Comment by highCs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by highCs | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Just in case you got trapped, this is mostly a boilerplate which goal is not to help you but the author to get the appropriate image that would allow him to invest in companies that are doing well.

> How do competitors view you? Think about your 2-3 closest competitors. If you asked their CEOs to truthfully describe your company's strengths and vulnerabilities

Well, your 6 months old startup has no "strengths and vulnerabilities". It should also not have direct competitors. Only big companies have this kind of things. You have code, users and growth.

> Are you ready for a Series A? > Imagine that instead of being the founder of your company, you're an investor

You already ask yourself these questions.

> The debate from hell

This one is decent and I'm nice. You already did this with your cofounder most of the time.

> Was your MVP truly minimal?

Who cares, you've survived.

> Stomach-churning churn numbers

You will stress automatically about churn.

> The missing key

Don't hire "key role". Only big companies do that.

> Laughed out of the room

Decent and I'm nice.

> Unexpectedly large market

By the way, only investors say market when talking about startups. While this has sense, it's kinda a concept for big companies again. Your startup has early users and say pool / niche of those.

> Unexpectedly small market

You rarely have an unexpectedly small market. Most of the time you have no market at all: you have built something people don't want.

> How does the trajectory of the world over the next 5-10 years align (or misalign) with what you're doing?

If you're growing, you're "aligned".

And on and on. The intention is not really to help you here I believe.

This sort of dismissal based on platitudes ("Most of the time you have no market at all") is the sort of comment we don't want on Hacker News. Anything can be dismissed this way, and anyone can do it. It feels good, gets upvotes, and generates more of the same—and thus the discourse clogs up up with more and more of this. That's bad. And what does your apparent critique boil down to? "The intention is not really to help you here I believe"—in other words, (a) you read minds and (b) you assume your conclusion.

For higher-quality discussion, we should apply the Principle of Charity: that is, assume the strongest plausible interpretation of an article and respond to that. Poking holes in a weak one may be fun but it is not substantive.

I have thought about that 10 more minutes and fortunately I get the same result as you: one can say of everything that "this is bullshit and the intention is bad". You dad got a new car? This is bullshit and the intention is bad. So my post achieve nothing good indeed.

So now, I have a question. I've noticed some people use a clever communication and social trick I call "word dropping". "word dropping" consists of forming sentences only in the intention to say or write a set of words because doing so can have an effect on some people. (Example of word set: de-risk, small market, big market, MVP, hire, key role, business plan, etc.) It is exactly like a text written with random words, it means absolutely nothing, but the trick is to do that with a limit set of words which when put together quasi-randomly provide a feeling of sense. One can see the disastrous consequences such a thing can have if people start believing into it. It's super powerful because word dropping cost nothing to produce and cost a lot to dismiss with proper arguments. This only hurts terribly.

I've found some people use plenty of social intelligence hacks like that, which works, hurts and decrease productivity. How do you protect someone from that? For example, say someone use word dropping to hurt me, what can I do? I guess I should read a book about that...

I was reminded of http://strategy-madlibs.herokuapp.com/ that is mentioned in this great talk by Simon Wardley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYH-vLWHhyY

It sounds good, but isn't good. I think the answer in response to it is to have ammo that both sounds good and is useful, and it'll win out to the smart people.

Haha the heroku app. Exactly that.

> It's super powerful because word dropping cost nothing to produce and cost a lot to dismiss with proper arguments.

Sounds like you may be referring to the Bullshit Asymmetry Priciple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

Sorry for that. Thanks for showing me this, I didn't know/notice.

Thank you for reacting so open-mindedly!

> gets upvotes

Why would it get upvotes if it's not helpful? Just trying to understand.

Sadly, the upvote system reacts eagerly to many things that are bad for HN, e.g. indignation, snark, cynicism, sensationalism.

One can speculate about why—my theory is that it plugs into reflexive neural circuits, rather than the slower, reflective ones that make for more thoughtful reactions—but the fact itself is painfully well-established.

Really interesting counterposition of the terms "reflex" and "reflect". Both share the same etymological root and core meaning, but through application have mirrored distinctions that make them perfectly beautiful opposites, in the way you're using them.

I couldn't agree more. It's the best way I've found to explain the difference between what we do and don't want in HN comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date...

It's common for etymological roots to branch to opposites, or simply invert. And then maybe revert again. Almost too common to note, really. A byproduct of how core association is to our minds it would seem.

You theory lends itself to validation. One aspect is timing - upvotes produced later after reading will be more thoughtful. The other aspect is effort - if upvote required certain effort over a length of time, that upvote too would be more meaningful. On the other hand, a short burst of heroic effort points to a reflexive reaction. If we could somehow inject effort into the voting we would get some really meaningful weights for each vote. This could be calibrated with manual review of sample comments. We could also use this knowledge to calm people down - confronting a person with a lengthy task might give them time to rethink their position.

So... how is that for an idea: having voted on something you get an option to return and double-down your vote, but no sooner than five minutes later. To try more things we could also show the user his recent upvotes, and mix in some comments he did not vote on, so that the user had to stop and think.

I like the idea of timing. Perhaps putting voting buttons at the end of a comment instead of the beginning?

In a word (well 2), please Google "echo chamber". Dan, Scott, and the HN policies fight really hard to keep this place from becoming one.

I think you're dismissing the competitors too early. It can be viewed more broadly as well.

You are not just competing with similar businesses, but also the potential that customers literally 'do nothing'.

In addition to that, there could also be legacy solutions or alternative ways of avoiding the issue that your company seeks to solve.

Another important spin on this might be if you /should/ have had competition but they no longer exist. That's something that the search here can turn up and provide further input for the other thought points.

A great way to look like an idiot is to get up in front of VCs and say there's no competition. The points that you bring up are all much better things to talk about than a flat "we have no competition" claim.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com