Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:29 AM UTC

sa46 wrote: post #95

closeparen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chat is a complement to email, not a replacement. Over time some people may take their formerly-email activities to chat, but no cutover is required. Running two chat systems side by side, on the other hand, is a huge pain. There really is a pressure to get everything migrated and the old one turned off.

Depends on the company. At our 6 year old startup, email is dead except for external communication. Everything is on slack including ops, stand ups and informal communication. At Google, hangouts was lightly used but everything was on email.

People expect an instant response on chat, but reading emails from time to time. That makes a huge difference in interruptions when you work.

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

#152

Post by tomxor » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

> If people were ravenous for a solution, why weren’t most people even attempting to pilot Level?

This is _not_ purely the "everyone is lying" problem, i.e everyones lack of ability to quantify the actual importance of a problem... The original questions were deceptive to both parties because they are unwittingly framed with the assumption that a "solution" in the form of a product or technology is a _valid_ form of solution.

Not all problems deserve or need technical solutions, but the subjects are denied the opportunity to consider this aspect. If you identify a problem everyone will likely agree it exists, which is useless, this doesn't qualify it for a solution let alone a solution in the form of a product.

I'm not very trusting of market research, but if I had to, i'd try to make this possibility intuitively clear by offering alternatives for comparison e.g: Do you think problem x would be better solved by a workplace policy or a technical solution / product?

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

#153

Post by avinium » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #20

danvoell wrote: post #4

"The gist is that it’s tough to get unbiased feedback during customer validation." - I wish this was taught along with lean startup content. Too many times I have heard founders say they validated the idea when all they have done is gotten biased feedback while asking self-fulfilling questions.

I say it every time, to every founding team I meet. Read “The Mum Test”[1]. It will make you aware that you to get unbiased feedback you need to remove your identity from the idea so that people aren’t nice to protect you. [1] http://momtestbook.com/

Can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Unfortunately I only read it after making all the mistakes it lists - but I know from personal experience that everything it says is correct.

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

#154

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #127

boudewijnrempt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was struck with " They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival." in your article. It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat…

> being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day. Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is incredibly valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-fri…

With people having the expectation of chat to be instantly replied, like a chat in a real life (someone walking to your desk and saying something) it is not asynchronous in any way.

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

#155

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

philipov wrote: post #37

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.

That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.

When you deal with a solution provided by a startup that is a one man army you can play with the product, but you don't trust it enough to buy it. The story tells exactly why you should never trust such a product. These are not socks, buy a pack of three and throw it away in 6 months, people expect to use the solution for 3-5 year and there is no guarantee there will be updates, upgrades and support even next month. Trust, risk management, rings a bell?

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

#156

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:40 AM UTC

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #106

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 id…

It is a matter or wording: you don't ask for feedback per se, you do user research to understand their needs and their pain points with existing solutions. Developers are not necessarily good communicators :)

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

#157

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:44 AM UTC

pkaler wrote: post #76

I've been listening to The Art of Product podcast since the start and Level really didn't make sense to me as a solution even though I understood the problem. Most issues are around context and focus when moving from an individual contributor to a lead. If a programmer I'm leading doesn't implement a feature in a way that I expect it is because the context that is in my brain hasn't been transferred to the programmer…

#2: it depends on the kind of team you have. My team of developers never had any chat client installed on their mobile for work use, they were either in front of their computers or away and not available. We did not discuss in airplanes as we were trying to focus when we had discussions, not to board and block the other passengers because we were busy chatting in the middle of the embark flux.

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

#158

Post by AdrianB1 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:49 AM UTC

fourseventy wrote: post #42

It seems like one of the main problems is that their target market was too large, and they were directly competing with slack which dominates that market. A better approach might have been to target a more niche market in the business communication tool space, and be the best tool in that space, before broadening to the wider market.

If you target the business communication space you are dead in the first second: you cannot compete to Skype for Business, for example, that is backed up and supported by Microsoft (and that matters a lot) and it is already feature-complete. Not unless you have a product that can compete on features and backed up with guarantees you will offer upgrades and support for many years, this is what companies want first.

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

#159

Post by jchook » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:50 AM UTC

Thank you sincerely for not contributing energy to realtime chat, FOMO, and the "constant inbox".

I personally find amazing productivity when I turn my phone to DND (helps with robocalls too) and quit all chat apps. On most phones you can configure who can call you in DND.

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

#160

Post by z3t4 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 12:54 AM UTC

The problem is that a product like Slack does not wear down, you do not have to replace it every second year, so there's no good opportunity for a competitor to sell a replacement product. It either have to be an order of magnitude better, or you have to sell it as an alternative, not a replacement, to customers that not already have their needs fulfilled. So when people search for a team chat product, first you need to make sure people know that your product is an option, but not only that you need a very good explanation of why they should pick your product and not the most popular one.