of hubris. Can happen to the best of us. Where it really derailed was here: “Others were not decision makers, so I had to take their feedback with a grain of salt.” Most users of this kind of product are not decision makers, at least when it comes to selecting the product. But they are the ones that have to use it and their opinions are critically important.

The idea of soliciting feedback before building a start up really doesn’t make sense to me. If you like your idea (“this is something I’ve always wanted”), are willing to dedicate yourself and have the means then you should try it. Otherwise you’ll never find out. If the creator of the automobile had listened to people they probably would’ve thought it was a dead end because unlike horses cars can’t reproduce. The idea that you can explain your vision to people who will spend one minute thinking about it with you and get useful feedback is also not obvious. Build the product or you’ll never know.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#107

Post by Someone »

BrentOzar wrote: post #14

Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email. Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers:…

I think you could provide a compatible API, or a wrapper around your API that makes it (mostly) compatible, claiming that you do it for interoperability.

If you think that’s too risky, legally, an alternative could be to provide example code showing “to do X in Slack, do this on our API”. If your tool gets some traction, a third party wrapper might show up.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#108

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

It's good to see that the author had early feedback and performed interviews. However, looking at an early post at the interview methodology, it seemed like there was the lack of validation around the product. The author successfully validated the problem, but not necessarily what he wants to build. A good read is the "Customer Driven Playbook" - which details a hypothesis driven model in product development to get more measurable outcomes. I think he should keep at it - but set more specific outcomes and look at smaller sets of things to improve within the larger space.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#109

Post by andrewstuart »

I think product development takes a bit of madness - a leap of faith, something that you believe that others don't ...... yet.

I don't think any amount of asking people what they want is a replacement for building something and putting it in front of people - only then do you get a true reaction.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#110

Post by _hardwaregeek »

The Paul Graham essay on start up ideas comes to mind [1]. Everybody kinda wanted this product but they didn't need the product. This paragraph sums it up:

> The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

Granted, it's not like I possess a magical "good startup ideas" power. And I don't have a successful startup under my belt. But still, I find it curious that many people haven't read this essay.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Post reply on HN