Earlier quoted context omitted.
You guys, Microsoft just acquires the already built project and our happy dev get his mansion.
yeah, but what color though?
Play your cards right and you get any color of your choice
I wandered off and built an IDE
231–240 of 273 posts
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely!:) I didn't expect this at all. I had to write 5 articles as part of my last milestone for HugeThing (accelerator) and share them somewhere. I wrote four technical ones in a day and a half. I then struggled with this one for three days. Had no idea where I'd share it or if I was going to use it at all. Finished it up this morning, and figured what the heck, I'll post it on HN. Probably no one's going to re…
Doesnt it feel good to post about what interests you, on your own terms, without a care for if anyone even cares, and then it blows up?
Yes sir, it certainly does.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue the you go the lesson slightly wrong. As a technical person you start with your great idea and get it working (not working is not the same as polished!). Then you HIRE someone who is great at marketing to help you figure out where it needs to be polished to sell it. The great marketing person will then do the work go get sales. Note, if you were a marketing person your lesson would be correct: you find…
Having built some very cool things that in the end nobody bought, I strongly disagree that one should just build the thing and then try to sell it. I also disagree that these two approaches lead to evolution vs revolution. Even if you have a revolutionary idea, and even if you can build it, it's still a waste of time if nobody will buy it. No matter how revolutionary your idea, you can try marketing it. If you are ev…
What I wrote is in no way contradictory to your experience.
Great tech MUST be sold, once you have the proof of concept you must get someone great at marketing on board to help you sell it. There are plenty of great marketers who can help you with this (for a price...).
My only point is as a great technical person you start with getting it working before trying to sell it. Once it is working great marketing people will come on board and help you sell it - that is partially a matter of finding customers and partially a matter of making you admit those hard rough edges need to be fixed.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, as a developer, it's soul-wrenching and just feels wrong to try to sell something before something proper has even been made. This has been my biggest struggle.
In my experience, technical people latently believe the thing that people buy from you is a product. So if the product isn't done / ready / etc, then you are being misleading trying to "sell" them or engage with them. It feels wrong, like you're forced to misrepresent yourself. You imagine the potential buyer as a hyper-critical power-user that will expect everything to be perfect. But what if the above isn't true at…
This has been my perspective. It surprises me how many people (including non-technical people) have a problem with simply going “hey I’m working on solving this problem. Would you be interested in giving me some feedback?”. Or even the less forthcoming and more morally ambiguous pretend that the product exists/is being built. don’t build anything yet. seek idea feedback from potential users. maybe even grow the community first. only actually build the product once you have enough data to show that people actually want it. invite the most vocal people to use it first. when ready to launch, launch with actual users on day one
I’ve worked with “seasoned” business experts, MBA’s who run multimillion dollar companies themselves, etc, who had a problem with this just out of principal. I once put up a website for a personal startup project with a “give us your email and we’ll send you the white paper” form — and the white paper didn’t exist (although the raw data that would be used to produce the paper did). When one of my mentors who was examining the website wanted to see the white paper, and I said “it doesn’t exist (yet), I just want people to show me that they are interested in it, otherwise this project is not really solving a big enough problem. So far nobody has requested to see it.”... they were LIVID. They could never trust me again after that, even after I tried to explain the reasoning.
So what if the first person asks for it and it takes a day or two to arrive? If only one person ever asks for it, it’s not a big enough problem anyway. But the mentor was seeing it from the perspective of how it would look if they did that in their multi-million-dollar company with their fortune 100 clients. But their rules did not apply for my situation. My situation was that I don’t even have a profitable company with customers. That I want to build things that people want, and the sooner I can figure out it’s not worth pursuing, the sooner I can move on to other ventures. So if during this journey I create a white-paper request button, and nobody ever clicks it, did it even exist?
