Quality and awareness | Hacker News Reader

Quality and awareness

1 pointsamholmes3 comments

I want to create quality things. I'm sure this is shared by a lot of people, specifically entrepreneurs.

Quality to me is something that works well at doing something that is useful to me in someone's life.

When I achieve quality, I'd expect my return to be others wanting (or wanting to use) the thing I created.

But, how do I know if my venture is going to be worthwhile even if I create something of the highest quality? I may very well have created something awesome, but how am I to assume other people will even be aware of what I created just because it has quality?

I can spend all my time focusing on the quality in some thing I'm creating, but if I neglect the second factor, spreading awareness, I don't feel like I've achieved what I'm seeking out to do.

However, I feel like if I exert energy into spreading awareness, instead of spending 100% of my capacity on quality, that quality will be diminished as a result.

So, my question is this: How can I focus just on creating great things without the risk that the thing fading into the pit of disregard?

I feel you. I think I have pretty much the same aspirations.

The short answer is find a partner who is great at marketing, so he or she can add momentum to your ideas. It's tricky since they need to share your vision and belief that what you are creating is genuinely worthwhile.

Also - if you want to create something of real quality and value - then it helps to not have to worry about that money thang, at least for a while. So either have money, make money, find investors, or do what Larry and Sergei did - work on your PhD that you can one day commercialize.

If you are worried about making rent and getting food, then it's hard to truly create something of quality unless you have honed your craft and are in the service / agency business. Even then, its hard as heck.

Finally, quality isn't just craftsmanhip but also completeness. A chair can be of utmost quality but it's incomplete without a table. But completeness takes time. Say you wanted to create the perfect AI based mobile personal assistant, a la Siri. Can you truly make it high quality for every single use case? for someone searching restaurants in Austin to someone trying to find the latest NASCAR results? Probably not in a reasonable time frame. So you try and have a lot of discipline to tackle a very small surface area of the problem and then build from there. So in that little niche area, your solution is both quality and complete.

In my limited experience, identifying the niche and having the discipline to stick to it initially and gradually scale up from there is the hardest part of entrepreneurship.

Good luck creating quality. The world sure needs it.

I had a feeling it was going to be mentioned that I need to delegate the marketing a partner. Does this mean that for anything to be successful one must need a partner to complete the other half (or be superman and be good at both)?

I have no idea. I am a fledgling entrepreneur who is figuring all this out for myself. I do find it easier to have a partner who complements my own skill sets and frees me up to do what I am good at. I have seen plenty of examples of people who have gone solo and done well but it comes down to you. If you have aspirations of building quality products and solely focusing on that without concern for marketing, then I think a partner helps immensely. Even the best products need to break through the cacophony of the internet to find their users and good team members (whether partners, or employees) can be really useful to help you understand how to reach people.

If you figure it out, let me know!

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