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Users You Don’t Want

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Re: Users You Don’t Want

#71

Post by mathattack »

ryandrake wrote: post #16

Been through this at medium sized companies struggling to sell. This kind of customer is alluring but poisonous. Company: We sell Product X! Toxic Customer: I don't want Product X, I want Product Y. If you're willing to bolt Product Y onto one of your menus I will pay you this stack of money for it! Company: $$$! Bam! The company just went from being a product company to a custom engineering service. You will have to…

The big challenge is that this type of technical debt can be hard to see. But "We promised our VC 50% growth, and we're only at 35%, and this gets us to 60%" is very easy to see.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#72

Post by geofft »

amelius wrote: post #66
ryandrake wrote: post #16

Been through this at medium sized companies struggling to sell. This kind of customer is alluring but poisonous. Company: We sell Product X! Toxic Customer: I don't want Product X, I want Product Y. If you're willing to bolt Product Y onto one of your menus I will pay you this stack of money for it! Company: $$$! Bam! The company just went from being a product company to a custom engineering service. You will have to…

But what if selling Product Y allows you to become ramen-profitable?

You can

* decide that you want to be an engineering consulting firm that charges only ramen, which will make your customer very happy

* become ramen-profitable on product Y without it taking all your time, build and market product X, then dump your customer and product Y (make sure you don't sign a contract saying that you have to keep supporting product Y)

* say no and find another way to become ramen-profitable

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#73

Post by ptero »

jcoffland wrote: post #45
GuiA wrote: post #20

> Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer. If you open a restaurant, you bet that there are certain building codes you'll have to follow in…

The quoted statement above is blatant discrimination and incriminates the company who wrote it. I'm surprised the company's lawyers allowed it. Much of the legal system in the US says that you cannot ignore the needs of minority groups just because it's not profitable.

The author gave this (notional) example to simply point out that such users present a very different use case for the original company and are likely to be a huge distraction. And undeflected distractions are bad for a startup.

If it were a real example and you needed a legal way out (what country / jurisdiction?), maybe referring those cases to another service that is specifically set up to serve their needs would be sufficient.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#74

Post by geofft »

dsacco wrote: post #53
jcoffland wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quoted statement above is blatant discrimination and incriminates the company who wrote it. I'm surprised the company's lawyers allowed it. Much of the legal system in the US says that you cannot ignore the needs of minority groups just because it's not profitable.

How is the statement discriminatory? If a company decided to start a sharing economy-based babysitting service, but doesn't have the requisite resources (or training/certification among workers) to look after special needs children, it's okay for them to not cater to those individuals. It's not as though they have the ability and are denying service - they are choosing not to develop a product or service with accessi…

> It's not as though they have the ability and are denying service - they are choosing not to develop a product or service with accessibility features. I can entertain a normative argument that it's ethically wrong to allow companies to operate in this way, but this is not legally considered discrimination.

The same reasoning would apply to "It's not as though we have an elevator and are denying service - we are choosing to only install a staircase."

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#75

Post by riboflava »

IanCal wrote: post #56
nostrademons wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefits of accessibility are largely PR-related: nobody wants to be the company that makes blind peoples' lives more difficult. There may be ADA-compliance issues as well when you get big enough. That said, accessibility is something you do when you're a big company. When you're a startup, work on making it useful to the easy customers, and then only once you have something that lots of screen-reader people want…

I'm not sure about the US but in the UK what you're suggesting would I think be illegal. You shouldn't make things accessible just when you're a large company, that's a really disappointing approach.

This is just another reason why the US has a healthier startup culture. There are a lot of things that take effort to do that US companies can get away with not doing until forced to by law or the market, or when the opportunity costs diminish that they do it out of the goodness of the individuals' involved hearts.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#76

Post by empath75 »

blfr wrote: post #64
GuiA wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's not profitable to do that on its own? The "free market takes care of everything" argument is an idealistic position, not something based in reality.

