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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#81

Post by eslaught »

fairity wrote: post #53

More of a meta discussion, but it's interesting that pretty much all HN threads on PG's recent essays have a strong, negative sentiment. My guess is that this is explained by 3 factors: 1) The quantity and quality of new ideas in PG's essays is declining. 2) Readers' expectations of quality in PG's essays is increasing. 3) The pool of disenfranchised readers is growing. The quantity and quality of new ideas is decrea…

The scope of pg's posts have narrowed dramatically.

Back in the Hackers & Painters days, it seemed like he was writing about a wide variety of topics. Startups were among the things he wrote about, but it wasn't exclusively about them. There were things about management styles, programming languages, even why nerds are not popular in high school.

At some point, I think around the time YC started to become really successful, that changed, and pg started to write basically exclusively about startups. I can understand why, but his essays have been a lot less interesting ever since.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#82

Post by pavon »

jefftk wrote: post #24

> At first I was puzzled. How could things be fine at 60 startups and broken at 80? It was only a third more. Then I realized what had happened. We were using an O(n2) algorithm. So of course it blew up. This is neat, but isn't actually right. Each partner has to know each startup, which is, yes, O(n2) relationships. But there's no one who needs to do work proportional to the number of partner-startup relationships:…

Unless the number of partners also grew in proportion to the number of startups. Then the partners had 33% more startups to learn, but they were scheduled for 33% fewer meetings with each startup, so the total number of meetings needed for all the partners to learn all the startups was O(P*S) which is O(N^2), since P&S are both proportional to N, so it took quadratically longer for that familiarity to occur.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#84

Post by ericmay »

iamwil wrote: post #63
lisper wrote: post #45

This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such form…

Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an i…

> and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)

Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about something being "priced in" in the market as a related concept.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#85

Post by felideon »

iamwil wrote: post #63
lisper wrote: post #45

This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such form…

Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an i…

> people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)

Which he has written about before: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague, but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to learn from users or how to build a successful startup.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#86

Post by tash9 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #80
fairity wrote: post #53

More of a meta discussion, but it's interesting that pretty much all HN threads on PG's recent essays have a strong, negative sentiment. My guess is that this is explained by 3 factors: 1) The quantity and quality of new ideas in PG's essays is declining. 2) Readers' expectations of quality in PG's essays is increasing. 3) The pool of disenfranchised readers is growing. The quantity and quality of new ideas is decrea…

Is there a single example of someone who is highly regarded for an extended period of time that doesnt end up having a strong group of people who dislike them? It's hard to tell if there is just enough commenters on HN that dislike PG or if tech folks in general actually have decided to dislike PG. Regardless, almost every single public figure reputation takes a downturn given enough time. PG is no exception.

Giannis Antetokounmpo. He's been great for almost a decade and everybody still loves him. Growing up dirt poor for most of his life probably helps w/ being a great guy, though.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#87

Post by halfjoking »

JL-Akrasia wrote: post #2

Caveat - The best type of mentors for founders are other founders. VCs, Incubators, are not optimal mentors, rather those are key folks to have in your pocket. My suggestion for all founders - find a mentor who is a founder & builder.

Let's say you're one of the hundreds of thousands of solo devs/founders making some money - but less than $1000/month on your SaaS startup.

You don't want VC, you just want growth and the ability to do your startup full-time. Why would someone mentor you in that case? What's the benefit to them?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#88

Post by O__________O »

Oddest part of this post to me is that the author founded HN, but largely abandoned it because dealing with the users was a huge mental sinkhole for them; not able to find the quote, but clearly recall him saying this, though might be wrong.

As it relates to HN, PG what have you learned from the users? If HN was a startup, would it make it into YC?

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#89

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

contingencies wrote: post #59

YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help one another. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup founders: how generous they can be in helping one another. This goes both ways. A few years ago a group reached out to me from HN who wanted to start up in the same sector we're working in. They were a small group of guys from a famous US university who arranged to call me and pick my brai…

One of the goto success stories of our generation, Facebook, is based on a university student acting extremely immorally as he stole the idea from people he agreed to build said idea for.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#90

Post by hinkley »

lisper wrote: post #45

This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such form…

And the whole thing with VC is that they've somehow figured out how to make money while being wrong 90% of the time. With those sorts of numbers, are you really doing much better than random chance?

I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break "throwing darts at a board" as a selection strategy.

If you can just select for people who are earnest and aren't lying to themselves too energetically, you can call it a day.

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