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue the you go the lesson slightly wrong. As a technical person you start with your great idea and get it working (not working is not the same as polished!). Then you HIRE someone who is great at marketing to help you figure out where it needs to be polished to sell it. The great marketing person will then do the work go get sales. Note, if you were a marketing person your lesson would be correct: you find…
> As a technical person you start with your great idea and get it working This starts from the (potentially flawed) assumption that your great idea is actually saleable. If you build something and prove that there is at least some market then great. But you might build something and find that there is no market. If instead you start with the market, then you are unlikely to be pointlessly building something.
Absolutely.
The opposite approach has equal risks: you start with a saleable idea that just isn't possible (or is possible but the costs are more than the sales will ever cover).
Either way it is critical have points where you decide if further effort is worth the investment. You have to make some investment in time/effort/money to find that out, if the answer is the product isn't worth the investment all your efforts to this point are wasted.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#236Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#237Posted seven times before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114421 (64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 (34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488 (111 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10991747 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022 (64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359128 (10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
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Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Building a house is very different from building a product. For example, timeline estimates for building a house can be reasonably ascertained; not so for software. It's the distinction between building something you've built before and architecting a new bridge or building. The latter is a creative effort with lots of variables that are extraordinarily hard to pin down into estimates that would be acceptable in spec…
So, your spec house is the yet-another-crud-webapp, where the spec is clear and the tech mature... Engineers do those too, but they aren't so much entrepreneurs as jobbing contractors or agencies
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Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's worth pointing out that in order to "sell" to investors (as opposed to customers), having the product (and the customers!) ready actually is very important. So the proper sequence is: 1. Sell. 2. Build. 3. Pitch to investors. 4. Repeat with more resources. Inexperienced non-technical founders sometimes get the steps 1-3 backwards.
reconciling creativity with the market is a really longstanding problem in lots of areas. so I'm really interested in discussion that leads to any insight. I'm curious about 1 before 2. Any attempt I've made in the past to understand market interest without having something that people can actually touch has always been really squishy. People aren't that interested to talk, when you do they always say something like…
> 'well, sure, I guess that sounds interesting'
I think the question boils down to: would you be willing to spend the next few years of your life on a 'well, sure, I guess that sounds interesting'?
There are all kinds of people. Early adopters are usually who a startup would want to start off with. If you can’t find even a few people who are excited about the value that your nonexistent product would add to their life (not even yourself as a user?), should you be excited about building it?
Money talks. You want people who are excited enough about what you’re building to give you money for a nonexistent product/service. Via Preorders, kickstarters, etc. Words can be cheap, but once they’ve bought in you can value their feedback.
Re: I wandered off and built an IDE
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having built some very cool things that in the end nobody bought, I strongly disagree that one should just build the thing and then try to sell it. I also disagree that these two approaches lead to evolution vs revolution. Even if you have a revolutionary idea, and even if you can build it, it's still a waste of time if nobody will buy it. No matter how revolutionary your idea, you can try marketing it. If you are ev…
What I wrote is in no way contradictory to your experience. Great tech MUST be sold, once you have the proof of concept you must get someone great at marketing on board to help you sell it. There are plenty of great marketers who can help you with this (for a price...). My only point is as a great technical person you start with getting it working before trying to sell it. Once it is working great marketing people wi…
I believe what you say is directly contradictory. I'm suggesting you definitely not get it working before you try to sell it.
For most product ideas, the key question isn't, "Is this possible to build?" It's, "Will enough people buy it to make a sustainable business?"
That is to say, the greater risk of failure comes from lack of demand, not lack of technical competence. The greater risk should generally be addressed first.
This is compounded by the fact that it's usually much easier to test the "people will buy X" hypothesis than the "I can build X" hypothesis. Or, put differently, the cost of reducing market risk is usually lower than reducing technical risk.
Furthermore, even if we're in the rare case of working on something where technical risk is significant, we generally don't need to get a real, working product to reduce that risk sufficiently. Some technical experiments are generally sufficient to put us back in the realm of, "Yes, we can make that product."