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They developed a tool without developing working out how it would be used. Is this a problem of bleeding tech in itself, or more of a problem of (product/service) comprehensive development methodology?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Though even in the latter scenario, it's still prudent to narrow the scope of your bleeding-edge tech as much as possible (e.g. if you're doing a cryptocurrency app, you probably shouldn't be trying to make your own NoSQL database at the same time). Nonsense, the database is the back up plan so you can pivot to a DB company if your main thing doesn't work out.
Or pivot to "we're a blockchain-based database". And when that fails, "we're a blockchain stored in a database". After that, you'll have to get creative with the neologisms: "we're the first ever datachain backed by a Baseblock".
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A) They say they failed because they had a bleeding edge product
IN Reality: they are talking more about Product Market Fit not being there/not being properly tested
B) They say that selling such a product is difficult, getting companies to implement it is difficult, and that the mental game is more difficult
In Reality: They seem to not fully understand their own product, what their customers' needs are, and how their product matches those needs
A few other points, with some overlap with the above
Firstly, that product they discuss is not very bleeding edge. It's basically Analytics. It's not like they were trying to sell Virtualization or Nuclear Fusion Reactors
It's Analytics/What Gets Measured Gets Managed/Pareto Principle
-> We should build a tool that tells you the adoption rate of every component in your design system—across your product
How is that bleeding edge?
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Secondly, Winter 2018 to Summer 2020
That's 1.5 years
Is that really time to tell if a product is a hit or not?
Look at all the companies that are going IPO now. They are between 5 to 20 years of existence before IPO
Outliers like Amazon and Facebook have really messed up lots of people's perceptions of what building a company should be like
They think everything is going to come together in one or two years
Thirdly, all their problems (sales is hard; companies adopting product is hard; mental game is hard) is basically
A) Your product doesn't have Product Market Fit. If there is a good fit then NEW makes it sell faster because no one else has it
B) Your mental game is weak. If you are going to give time to a product (even a not that significant 1.5 years of your life) you must make sure you give it your best shot
C) It seems all your issues rise from you thinking SOMEONE ELSE is going to do stuff for you
You have to sell
You have to get the company to adopt the product
You have to keep yourself focused and positive
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Do you really understand what problem that product solves?
Does your customer want that problem solved?
How is that bleeding-edge? It's just "lint for design systems". What happened probably is that the number of people who actually use a "design system" is fairly small. And among them, those who understand what linting is are possibly rare...
Seems to be this article is about when your product is bleeding-edge tech, but people are commenting as if it were about building your product using bleeding-edge tech (in-house or otherwise). Definitely only do one of these at a time, tho :)
Yeah, it's kind of like the classic "break one law at a time" rule. If you're hauling drugs, don't speed. Getting away with just the one thing is hard enough. I think Discord is one good example of this sort of trade-off. Single, pretty standard type of app that improves on its predecessors, with some bleeding-edge engineering: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to... >Discord has never been af…
I disagree. There is always a space for something bleeding edge. Your fatal flaw was not creating something "new" but the fact that you didn't actually build the product. A product that has no easy ability to integrate with a workflow is not a product, it's a proof of concept.
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I had my first startup fail in the late 2000s because we built a sales prediction software that sounded cool, but nobody actually wanted. We even had a large paid pilot with a major auto manufacturer, but they didn't renew when it turned out that none of their employees had actually used the software. Making something nobody wants is a classic startup mistake. I resolved not to make it again and read a great deal abo…
Someone on HN once said “It’s hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don’t have”. Building software that solves a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have is also a real problem.
As for building a solution to "a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have", I'll agree that this may not be a good thing for a startup to do - but when I see how basic research is being defunded and drowned in red tape, and people saying that startups are the new, distributed R&D departments, I feel the middle has fallen out. When startups do a greedy gradient descent, and academia struggles doing science, who's going to work on solving problems that require solutions one or two steps beyond what the intended audience can understand? FLOSS community? What about outside software?
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It's actually hilarious. So many people enjoy sharing their opinion on the headline rather than the content of the article.
Sometimes people just want to talk about a certain topic, regardless of the article's contents. The headline just gives them a convenient excuse.
Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building a bleeding edge product and how difficult is to sell such product (probably because everyone know that using bleeding edge products is dangerous :) )
It's actually hilarious. So many people enjoy sharing their opinion on the headline rather than the content of the article.
It only creates a confusion when most people don't bother reading articles when the headline is strong enough to inflict a response. It has become a tool to say something and deny saying it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or pivot to "we're a blockchain-based database". And when that fails, "we're a blockchain stored in a database". After that, you'll have to get creative with the neologisms: "we're the first ever datachain backed by a Baseblock".
Hasn't the blockchain hype subsided a little by now?