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This was a better article than I expected. Finding ways to measure your assumptions is great, because if you can measure the behavior, you can measure the impact of changes. Generally, I'm not a fan of "scientific method" as a phrase. It's too often used by people dismissing intuition in a very non-scientific way.
I always love the debate on whether great products are imagined or are discovered through experimentation (certainly a bit of both). This post details the advice I usually give to startups on this topic and I'm happy to answer questions and join the discussion.
In the creativity bucket, there's also a fair amount of inspiration from: 1. Studying other products and reasoning about them. 2. Conceptually dissecting multiple existing products and looking at different combinations of some subset of their components. Any thoughts? PS: Loved your essay
Hey Michael, apart from custom internal analytics tools and solutions similar to GA which other tools would you suggest using?
Michael, How much racism have you faced in Silicon Valley? Do you ever face racism from companies going through the YC program?
This was a better article than I expected. Finding ways to measure your assumptions is great, because if you can measure the behavior, you can measure the impact of changes. Generally, I'm not a fan of "scientific method" as a phrase. It's too often used by people dismissing intuition in a very non-scientific way.
Thanks - I agree that balance is really important. Also, in many cases - especially where the founder is a user - intuition can be a key early driver of success.
On the other hand, I don't necessarily know what this technology is going to mean to end users. They're going to find problems to solve that I didn't even imagine. As we're closing in on a beta, I'm doing demo/interviews as often as I can (a couple of times a week at this point), and seeing where their minds run. As William Gibson said, the street finds its own uses for things.
Once we get the product in the hands of real customers, it'll be far easier to start taking measurements and figuring out what to work on from there. But for now, intuition is the only tool I have.
Hi Michael, how does one conduct customer research? What questions do you ask? How do you know you're doing it right? Are there any good books on customer research?
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Thanks - I agree that balance is really important. Also, in many cases - especially where the founder is a user - intuition can be a key early driver of success.
Absolutely agree. I'm a "scratching my own itch" founder, and building a product based on years of doing the job of my target users. "Scientific method" isn't terribly useful for me as I build the initial product. On the other hand, I don't necessarily know what this technology is going to mean to end users. They're going to find problems to solve that I didn't even imagine. As we're closing in on a beta, I'm doing d…
What are some best practices for evaluating ideas before building anything. You mentioned talking to users which is good advice but assumes that an industry has been identified already.
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Sure, it does! I just added it to register that is weird to publish as an AMA and not answer many questions. I think your approach is right. One thing that helps me is to use hypothesis from users/visitors/customer as much as possible. Talk to customers and try to distill what are their hypothesis about a specific problem. Talking to customer goes a long way. On the topic, I think that famous quote atributed to Ford…
Its funny - I think the Ford quote is right. I always tell folks to not ask a customer what they want but ask them what their problem is. Its the customer task to describe and demonstrate their problem - its the founder's task to think up and test solutions for that problem.
About the quote, it kinds of depends on what do you mean by "want", but I understand and agree of your approach (while still disagreeing with the quote if that is possible).
BTW the quote is probably bogus, as the first Ford cars were slower than horses. 45km/h vs 88km/h (world record)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_A_(1903%E2%80%9304) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_gait