The Pivot

The internet is a psychology experiment? Well, maybe a tiny fraction of it. You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you'll enter your email address.

I'm not sure we need more of that. Its like someone pretending to sell brushes wanting in your house, who keeps glancing around casing the joint while blathering some spiel.

As a model for qualifying internet product plans, its going to suffer from self-selection of the customers - you know, those lonely people who will talk to anybody, even a brush salesman, and will tell them anything they want to hear.

does anyone else think his site design looks similar to youtube?

Experiments are far broader than landing pages for nonexistent products. The same thing applies to building a working product and realizing it's not what your customers want. Or building a small feature that turns out to be a product in itself.

The entire product development process is a bit of a psychology experiment. Try to understand what your customers want, build it. Learn from it. Repeat.

"Building a product for the Internet is now the easy part. Getting people to understand the product and use it is the hard part."

This feels like a meta-Dilbert joke about how business guys perceive technology & development.

As if the "product" is somehow separated from "getting people to understand. . . and use it"

>building product X and selling the company to Google for a billion dollars.

Oh no! it was my secret business plan which i have for several years been working on in my mind during all these hard-to-stay-awake afternoon hours in my cubicle ... opsss... at my desk at highly collaborative (ie. noisy) and innovative (no sane person would do such a space for him/herself) open space at BigCo-s