Why isn’t someone using my software product or open source tool?
threadreaderapp.com
threadreaderapp.com
Some developers even do that with themes. Yeah, I am not going to DL a theme file only to find out I don't like.
It's like targeting the market of murderers, and giving them a better toolkit particular to their operations, and complaining that everyone who isn't your market is hating it and drowning out the product's value.
If you're going to help people do something widely reviled, then do it in secret.
So focus on a very narrow use case and make that as simply and frictionless as possible to solve (installers for all platforms, bundled libraries, simple tutorial for the main use cases people are downloading your software for, ...). Your product may still support all the cool stuff you put into it, but accept the fact that most people wont use those features.
Once your user is invested in your software he might try to expand his use further which is what might keep your users invested, but to get there you need those specialized narrow key use cases that are your hook to get them.
They wont even get to reading the description or trying out the product/demo if they don't know it exists. Point #7 is getting at this, but I personally feel like this should be Point #1 and probably also have a load of sub-points about it :-) A single post on a forum or a handful of blog/twitter posts probably isn't going to cut it.
You need relentless self-promotion via appropriate communities (which might be twitter, but possibly IRC, forums, mailing lists, hell even youtube) in a genuine & non-spammy way that is appropriate, interesting/useful, and (crucially) relevant to the people in that community/discussion. Once your product becomes more widely used and well-known enough in those communities, then it starts to become a bit more scalable since your happy users will suggest people use your tool for you, and you dont have to be the one to pounce on every opportunity to suggest people use your tool to solve their problem X.
Marketing is tough and its a really crowded space.
This I find is an important one most developers forget. I want to know why you consider your tool/library different from the solutions already out there. It might be better in some respect, it might sacrifice some functionality for the benefit of simplicity, usability, etc. Or you might have created a 'yet-another-X' in which case I probably won't bother as I might already have a solution I'm fine with.
Why?
In the absence of sufficient trust, a definitive explanation is always required for a party to be at ease.
- Features - what the tool does;
- Advantages - how are the features better than the competitors';
- Benefits - why are the advantages useful to my business.
Users (devs) are typically interested in features but the people who make usage/purchasing decisions (often non-devs) are more interested in benefits.
Here's the description for, to take an example, Rust:
> Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
Succinct and understandable, and exactly what a developer chancing upon the project wants to see.
Were this to be made accessible to non-developers it would need to read something like this:
> Rust is a programming language for developing computer systems and applications that runs blazingly fast and prevents errors when programs try to access the wrong memory, or attempt to work with that memory in two different places at once.
It would be less readable and less appropriate for the primary audience of the product.
No, it could read:
"Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast and is more reliable and secure."
To a non-technical user, they basically mean "good", which is all the non-technical user really cares about. To a non-technical user, "prevents errors when programs try to access the wrong memory, or attempt to work with that memory in two different places at once" is just as much word salad as " prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety". They don't know what either one means or why it's a good thing.
And the first question the technical user is going to ask is "what makes it reliable and secure?"--which is what the technical description is for.
> prevents errors when programs try to access the wrong memory
Reads as "Prevents errors when <wizardry>"
That's what I learned from my own open source work; without meaningful social connections, it took me about 10 years working nights and weekends to get one of my projects to reach 200K+ downloads per month. I have about 4 full years of 'failed' projects behind me; even though they were actually successful from a technical perspective.
It may come across like this, but most often, a decision is made against a solution by an individual, because the risk of a project like this not being maintained after a while is quite high.
I don’t mean methodical as in heavy or complex. Example, there’s a short book on designing good usability into a UX with some really simple and quick methods (https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Yourself-ebo...).
Isn’t choosing which open source project to invest in a bit like market research, as is UI/UX design? Maybe that’s stethching an analogy.
The point is I always have strong intuitions and opinions about what project to invest time in, independent of interest/passion. However, it seems even one or two more methodical decisions processes could be provide useful data points to factor in.
If you feel roughly as passionate about two projects, why not try to maximize your chances all the work will go somewhere?
"Please forward to marketing" is based on one of my highest-rated HN comments. It starts:
Tell me what your product is. What it does, where it works, how it does it, what it requires. Is it a physical product (or is it shipped in one), an interactive application, a Web service, a programming language / tool? As a reader notes, don't make me use Wikipedia to figure out WTF your company does.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...
