You must know who their users and their needs, but not necessarily BE a user.
or, you know, you're overthinking the problem. ;)
You're Overthinking It
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: You're Overthinking It
#42I think it's also a good thing to stop overthinking it in regard to Hard Work. The schlep barrier and uggh fields come to mind.
http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/
What are some ideas that you would do if you weren't concerned about "working smarter" or something having to be elegant from the get-go?
My most successful product has been a magazine (and let me define that success: very successful in terms of contacts it's given me, unsuccessful financially). The "build process" for that has been neither elegant nor free of mountains of schlepping.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#43Upvoted just for this absolute gem: [...] it also depends on where you are on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The lower on the pyramid your product is, the crappier it can look. If your product is core to helping people make money, pirate movies, or sell your useless couch, you don’t need a designer. But if you’re high on the pyramid, ugly/clunky UI makes it impossible to for people to see your vision. Never heard this…
I think that design could still be really helpful if its helps achieve one of those core 'needs.' Craigslist leaves alot to be desired when searching for apartments (my only experience with it) compared to Hipmunk's hotel search, which plots the results on a map with color/size coding.
Craigslist is not just about apartments though. It's a general purpose online classified ad site. Building a lot of location plotting features might not have any relevance for 80-90% of the listings.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#44...so how would corporate banking systems get built? Although I understand the sentiment, and have followed it with a number of my projects, an aweful lot of companies build and sell software that is not necesarily useful for their own purposes (banking, financial, retail etc). A better and more general rule, and one that has been stated millions of times is simply its really REALLY important to known and understand…
Seems to me that the advice in the OP is intended primarily for someone doing a startup (or planning to). In that circumstance, you're probably not going to stick with such a high risk, even for high potential reward, unless you yourself fit into the group that would use it.
That is to say, you yourself are the client (sort of), meaning there's not so much need to make any effort understand the client, because you already know what you know/how you feel about $THING(/etc.).
Re: You're Overthinking It
#45This highlights one of my main problems with social media in general which is that popularity does not correlate well to utility. Even in a relatively niche community like HN there is still tendency towards shallower, more general articles simply because they are applicable to a wider audience so they inherently attract more upvotes. But if you're running a business, the most important thing will be domain knowledge, and the most useful information will not be something found in a blog post that goes viral, but insight and wisdom discovered by insiders who have concrete, applicable experience. Finding these people is of course much harder than popping open HN, but it's possible if you stay focused on smaller communities and networking within your industry. Keep your nose to the grindstone long enough and you will become one of these people.
That's not to say that there's no value to be extracted from popular subjects. Of course there is a lot of capitalization to be done on trends and fads, and mass markets are the biggest, but as a daily visitor to HN I think I can safely say that I could come here once every two weeks and gain almost the same marginal value, significantly less than what I'm gaining in daily work experience.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Maybe I'm unique but my needs also include stuff like food, shopping, talking to friends, driving, running, clothes, and more." You probably don't spend 8-10 hours per day eating/preparing food, nor driving, nor running etc. You may engage in those things, but you're not an expert in those domains. The OP point was that there's many lucrative domains out there that don't have optimal solutions to their problems yet,…
I bet Drew Houston wasn't spending 8-10 hours a day sharing files, neither was Zuck looking up student profiles all day long. I don't agree with the notion that you have to understand the ins and outs of something to start working on it. See http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html Do you think all of Basecamp's customers are software companies because that's the only domain 37s knows deeply about? Funeral directors use Fac…
Facebook is an outlier. About DropBox, I'm sure Drew Houston spent every living hour digging into the intricacies of other solutions, the risks, what people wanted, etc when he decided he wanted to make DropBox.
You can pick up the domain knowledge while working on your product or before working on it, but you still have to get it somehow.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Maybe I'm unique but my needs also include stuff like food, shopping, talking to friends, driving, running, clothes, and more." You probably don't spend 8-10 hours per day eating/preparing food, nor driving, nor running etc. You may engage in those things, but you're not an expert in those domains. The OP point was that there's many lucrative domains out there that don't have optimal solutions to their problems yet,…
I bet Drew Houston wasn't spending 8-10 hours a day sharing files, neither was Zuck looking up student profiles all day long. I don't agree with the notion that you have to understand the ins and outs of something to start working on it. See http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html Do you think all of Basecamp's customers are software companies because that's the only domain 37s knows deeply about? Funeral directors use Fac…
You end up needing to be willing to commit to learning a hell of a lot about an industry, and that's time you won't be developing. The tech, in most cases, is secondary to understanding the business needs and workflow of an industry. One of the most successful guys I know as a small business software guy took a year to take mortuary classes and work in the funeral industry to learn their needs before developing services for them.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#48Something that I took away from this (awesome blog post) is perhaps not directly related: don't spend too much time worrying about competitors. Build your thing. Just. Build. It. If you have innovated and not imitated you will have something that no one else has. It's really that simple. You could sit and fret about how easily Google could destroy you, you could worry about the fact that maybe Facebook offers a simil…
I agree with all that, except the end. By all means just built it, but true originality does not always win in the end. See success of Snuggie vs. earlier product Slanket for reference.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#49Let me just say thank you to the author. I pretty much over think every aspect of my life. Its good to have this little reminder.
Re: You're Overthinking It
#50How does miso make money??