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“Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

#31

Post by jonwachob91 »

mwseibel wrote: post #26
LifeOfRio wrote: post #5

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?

Different answer depending on whether you have a product built or not. Also different if you have a consumer product. My best personal experience with customer research is for live consumer products. In that case we would recruit potential customers off of craigslist (offering $50 for an hour of their time). We would bring them into the office and sit them at the table. The entire team (small) would be in the room. W…

>>> It was very important that everyone involved with building and designing the product was in the room experiencing the user test live.

Was there ever a point when you had too many cooks in the kitchen?

Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

#32

Post by davnn »

dpandey wrote: post #20
mwseibel wrote: post #2

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

Thinking from first principles.

Sometimes starting the other way around might be helpful - not seeking inspiration but defining the essence of your value proposition and starting from there.

We often tend to develop horseless carriages.

Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

#34

Post by kumarski »

mwseibel wrote: post #23
muratsu wrote: post #11

Hey Michael, apart from custom internal analytics tools and solutions similar to GA which other tools would you suggest using?

I always loved Mixpanel - but its been a couple years since I've been active on the product side and there are now tons of great tools. In the end of the day - use the events based analytics product that your team will enjoy looking at everyday.

snowplowanalytics.com - What do you think of this one? It's open-source...pretty crazy.

Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

#37

Post by mwseibel »

marciojmo wrote: post #33

Hi Michael! What problem do you think a game company is solving? What would be reasonable key advantages at a company level? I.e.: What do you know/have that Zynga (or even smaller studios) don't? lol

I think gaming companies are solving the problem of consumer entertainment and I think in that world a/b testing is super important.

Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

#38

Post by mwseibel »

marciojmo wrote: post #33

Hi Michael! What problem do you think a game company is solving? What would be reasonable key advantages at a company level? I.e.: What do you know/have that Zynga (or even smaller studios) don't? lol

I think gaming companies are solving the problem of consumer entertainment and I think in that world a/b testing is super important.

Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel

#39

Post by taanayya »

We are new to the startup scenerio.We have a great customer following.But we r looking for our seed fund /guidance to start it up;Its a platform to connect ,facilitate and empower moms.What would be ur suggestion for us to march ahead ,its a real world problem we r trying to solve .We dnt have an app and an mvp to show as our business model is slightly different.what would be ur suggestion to march ahead?We want to launch asap.
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