She's crowdsourcing it, very efficient from her perspective.
Somebody relatively new to the tech industry who seems to have time to write tons of "expert opinions"?
I have seen more and more of these sorts of articles coming on HN, and other tech orentend places on the internet. I am starting to question if coding is the right path for anybody doing tech, and simply skip stratit to being a expert in field that takes decades to master even a small segment.
It's not every single post. The ones I am talking about are ones where they have worked a hand full of a jobs -- about a year each and yet find themself speaking at conferences and writing grand articles as if they are somehow a proven expert in the topic they are talking/writing on, but lack the actual experience to justify their stance.
To me, the real experts who have something valuable to say are probably too busy writing code and solving problems. It is not until much later in their career can they even begin to connect the dots of their mistakes and success to be able to talk about them.
I think people should be leery of advice given by those with no real track record to support their views and positions.
Yes, I know this is a bit of rant, but it seems to me that the industry is starting to look a lot like other industries where a class of people who actually can DO things are getting left at the sidelines while those who only talk about things are being trumpited as superstars and leaders of the industry -- without ever writing any significant amount of code or being a valued team member.
Please feel free to correct my thought process on this, I am open to other interpretations of what is going on.
This article isn't that, though. It's some common sense recommendations from a person consuming software. Almost anybody can write that, and if it's actionable advice, so much the better.
Shallow topics can afford to have new people come in and give their opinion. I've got to say though, I'm not reading lots of those articles. I'm reading the articles that have technical depth. Just my preference.
Furthermore Basis seems based off the open source work of Richard Geldreich. The company seems to be attempt to license this work, or license derivatives of this work. Richard appears to still be involved.
I nearly watched/listen to everything posted by this company. Every wording in in future tense, with the exception to crush which is the free version, that had been available before the company existed, and was written by Rich Geldreich. There seems to be no information on the different between the free crush -- that existed before the founding of the company -- and the Basis, nothing you can tell from the there website anyways.
There is no doubt that people are using crush, and that even some people did buy licenses to the crush taken private version. The slides seem to indicate -- again crush is what is in use, and Basis "will" do x y or z. It seems they are using crush and basis interchangeably.
But even so, the slides clearly state that Rich wrote the software, and it seems to do so in such a way to make it clear that it was Rich. But that doesn't even matter. The point of my comments was not to argue about what somebody has or has not done.
But none of that actually matters, if I took everything the site said, and everybody else is saying here at face value the company, the people involved with maybe the exception of Rich are not industry experts on starting companies, running companies, or pioneering technology yet.
Simply having a one big named customer is like winning the lottery, so any advice anybody there would have about that would be a waste on the vast majority of people trying to start a company.
If you simply dug deeper you would see what Binomial is. The history goes a bit like this.
1) Hated interviewing (interview processes seemed to be rated if there was a job offer or not) 2) Hated working with people. 3) Found Rich. 4) Liked working with Rich, and Rich with Stephanie 5) Both decided they hated working with people and that people seem to be the problem. 6) Both decide to start working together as contractors. 7) Rich had crush, which was a successful piece of software. 8) Idea!!! Take free software and make a for pay software company out of it to pay the bills!
None of this is really up for speculation, she blogged all about it over the past 5 years.
Stephanie and Rich are super smart and talented people, and are doing some cool things.I look forward to seeing if they do become the type of people I think should be having blog post and articles posted on sites like HN. But as my main point is scuessess is not a switch, it does not happen instantly. The company, is too new, and at least the main member of it speaking at conferences and simply lack a history that suggest that they have consumed enough of information to really understand how they got to where they are and if there is anything they could say that would help others.
No I am not trying to stop people from writing about their experiences, but what I am concerned about is how HN and sites like HN seem to get flooded with tech and business articles from people who -- again -- seem to have a ton of time to write about things on a constant bases -- but lack a history around them that supports their views and thoughts on subject matters.
I have a lot more to say but don't have time time. But I should make it clear that the issues I have are with the poster, and that stupid site that concatenates tweets into articles. Things like that I feel are a plight on getting ture information transfer from those who know to those who don't know. I expect the bar to be a bit higher.
