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We are not normal people

justinjackson.ca

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Re: We are not normal people

#71

Post by jp1989 »

janj wrote: post #21

I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…

I'm sorry, but I find this attitude really bizarre. You seem to confuse marketing with advertising, and even then it still feels bizarre. How are people meant to discover products, or solutions to their problems?

Re: We are not normal people

#72

Post by astine »

badman_ting wrote: post #68
jsaxton86 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the barber need arbitrary shapes in this case? It looks like his pain point was that he was walking to a computer. Perhaps having a tablet by his phone could fix this problem? It could be as easy as the paper calendar solution, but since it's all being done electronically, you could allow people to schedule appointments online and such.

> Does the barber need arbitrary shapes in this case? But why is the default assumption that the barber needs software, and we must prove out that he doesn't? The barber just wants to note some info and get on with things.

Because we are software writers and we are looking for problems to which our skills are a solution. The barber might just need another paper calendar, but then where does that leave me, the software developer? It leaves me still in need of a job.

Re: We are not normal people

#73

Post by ForHackernews »

fibbery wrote: post #62
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a mediocre implementation of something "impossible" can make a lot of impact. See bitcoin. Bitcoin was perhaps the worst possible example you could have chosen... The implementation was the opposite of mediocre; its code predicted and solved implementation problems that no one realized were problems, except Satoshi. And on a technical level, the client has only experienced one problem that had to be rolled back.…

Would Twitter v1 count?

No. Figuring out how to post short bits of text on a website is not a difficult technical problem. All of the "hard" problems twitter has solved came later as a result of scaling up to millions of users and hundreds of millions of bits of text.

Re: We are not normal people

#74

Post by jiayo »

jp1989 wrote: post #71
janj wrote: post #21

I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…

I'm sorry, but I find this attitude really bizarre. You seem to confuse marketing with advertising, and even then it still feels bizarre. How are people meant to discover products, or solutions to their problems?

This never used to bother me either, but there are certain things that once you've seen, you can't unsee.

Smiling people is one of them. If your marketing site has pictures of smiling people on it, I am immediately turned off. Look at the billboard on your local subway system. Ads for dentists, graduate degrees, Trident gum, upcoming plays. 9 out of 10 of them have a stock photo of a smiling person, presumably unable to contain their enjoyment of $PRODUCT.

In very rare cases, say, for a Meetup group, or a bike tour, will I see pictures of smiling people that are actually organic. That's fine. It's when they use stock photos that it insults my intelligence and makes me feel like "marketers lying to take my money". The photos aren't even of people paid to pretend to enjoy the product, they're just sub-licensed from Getty. What it tells me is they're more concerned with sales driven by emotion than making a substantive first impression.

To test this, I just thought of the most boring thing I could think of: enterprise resource planning. The first marketing result on Google is this, complete with smiling person:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/dynamics/erp.aspx

The best salespeople in the world make you walk away thinking you got a great deal, that you got the upper hand. When I see these blatant plays for emotion, I walk away disgusted.

Re: We are not normal people

#75

Post by shas3 »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #15

"increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales" This is true to a point, but if your strongest suite is your raw technical ability then it may be best for you to pursue problems that have remained unsolved because of technical challenges that have put others off. A significant technical barrier is also nice to have if it means you can get the market before you…

There is a correlation between the success of a product/service and the difficulty of the technical problem you solved to create the product/service. There are hard technical problems that don't result in profitable products and there are profitable businesses that result from non-difficult problems. But there are several examples of companies which solved super-hard problems (e.g. PageRank and Google, Blackberry and messaging, Apple's UIs, TI-Intel-etc.'s transistors and ICs, IBM's early mechanical computers, Edison's invention of the light bulb, Ford's assembly lines, etc. etc.)

I think the mistake many people make is that they treat marketing as a problem divorced from technical development. They should really be the two sides of the same coin. It is wimpy and inexcusable for entrepreneurs to say "I'm good at one and not the other".

Re: We are not normal people

#76

Post by pstack »

janj wrote: post #21

I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…

This article:

1. Create a short article repeating common sense that everyone should know. 2. JOIN MY MAILING LIST!

Re: We are not normal people

#77

Post by bsbechtel »

“I could build this on the Twilio API!” “I could learn that new CSS framework!” "I could use this new tool I just purchased!”

I've never thought this way when I learn about some new technology...my way of thinking has always been "This task I'm doing really sucks, how can I make it easier?" This way of thinking seems so much more intuitive and less mentally taxing. Do others here really think the way the author describes? I'm curious.

Re: We are not normal people

#78

Post by Udo »

dpcan wrote: post #57

Also, we sometimes won't ask questions or talk to potential consumers for FEAR that our "great" idea will be negated. The excitement of building something, using new technology, solving a problem (whether it exists or not) is exciting. Then you might start seeing dollar signs, or fame, or respect among peers, etc, in your mind. Nobody wants to INVITE someone to shut down those thoughts or feelings.... but we must. I…

Sometimes, customers don't know what they might need. The danger of talking to potential customers when designing a piece of software lies in the problem that you're going to get a long list of convolute feature requests that, if implemented, doesn't result in anything usable. On top of that, the exemplary barber is unlikely to ever use anything besides paper. We might not be normal people, and normal people are unlikely to give meaningful design input.

In my experience it makes sense to talk to them twice, once to determine general needs, and then a second time to actually have them try out the prototype.

Re: We are not normal people

#79

Post by coldtea »

janj wrote: post #21

I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…

>I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples.

If you cannot understand it as it is already, you'll only understand it when you stop being merely a paid developer and become a developer that needs to sell the software he writes.

"If you build it they will come" does not hold. The best product can fail (and often has) because people have not known about it, or it was not presented to them in an appropriate way. That's what marketing does.

Re: We are not normal people

#80

Post by wpietri »

Udo wrote: post #78
dpcan wrote: post #57

Also, we sometimes won't ask questions or talk to potential consumers for FEAR that our "great" idea will be negated. The excitement of building something, using new technology, solving a problem (whether it exists or not) is exciting. Then you might start seeing dollar signs, or fame, or respect among peers, etc, in your mind. Nobody wants to INVITE someone to shut down those thoughts or feelings.... but we must. I…

Sometimes, customers don't know what they might need. The danger of talking to potential customers when designing a piece of software lies in the problem that you're going to get a long list of convolute feature requests that, if implemented, doesn't result in anything usable. On top of that, the exemplary barber is unlikely to ever use anything besides paper. We might not be normal people, and normal people are unli…

Yeah, that is a common mistake. Customers are experts on their problems. We are experts on solutions. Good products are found at the intersection of those two circles.

I never believe uncritically what customers say about solutions. And I never believe what developers say about customer problems. Especially when that developer is me.

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