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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#141

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

geph2021 wrote: post #123
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…

In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process (and hassle). The salesperson nails down price, model/unit, with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy games on pricing. After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, tr…

I agree, the "finance person" that technically does your paperwork and pitches you all those aftermarket products is the biggest crook in the industry (right next to the service advisors that tell you what service your car needs and the price).

I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed at me. I just can't lie like that.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#142

Post by paxys »

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…

While what you are saying is historically true, the internet has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets, expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more customers today walk into dealerships only because they have to by law, but know exactly what they want and what price they are willing to pay.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#143

Post by suzzer99 »

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…

Similarly I waited tables for 5 years. That experience has been a massive boost to putting myself in end users' shoes when designing systems.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#144

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

tenpies wrote: post #115
lnwlebjel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the price you have listed", you will also have a generally good experience.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#145

Post by btbuildem »

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.

I've only ever bought used cars, from individuals. Paying extra for the overhead of a dealership and some salesperson's bonus seems absurd to me. You're pretty much guaranteed to get taken advantage of by a professional.

Local classifieds, private sellers, take the car to a trusted mechanic for an inspection.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#146

Post by kevstev »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #112

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 space…

With open source, the incentives from a maintainers view might look a lot different than what you would think. A friend of mine has a very popular JS framework out there, gets about 500k downloads a week off of NPM.

There are lots of user requests that he just outright ignores. He doesn't even care about his stats, or trying to "compete" with another more popular framework- to him its just more headaches. He built what he wanted, pushed it out for the world to use, and plenty of people did, enough that even 10x'ing that number is unlikely to really burnish the resume any further. He even tried to make it a full time job, but he found the Patreon model just way too much begging and inconsistent. Offering a support contract, a few people bit, but not enough that he could really hire people so he could offer 24/7/365 support that that implies.

So he refactors, adds features he wants, and tells everyone to go Fork themselves if they whine about their pet feature not getting implemented. Of course PRs are welcome, and its actually more of a community based project now, but he has retained BDFL status for the core of it.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#147

Post by lifeisstillgood »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #113
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.

The thing that fascinates me about UBI (apart from the right wing capitalists promoting socialist utopias) is the effect it (presumably) will have on salaries and companies. I mean HN is populated by people who mostly enjoy their STEM related work, but even so if we did not have to pay mortgages tomorrow I suspect 75% would hand in their notice and go something else - still working but working on their own start ups or the like.

I cannot see a way to bring it in without collapsing the economy basically.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#148

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

paxys wrote: post #142
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…

While what you are saying is historically true, the internet has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets, expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more customers today walk into dealerships only because…

People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion.

My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine!

Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started.

(Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#149

Post by gnicholas »

inglor wrote: post #121
gnicholas wrote: post #114

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…

It's a literary device. What he's telling you is that he learned: - That founders don't believe YC-partners often because their advice is counterintuitive. The underlying message is that it's important to not only give advice (sell your service) but also understand if it's being taken (your service is being actually used). - That founders (sers) come with presumptions and those affect how they apply your advice (use…

I guess that's one way to put it.

But skipping the conclusions means that we don't know what, if anything, they are doing differently to solve these issues. Just telling someone "trust us, you'll regret it if you don't follow our advice" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

I'ma also not sure PG is trying to use a literary device, as you suggest. His normal writing style is very candid, so it would be surprising if he were all of a sudden burying (omitting?) the lede here.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#150

Post by barrysteve »

hinkley wrote: post #100
barrysteve wrote: post #75

PG is great. What would we do without him? We want a PG in the arena at all times. This article doesn't hit the mark. Startup people don't listen, because they're trying to create something new, that nobody else understands (or people who understand are a 'parallel thought threat' like Newton and Liebniz). Counter-intuitivity is in the ballpark, but not quite "it". Really what an inventor/entrepreneur does is to spec…

It's a chicken and egg problem though. Is the idea new because I am a novel, intelligent person gifted with foresight, or is the idea new because I'm a contrarian and am more concerned with changing the world than having a really compelling reason to do so? We talk about people 'losing their way' as Reality chips away at their original idea. And while I'm sure this really does happen to some people, how often is it j…

Nobody is made from one divine moment. There are many good ideas. Lose one and another comes.

Executing on them is difficult if the charging bull has to be asked to serve two gods. Can you lash reigns to the bull without keeping the bull from it's target?

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