Okay.
- It's not a new trend. People at all levels of experience have been sharing good & bad advice for as long as talking has existed.
- Are you certain the author is inexperienced? She appears to own a functioning software company, which alone is more than most developers can say.
- So what if someone has less experience than you? This is an ad hominem argument. How much coding experience should one need before they're allowed to talk? Because the field of software development is growing, the majority of developers are newer. That will remain true until the day software development starts shrinking. What about her experience disqualifies her from sharing useful advice?
- She's right, many OSS devs complain about lack of exposure while at the same time not making it easy to understand or explain what they're doing. Programmers as a group have this problem, even very experienced programmers. She's right, the way to get attention is to spend some time making your project easy to find and easy to understand.
- She's right in a broader sense too. Good marketing is valuable, and it takes time and effort that is not programming. This applies to communication within a team, and it applies to starting businesses. This is something that took me personally a long time to learn. My decades of programming experience, surprise, didn't make me an expert in communicating the value of my software to other people.
Doesn’t this come close to veering into what WP says is a “well known as a fallacy”? (and what we all learned in whatever class that was in college? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority).
Does this fit your example: My first job out of school was as a developer on WordPerfect for Windows.
In short order I came to believe there were strategic mistakes being made (not the mistakes we made in code, mistakes at the exec level), as if there were a bubble or echo chamber around certain decisions, and that these strategic errors were an existential threat to the company.
Dozens of highly paid people working on OS/2 ports, and other non mainstream platforms. Not paying enough attention to performance even as it started to hurt product reviews, because Microsoft steadily invested tons of time into optimization. Many other similar things.
I asked for sit downs with some execs to offer alternative viewpoints on a few of these issues as food for thought. They listened, and watched, a early 20’s kid who looked 18, articulate these points.
Should I have not tried to be an “expert” with three months of experience? Should they have at least allowed a second, broader meeting with key people to air out contrarian ideas? Surely I wasn’t the only one who saw these things. Could they have avoided wiping a billion dollars in value off the books if they had more seriously listened to a more diverse set of opinions and ideas?
To be clear, sometimes less experienced people come with crazy, clearly impractical, even arrogant ideas that are not fully thought through. These should be constructively criticized and usually dismissed. Just remember, it’s not that unusual for experienced professionals to do the same thing.
How is experience relevant at all except probabilistically? Ideas and approaches speak for themselves. They either have merit or they don’t.
Should we ignore someone who keeps talking about how he can make a strong case for redefining our fundamental knowledge of physics? I mean the hell he’s not even a physicist he’s just a patent clerk without a PhD (not 100% certain but if I recall correctly there were interesting results before that degree was earned). More than one person had a chance to listen and didn’t.
Of course my experiences and biases over the years have lead to this opinion, but I will never dismiss out of hand an argument that at first glance seems to be made in good faith, and appears to have had careful thought put into it.
Moreover, if the argument has these attributes, and is also contrary to what I believe while a being business critical.topic, I’m more likely to read or hear it, at least until I’m sure it’s not a perspective I have already thoroughly considered.
It's just as important to evaluate the way you do things as it is to actually do them. Just because a method is battle tested doesn't mean that it's optimal, or even close. It's not a convex space, and it's certainly not a solved problem.
That said, I don't think that there's any particular dearth of the experts that you talk about writing about the industry. Maybe you only click on essays written by fresh talent, for some reason?
You've set up a strawman with some asinine assumptions about the author: "relatively new to the tech industry", "lack the actual experience to justify their stance", "without ever writing any significant amount of code or being a valued team member".
I am positive that Stephanie Hurlburt is smart and talented. I never intended to question those things. But question the onslaught of speakers who have don't appear to have a good backing for why they are experts other than "they spoke at conference X, therefor...". Making a single accomplishment does not automatically make you a expert. Experts are those who have spent years honing their skills and demonstrated success time and time again. An expert is not somebody who is mirly smart and talented and driven. Those qualities combined with time, successes and failures is what makes an expert an expert.
Upon second look I seem to be mostly agitated that HN has resorted to links to tweets concatenated into articles format, then suggesting buying PDF versions of said tweets.