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

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

#181

Post by Aeolun » Sat, May 18, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #135

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Actually, a true story: Ford said that if he were to listen to what people want better than a horse, he would have built a carriage with hitch for 6 horses :)

> If I’d asked people what the wanted, they would have said, ‘A faster horse’

Is how I believe that quote goes.

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

#182

Post by yashap » Sat, May 18, 2019, 3:57 AM UTC

Great article. Thought the author sounded really bright, practical, mature, customer focused and motivated, did a lot right. Seems like someone I’d love to found a company with. But the simple truth is startups are hard, most of them fail even if you get a tonne of things right.

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

#183

Post by caseyf7 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 4:00 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #178

gknoy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Please name them for those of us looking

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

#184

Post by ernsheong » Sat, May 18, 2019, 4:24 AM UTC

derrickreimer wrote: post #100

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:…

Author here. Slack is undoubtedly sticky, although I challenge the assumption that all integrations need to be replicated in a niche play. Those who did adopt Level were willing to give up a number of integrations that were low-value to them or were just causing noise that proved unnecessary.

My 2 cents is... don't give up. Make sales calls. Aim to get 100 rejections (makes rejection a metric to aim for, really, so less pain?). Then you get a better view of the market and the real pain points.

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

#185

Post by sbr464 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 4:29 AM UTC

fuddle wrote: post #164

Why is there no screenshots of the level app on the homepage or Github page? A picture of the app would help me decide whether I want to use it.

I was curious also, but found some in the docs.

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

#186

Post by ian0 » Sat, May 18, 2019, 4:42 AM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #12

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.

Yep, it is extremely hard. Lean Startup makes it sound trivial when it's almost impossible. Almost nobody is going to clear up their day to talk to you about their problems, answer your questions, give you feedback, be your guinea pig, etc. The ideal way to validate it is to be so immerse in the industry/problem such that you understand most of the pain points. Do the job that your ideal customer is doing. Attend the…

One thing I realised recently is when you have traction, this is a much easier problem to deal with. Everyone keeps hounding you for improvements and you prune these requirements to increase utility and demand.

So its critical that you find a good sponsor/client in the early days. One that you have easy access to and you work together with until your product gets to the point where its utility is obviously apparent to new clients. And work it from there.

When your working with your first client they will inevitably drag you down into the small details (improve this/ make this). I call these the "meh" features. What you need to do is focus on analysing the underlying reason why they want the "meh" features and work on eradicating that reason. If you crack it, you get a "wow" feature. And that brings traction.

For example, we designed a financial platform for schools in a developing country. Finance operations in schools is complex with varying chains of manual processes. Our "meh" features were digitising these processes, improving each individual task. Our "wow" feature was to completely automate the end-end process for a small subset of schools with similar requirements. Instead of making their tasks easier, we just completely removed the need to do them. After that it was pretty apparent what we had to do.

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

#187

Post by hyperpallium » Sat, May 18, 2019, 4:46 AM UTC

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…

> problems that you have a firsthand understanding of/experience of

This is also data driven. It may be mere "datum", but complex, with many components, far richer than any statistical data.

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

#188

Post by _hardwaregeek » Sat, May 18, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #173

_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 thi…

If there's one thing Hacker News lacks, it's biting criticism and pessimism :P

Kidding aside, I see your point. I guess it's important to distinguish between criticism and dismissal of an idea. "Dropbox is just rsync" seems like a dismissal, not a critical look at the validity of the idea. And Lily Allen turning down bitcoin? Well honestly I'm a little with her on that one. "Oh yeah can you perform and we'll pay you with a totally legit online currency we swear." Not exactly a great sell.

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

#189

Post by davidivadavid » Sat, May 18, 2019, 5:37 AM UTC

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #144

sdenton4 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! One of the things I found frustrating about the article is that he talks about people 'lying' constantly... when if fact he had just asked meaningless questions.

He used the word lying. They didn't know they were lying. They were miswanting. And it's a HUGE glossed over fact when talking to customers.

Yes, it's the customer development version of the XY problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

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

#190

Post by dreamgt » Sat, May 18, 2019, 5:40 AM UTC

Sorry but the outcome seemed obvious from the get go. Of course you weren’t going to be able to single handedly replace a platform like slack, while improving upon the pitfalls it’s creating in cross-team communication. The insight into your experience is great, but it’s really the type of thought that is born and dead within a few minutes of most developers minds. Especially when we think of the effort and consequences of such an endeavor.