If it's not profitable then why should Airbnb be the one to subsidize it? Why not the government? Or some charity? Or you? We don't expect anyone who meets a homeless person to offer them a place on their couch. That would be unfair. And an additional incentive to avoid homeless people. We have (well, not everywhere but at least we aim for) a systemic solution. There are homeless shelters for example, sometimes run a…

Yeah, those people shouldn't have made the choice to be disabled.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#77

Post by Lawtonfogle »

Animats wrote: post #4

That's a good argument against "accessibility". You're probably not getting significant revenue from the screen-reader people.

Do disabled people actually bring in profit once you account for building code changes needed to support them at any brick and mortar location?

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#78

Post by nostrademons »

DanBC wrote: post #62
nostrademons wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefits of accessibility are largely PR-related: nobody wants to be the company that makes blind peoples' lives more difficult. There may be ADA-compliance issues as well when you get big enough. That said, accessibility is something you do when you're a big company. When you're a startup, work on making it useful to the easy customers, and then only once you have something that lots of screen-reader people want…

Accessibility benefits everyone. Everyone wants easier to read, easier to understand, websites. How does a harder to use, harder to understand website help a business?

That's not really the comparison for a startup, though. It's "Would you rather have an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand website that does nothing useful, or an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand website that's full of security holes, or a hard-to-use, hard-to-understand website that basically does what it's supposed to?" It's pointless to make a website that nobody wants to use highly usable.

There's an opportunity cost for everything. The most fundamental opportunity that you don't want to miss is building something that lots of people want; if you don't accomplish that (and it turns out to be really hard), it doesn't really matter how well you've built the thing that nobody wants.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#79

Post by bsder »

Hmmmm. It probably depends upon how much money were talking.

If the customer is throwing around a couple million dollars of NRE, it's probably worth bolting something on and pocketing the money. If the customer is only moving a couple hundred thousand, it's probably not.

This seems more like a software-only startup issue. We have hardware and have these hard-nosed discussions all the time--generally about volume.

Customer--"We want X and we want 100,000 units and we're going to put the NRE on this payment schedule."

Us--"No, you're going to put all that NRE up front and it's . And you're going to front the first 10,000 units which is . After that, we can put you on the royalty schedule. We can't put ourselves in the position of losing the company because your volume never materialized."

Customer--" That's preposterous."

Us--"No. It's the reality of hardware. We know our costs really well."

Side comment: it's always 100,000 units and 100,000 units is generally hardware death--big enough that you have all the volume problems but small enough that your profit sucks.

Re: Users You Don’t Want

#80

Post by quwert95 »

dublinben wrote: post #32
quwert95 wrote: post #13

>In the case of Justin.tv, pivoting to serve video gamers was the right move. Our video game broadcasters always represented a small but consistent group of users. It tooks us 4-5 years to realize how important they were. This stuck out at me as an avid Twitch user/follower (and sometimes a streamer). I think they need to re-realize this. The pivot result (extra effort and focus in Twitch) is being re-pivoted with th…

Does it really matter what the content of the stream is, as long as it is bringing in viewers? They've built the Twitch brand around games, but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind.

Kinda, sorta.

I, personally, want it to matter because Twitch's mantra and goals are still focused around being 'for gamers.' As a user, I feel like the "purity" of the space has been diluted. I am not alone in this.

From a business perspective, I guess anything goes as long as it gets eyeballs on ads, people buying bits (Twitch fun bucks), and more channel subscribers but simultaneously balancing the friction that new features have with the established userbase.

>but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind.

Youtube Gaming, Afreeca, and many others still exist; hopefully Twitch doesn't rest on what they have in regards to streaming. Twitch is also no longer just a streaming site; it's a software and wiki/database company now with the acquisition of Curse. Curse definitely brings in it's own conversation of "Users You Don't Want."

Edit: Added Curse stuff.

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