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

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

#171

Post by wpietri » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:03 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/

Removing your identity is incredibly helpful. The last time I did this from scratch, we didn't have our company name on the door. We were doing a consumer-focused product, so we told all our early test users that we were doing market research. Eventually a significant percentage of test subjects figured out that one of the products discussed was ours, because most of the later questions focused on it. But that was after we got their honest, early reactions.

Basically, if you want to find out whether you're baby's ugly, you have to make sure people think the photos are of a baby, not your baby.

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

#172

Post by wpietri » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

yingw787 wrote: post #11

I think for things like business chat, since the purchasers of the product are different from the users, and not completely aligned with them 1:1, VC-backed companies with the connections and credibility to said stakeholders may have a much easier go at getting paid users. You can also trade profitability for growth, which is something bootstrapping precludes. P.S. I read @rwalling's "Start Small, Stay Small" a few m…

Agreed! I think products where the purchaser and the user are different are an enormous graveyard for startups. There's a big difference between building a product and building a business no matter the sector. But when the purchaser and user are different, it can be way worse. Good designers and engineers want to focus on improving the user experience, but that may not translate into sales at all.

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

#173

Post by quickthrower2 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #110

The Paul Graham essay on start up ideas comes to mind [1]. Everybody kinda wanted this product but they didn't need the product. This paragraph sums it up: > The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people.…

The problem I see, from briefly looking at the landing page is that you can achieve what you want on Slack by disabling notifications and then checking slack every hour or so, when you've just committed some code and feel like your mental cache can be flushed. This is what I do. There isn't a big enough problem being solved, especially to move away from the slack ecosystem. Even if the 'other' product had all the things slack has, the cost of getting another tool and getting used to it seems too high when that effort could be put into swapping a different tool for a different reason with more upside for the team. The cost of the product itself in this equation is almost irrelevant.

Having said that no one wants to be the "Dropbox is just rsync " guy. Or Lily Allen turning down thousands of bitcoins (although she's successful anyway so she probably shouldn't care). If you see what I mean ... no one wants to say an idea sucks before hand, and if they do you can just say "well they said that about Dropbox".

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

#174

Post by soneca » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

As a listener of the Art of Product podcast I am a little sad with this announcement. But rationally I don't think I should be. The founder was very aware and honest about the challenges of his product; and this decision, at this time, seems very mature and right.

Good luck on your next endeavor, which, I guess, will be a developers'tool :)

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

#175

Post by sudhirj » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

RaceWon wrote: post #133

trustfundbaby wrote: post #66

I read this, and all through the article I kept waiting for the part where the author would talk about his own experience using his own product. What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love something you build unless you love it yourself, Seth Godin touches on this in his book "This is Marketing" I like the data driven approach to product development, but sometimes passion trumps data, if y…

> What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love something you build unless you love it yourself This reminded me of a quote which is totally the opposite, and imo more accurate: "Most entrepreneurs fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in love with their products and their business when they should be falling in love with their clients and customers" -Jay Abraham Both sentiments are h…

There’s a superb YC video that rephrased this correctly for me - be in love with the problem, not your current draft of a solution. Certainly not your first draft.

https://youtu.be/vDXkpJw16os

But you do need love. I had a similar experience with https://whatsgoingon.in - I fell in love with my own live blogging product, but I don’t have the problem of actually needing a live blog for anything in my life. That craters motivation pretty quickly.

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

#176

Post by nobody271 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

Derrick, let me share my rather cynical opinion about all of this and hopefully it will make you feel better. The part where you say people were waiting for it to be "more polished" really speaks to me. I've heard that about some of my basically finished websites. The thing is, that's a lazy answer. At the same time if you had asked someone why slack is so great when it first came out they would have fired off some canned response. Because of this fact I really question what actually motivates people to adopt software. I don't think it's the things they say. I think it's more the idea that software as an industry is analogous to the fashion industry. People just a lot of times do what they're told. I think you have to tell, not ask. But in 2019 how do you do that? idk, pay Scott Hanselman to say your product is a revolutionary idea and see how many people parrot that same response back to you. I'm saying I don't think you had a bad idea but maybe you overestimated the autonomy of the average developer.

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

#177

Post by Aeolun » Sat, May 18, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

I’m a bit sad. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make my company switch to something like this, but if I were ever in the position to make that choice myself?...

The problem is the decision makers don’t mind being interrupted all the time.

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

#178

Post by Aeolun » Sat, May 18, 2019, 3:18 AM UTC

gknoy wrote: post #132

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…

> There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. We must use chat very differently, because I don't understand this. The number of times I've found answers to problems ("How do I X? Why can't I get Z to work with vagrant?" etc) by searching through Slack channels, or viewing pinned messages that explained something (or had a workaround/fix for a prob…

Don’t use confluence. There are knowledgebases with way less friction.

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

#179

Post by Aeolun » Sat, May 18, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

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.

It is hard to entertain a messaging product for which the author says they’re explicitly intending to stay solo.

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

#180

Post by joncrane » Sat, May 18, 2019, 3:32 AM UTC

BrentOzar wrote: post #14

Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email. Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers:…

Isn't Mattermost pretty close? When I moved to a company with Slack, I recognized a lot of stuff from my previous job where some of the devs used Mattermost.