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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#151

Post by conductr »

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…

Bought a new car recently and it was a joy, the market being what it is you go in knowing you’ll pay MSRP. Yeah it feels expensive, and is, but removing the negotiation was great UX

Also helped that the dealership was pretty empty. A few of the dealerships I went to were madhouses and I just wanted to leave immediately as it was a chaotic environment

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#152

Post by s_dev »

hinkley wrote: post #90
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…

And the whole thing with VC is that they've somehow figured out how to make money while being wrong 90% of the time. With those sorts of numbers, are you really doing much better than random chance? I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break "throwing darts at a board"…

>I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it.

“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.”

― André Gide

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#153

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

dsr_ wrote: post #33

"[2] When I say the summer 2012 batch was broken, I mean it felt to the partners that something was wrong. Things weren't yet so broken that the startups had a worse experience. In fact that batch did unusually well." When something unusual happens (every partner needs to keep track of more startups) and the result is unexpectedly more success instead of less, doesn't that suggest that the partners were counterintuit…

Came here to point this out too. Maybe try to break it again?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#154

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

suzzer99 wrote: post #143
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.

I think any work that puts you in direct personal contact with thousands of people is going to be valuable.

I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#155

Post by paxys »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #148
paxys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tow…

Who was saying this 20 years ago? eCommerce was barely a thing back then. Smartphones, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist. The only people who knew about new cars and their features were enthusiasts who got a dozen magazine subscriptions.

The difference is that today there are actually companies successfully following this model, Tesla being the most prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to it.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#156

Post by vl »

ejb999 wrote: post #128
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.

I'd rather go get a cavity filled, then buy a new car. Do it as infrequently as possible (hoping to get another 10 years out of my 11 year old Toyota). Every time I visit a new car dealer I feel a need to take a shower, just to get the stink off of me.

BTW, apart from fixed price online sales, there are fixed priced dealerships. They advertise price on the website and don't negotiate. You just show up and get car at this price. Very smooth.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#157

Post by andrewmcwatters »

kevstev wrote: post #146
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 wh…

Ultimately, I found that basically no one makes any money off Patreon or GitHub Sponsors. I mean statistically. Sure there are big names you and I know of out there, but the income of OnlyFans creators is orders of magnitude higher.

But of course, I doubt they'd ever share the distribution of income for users off those platforms. You'd realize there's no point.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#158

Post by vl »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #131
sgustard wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I learned about the industry is that dealership salespeople are hired from the same pool as, say, McDonalds employees. These are not college graduates who have white-collar job offers. They join with no existing skills at low wage. Turnover is massive, the average sales agent leaves within a year. Meanwhile, the whole industry is pushing hard to adopt Tesla's model of fixed pricing and replacing people with…

I went to a top US university in a stem degree. My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats, but wasn't a bozo. Basically everyone had a degree, and everyone made atleast $100k. I personally made about $225k but as I said, I was pretty good. I know a person in Bay area car sales making $300k+. I assume there are many others. I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to close accountants and…

It looks like it was luxury brand dealership?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#160

Post by wizofaus »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #148
paxys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tow…

A smart helpful person is one thing. Someone whose pay cheque depends on convincing people to buy a car even if it's not the right one for them is something else entirely.
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