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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#111

Post by xapata »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #102
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.

Used car salespeople are even worse! Are you buying from individuals or from a dealership?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#112

Post by andrewmcwatters »

God, even as an open source maintainer, all of these insights SCREAM incredibly relevant.

In fact, what is worse is that you don't realize your focus is totally wrong because you're not losing revenue. You might be losing eyeballs or growth and adoption, but that's easier to gloss over considering it's a factor of advertising.

I constantly ask myself when looking at some of the de facto solutions in open source spaces what the hell the maintainers are doing, because what they are focused on is completely irrelevant.

The same could be said about large companies who have so much revenue that can continue to make mistakes until someone challenges them.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#113

Post by ianmcgowan »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #36

The thing that leaps out is "fund lots of small startups, the lessons are repeatable". I occasionally bang on about "Million Startups". Some back of the envelope maths and I reckon one could finance a literal million startups with what SoftBank might call a bad year (around 30 billion). When YC started they funded people with 5k per founder. I am not saying fund the next fusion machine, but put momentum into cities a…

Maybe rebrand UBI as the government funding a few million startups? That and universal healthcare probably would free up enough people to start their passion project. Enough to cover the ones that want to be artists, caregivers, or just go surfing/play video games.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#114

Post by gnicholas »

Is this what VCs want when they ask what you have learned from your users? It sounds like most of the learnings are about what his users do wrong, and why. There's surprisingly little in the way of "our users told us X and we realized we need to do Y".

I assumed that when people ask what you've learned from your users, they're not asking you to list how lousy your users are at doing various things, and why they just need to listen to you more.

I would actually be interested to read a post about what a VC has learned from his/her users, in a constructive sense.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#115

Post by tenpies »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #102
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.

> in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience

And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most.

You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#116

Post by insightcheck »

FerociousTimes wrote: post #106
insightcheck wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testimonials, despite carrying the baggage of being a marketing term, are a legitimate form of evidence, especially if the people giving testimony are named in full. It affects their reputation if either they or the company they are testifying for are disreputable. It’s true that independent reporting will be more likely to provide a balanced and objective assessment, but at the same time, opinionated articles like t…

Testimonials in general are like these cheesy or sleazy infomercials on home shopping channels, fake and worthless and that's why they earned the bad reputation that they have. Also, it is not even that the essay itself is totally bereft of real world examples to support his thesis, when he actually cited Airbnb as a case of coming around, and applying the practical advice given to the founders by YC to deliver value…

To clarify, I maintain that testimonials from people who give their full names (and thus can be contacted after) are perceived as solid evidence. A common real-life example of named testimonials seen as credible by recruiters are written LinkedIn endorsements from named people who are connections on a person's profile. However, I agree that nameless or semi-anonymized testimonials are less valuable and give the entire term of "testimonial" a poor reputation, because their truthfulness can't be verified.

On the second point, what you wrote is true, but the Airbnb mention was pretty short; your comment is probably around the same length as Graham's mention. The Airbnb mention in full consists of: "[4] The Airbnbs were particularly good at listening — partly because they were flexible and disciplined, but also because they'd had such a rough time during the preceding year. They were ready to listen."

I could find no mentions of other named companies involved with YC in the article, and the Airbnb mention was quite brief (the assertion was that they listened to YC's advice, and the implication is that this was the reason behind its success).

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#117

Post by arecurrence »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #107
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

This is interesting because as a car buyer, the only experience I want is car sellers quoting me prices until I get the lowest one. All via email.

Bought a car via carwoo back when it was in business. The service let you message dealership salespeople and get quotes back. I met the guy that sold me my car for about 15 seconds total in the entire process.

By far the swiftest and best large product purchasing experience I ever had. I was sad to see them close.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#118

Post by zamfi »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #102
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.

> my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience

Pretty sure the parent means "best" as in the best way to get experience doing sales for the salesperson.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#119

Post by mindcrime »

tech_tuna wrote: post #108
lisper wrote: post #45

This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such form…

Quoted post unavailable.

The dude's shit doesn't stink. In his view.

Isn't that true for most people? I mean "from their own view". We all tend to assume that we're right more often than not, no?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#120

Post by bjelkeman-again »

travisjungroth wrote: post #49
jkaptur wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the tech-nerd chestnut to bring out here is Dunbar's number. Not that that's necessarily the mechanism, but it's the thing to mention.

Appealing to Dunbar's number for org sizes is a strong signal for me I should de-weight whatever the person is saying. They're just parroting pop-science with reasoning that doesn't hold up to a second of critical thinking. If humans evolved to hold about 150 relationships in our minds, to say that an org has a tipping point of 150 people assumes the members of the organization know 0 people outside of the organizati…

My experience is that one can have multiple 100-150 person contexts and keep track of the people in them, i.e company, football community, friends etc. But it is harder when they get bigger.
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