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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#241

Post by throwaway2037 »

maroonblazer wrote: post #237
ejb999 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I once dated a girl whose dad's idea of a fun Saturday was to spend the day at a car dealership to see how low a price he could negotiate for a car. He'd always walk away, regardless of how low they went. I thought that was hilarious.

This needs to be a reality TV show with hidden cameras!

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#242

Post by [deleted] »

mdorazio wrote: post #185
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that fascinates me about UBI (apart from the right wing capitalists promoting socialist utopias) is the effect it (presumably) will have on salaries and companies. I mean HN is populated by people who mostly enjoy their STEM related work, but even so if we did not have to pay mortgages tomorrow I suspect 75% would hand in their notice and go something else - still working but working on their own start ups…

The B in UBI is pretty important and seems to be at odds with what you're thinking. It's meant to be a basic income that guarantees you won't starve or be homeless somewhere in the country. That's it. A backup to fall upon or a subsistence if you don't want to/can't work or a life booster for low income earners. No fancy cars, apartment in a coastal city, big house, vacations, meals out, etc. How many HN readers woul…

[deleted]

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#243

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #144
tenpies wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most. You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.

If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the price you have listed", you will also have a generally good experience.

I wish that was the case. The dealership experience seems designed to maximize the pressure and extract as much value from customers as possible.

My first Toyota dealer experience was offering to buy a car at advertised price, and them refusing/countering with a lease. We just walked out.

Based on that, I waited until Toyota offered pretty good unadvertised discounts and called up a bunch of dealers with an offer/car in mind. I got the car my wife and I wanted for $1k more than my offer, which was I think $9k less than MSRP, and the experience was way better. We only had to sit through the finance departments upsells.

The third sale was paying MSRP at a Lexus dealer and we still were there for almost 5 hours.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#244

Post by throwaway2037 »

themodelplumber wrote: post #235
tchock23 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alex Hormozi was on a podcast recently talking about how you should learn high volume sales skills in a scenario like a gym chain, car dealer, etc. Do that for a few years and then take those skills to sell the most expensive thing you can to make “real” money with better quality customers. Seemed like reasonable advice and aligned with your experiences...

Selling stuff is an extremely outward-focused career though, and it's its own thing. You have to be really careful due to the creeping boiler room effect. You can lose track of who/what you are inwardly very easily, due to almost no attention given your own values, and in effect a strong counter-incentive for attending to your own stuff. I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very…

"creeping boiler room effect" -- I never saw this phrase before. I like it. This is the reason that I personally avoid sales people (outside of work / socially).

To me: Sales is fundamentally about upselling -- selling you more than you need. How can people do this 8 hours per day, then go home and pretend they are not a sales person? Every GOOD sales person tells me they are "only like that at work". No, they are not. As a result, I try to avoid them! In social settings with sales people, before you know it, they are trying to manipulate you. It is so tiring.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#245

Post by throwaway2037 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #157
kevstev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly right. This is the superstar phenomenon of single commercial actors on the Internet -- YouTubers, Open Source product owners, self-publishers, etc. Far less than 1% "make it big", then eventually v/blog about how to be successful just like them in five easy steps. Many great bloggers eventually write that awful post about "writing is the best skill to have". Barf. I do agree about OnlyFans. Due to social constraints, it does seem easier to make "middle class" money than YouTubing/OpenSourcing/Self-Publishing.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#246

Post by thorncorona »

jseliger wrote: post #62

Another related surprise is how bad founders can be at realizing what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk about some problem, and we'll discover another much bigger one in the course of the conversation This is also true of undergrads, who often come in to office hours thinking they have one problem, but they in fact have another, or several others. I suspect that mentorship is useful: https:/…

This is a very well written essay. I like your writing style.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#247

Post by copperx »

xapata wrote: post #111
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.

Used car salespeople are even worse! Are you buying from individuals or from a dealership?

What do you mean? Buying a used car from a dealership is about 5x worse than buying a new car. Of course they're buying from an individual.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#248

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

sgustard wrote: post #110
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…

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…

That's true of most sales, including medical sales. But this is also why incentives for sales are highly tied to performance. You can't fake that skill.

Fun fact, most surgeons learn to perform surgeries (in particular how to use new techniques and equipment) from sales people who don't have degrees. They often actually go into the surgery with them.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#249

Post by hendry »

What pains me is how difficult it is to give feedback or complain about a service with startups half the time.

All I wanted is an email address.

Twitter can be hit and miss.

This morning I went down a rabbit hole to try submit a bug report to OpenAI. Had to go through a Kafka-esque Discord registration process.

Astonishing how hard it is to get a service provider to listen.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#250

Post by robocat »

avg_dev wrote: post #21

I’ve read a few of pg’s articles over the years. I believe it was one about nerdy kids and their relationships and worldviews that first brought me to this site. At some point, I read the article “Hackers and Painters” and I felt like pg’s essays didn’t resonate with me anymore. I even read a response called “Dabblers and Blowhards” that I resonated strongly with. I thought to myself, pg is distanced from reality, an…

I think I have followed a similar trajectory.

I had an engineer-employee-type response to some of Paul’s hackers-and-painters essays (2004), and I still think there is a lot of wrong in some of his cherished opinions[1].

However my colleagues and I founded a company about the same time as ycombinator was founded (2005). I have a lot more respect for his opinions after watching the wild success of YC over the years: he has proven again and again that his opinions are valuable.

That said, I want to quote from the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32917643 : “I never hear pg talk about really any of the downsides or regrets about the startup ecosystem that he helped unleash.” . Paul’s article is a bit rah-rah (making the world better by helping found startups), and it is definitely one-eyed without the balance of what the costs are. I am definitely not arguing against progress, but I would appreciate some humble reflection on the costs to others of that progress.

I admit it is very hard for me to have the self-awareness to know if I am just trying to cut down a tall poppy, or whether I am just knocking down a success, or am I subconsciously railing against somebody due to their well endowed ego.

Regardless, there is a lot to learn from the essay, and I rate the knowledge he has shared as highly valuable (even if the knowledge shared is difficult for me to apply, given that I don’t run an incubator!)

The most unfortunate part is that I think that the quality of comments on HN about this particular essay have been low. I suspect I am adding more low quality comments myself.

[1] Example I disagree with “Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy” from http://paulgraham.com/smart.html — a couple of jems but mostly hard disagree with his points in that essay. Perhaps he has a different definition of intelligence, but dominance and intelligence are distinct variables (even if correlated). Maybe related to a generic comment about other programmer essay writers “you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.” — https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm — although that trends too far towards psychological diagnosis by comments which is really not productive (and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end!).

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