Is there a legal risk of using freelancers when building product version 1.0? What is the correct way?
Yes - recruit a technical co-founder :)
“Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#42Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#43Thanks for doing this Michael! Any advice on getting people to pay for something before it's built? I think a lot of people will say they will pay a certain price for something but when it comes to signing up once they can enter their credit card, that doesn't end up being the case. Are LOI's the main way, and does that work for smaller projects < $100/mo?
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#44Thanks for taking the time to do this.
My Q: When one a/b tests there is generally a winner, but a better option might be possible if the team spends a bit more time brainstorming and hypothesizing. Do you have any thoughts on when to go with the results of the a/b test vs when it's worth going back to the drawing board to try to brainstorm a better idea?
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, one of our YC partner Dalton Caldwell hammered this idea in my mind. He told me that when he sees a founder trying to attack a product that other have either failed or succeeded at - he looks for what they've learned from those folks. If the founder dismisses previous attempts to solve this problem or similar ones - that is a very bad sign.
Really enjoyed your piece on product dev cycle fundamentals:
http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/product-development-cycle-...
Just curious growth wise, did Socialcam have a lot of word of mouth, or was some growth hacking involved as well. 16 million downloads in 3 months is incredible.
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#46Hi 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.
Yeah! I agree! I asked that because I think it's hard to distinguish yourself by solving this general consumer entertainment problem. Seems that all game companies do that, even when thinking about small studios, it is hard to find differentiating factors that does not rely on the game itself.
I also agree that A/B testing is super important! We are following exactly what you have described here http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/product-development-cycle-... but for a game, and the results are pretty interesting! Specially because we don't need a GDD (a document describing the game), all members of the team are involved in the creation process (and they feel more motivated to work - and believe me, this is big problem in indie studios) and is easier to propose changes and improvements to the game, since them just need to bring us closer to our goal with the game (for example: 20k ad visualizations / day). I'm anxious to get into this A/B testing phase! We haven't launched yet.
Thank you so much for sharing the knowledge! These posts were really valuable and helpful for me! And I think they are complementary!
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks for answering below! 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
According to Patrick Vlaskovits and others, there's no evidence that Henry Ford actually made the quote. So, I would agree that it's probably bogus.
https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
https://www.quora.com/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-%E2%80%9CI...
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#48I think there's clear danger of having a local maximum problem here. This is because the role of hypothesis in the process seems either misunderstood or misplaced.
The Tim Robinson example in the article recounting the removing of links on the checkout flow illustrates this. He observed something interesting in the data (people clicking on links), but he then skipped straight to a test which removed links and found conversion went up. It's implied that people were being distracted from the main task by the links.
But it might equally be that they wanted to click the links to find some missing information about the product. Or even some other reason. Without any qualitative analysis to establish a reason why people were clicking on them, you don't know if he might have raised conversion even higher had he kept the links and addressed a need people had. This is particularly important in a checkout flow where the numbers of people are comparatively low and behavioural elasticity is also comparatively low.
So I'm reading between the lines here that because qualitative analysis is hard, people don't do it. Maybe that's fair enough, but that doesn't prevent you from kicking the tyres on hypotheses. Quant analysis and A/B testing will only tell you what happened, not why did.
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#49What 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.
The first thing I ask a founder is how often does the target customer have the problem they are looking to solve and how much money are they willing to spend to solve it. The more often the customer has your problem and the more money they are willing to spend - the easier it will be (all other things being held equal) to get customers and iterate. Sequoia calls these problems hair on fire problems. The second thing…
This is great advice and advice I wish I taken onboard earlier. As a technical founder Ive found myself making a large set of assumptions which are usually proved to be incorrect when going to the market.
Going into the market and talking to your customers early on so you can answer those two questions will really help tell you if you have a viable idea.
Re: “Scientific Method for Startups”, and AMA with Michael Seibel
#50I wish the article had "screenshots" to show what was being changed, and why. It would help people to visualize and apply the steps better to their startups. Excellent read!