Hacker News Reader

Comment by redshirtrob | Hacker News Reader

This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just not generally true, but it's often repeated as though it were.

It's demonstrably not true that you must be a user of a product to build a good product. To pick a random example: I doubt all pacemaker firmware developers have heart conditions that require pacemakers. I can conjure plenty of similar examples--some from my own work history.

That's not to say you shouldn't empathize with your users. You should. And, that's not to say it's not sometimes an advantage to also be a user of a product or service. I suspect it can be an advantage in many circumstances. But, I don't think it's a necessary condition to make something really good.

View on HN

The pacemaker example doesn't resonate with me. Its a very well-posed problem - don't let the patient die. You don't have to be user to understand how to make things better. For things like personal computing its a bit different. Problems are very ill-posed and often the question is what to make. In the second category its better to start with a map of the future and refine it with user feedback. However often users don't know what they want and then you need folks like Jobs.

Perhaps I should have quoted the specific point I was responding to:

> You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good.

That doesn't say anything about product or market. It's a very general statement that I happen to find rather dangerous in terms of hiring/employment practices. I tossed out pacemakers as a very obvious counter-example. I could come up with plenty of others--some from my own work experience.

I did try to couch the comment a bit. I do think there's value in being a user of your own product. I do not think it's a necessary precondition though. And treating it as such unnecessarily constrains the candidate pool. That's the point I was trying to make.

It's like being a chef but not wanting to eat the food you cook.

For example, a lot of people want their salmon cooked extremely well done, when you as the chef, think this is wrong, but this is what the customer wants, so you do it anyway, but you no longer care about it.

I didn’t mean that you should only hire candidates who are existing users of your product.

Haven’t you ever had moments, while using something, where you encountered some stupid behavior that made you go, “Do the people who make this thing ever use it themselves??”

This is related to the concept of qualia [0], and sentiments like “Be the change you want to see in the world.” or “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Yes: someone without a heart condition will not be able to fully appreciate all the nuances of a pacemaker.

Of course that’s not to say they can’t contribute to the development and production of pacemakers. That’d be absurd.

But unless the thing you make is actually used by you, you will only [need to] perform within the specifications of your job, get paid and get out.

You won’t be able to identify any deficiencies that aren’t immediately obvious, and unless user feedback impacts your profits, you may see no reason to improve something. It’ll be /r/NotMyJob.

But if you’re an active user of your own product, you’ll have a much higher chance of noticing annoyances and shortcommings and fix them before waiting for user feedback to bubble up through the corporate chain to influence a change in the product.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

I work for a company that makes a very popular social app and I don’t use the app whatsoever, and refuse even to download early adopter versions to test.

Sometimes people at work give me crap for this. But they know my engineering contributions are among the best in the company, so what can they say?

It’s foolish to disqualify people for this. Imagine saying men cannot ever work for a team that delivers feminine hygiene products, or a woman can never work for a product team that makes male health products.

Hm the advice to be a user would apply for startup founders right? I definitely wouldn't expect engineers to be active users especially in a more mature company with PMs.

Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.

It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it.

That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education (in a field other than software), and you're slotting into an existing market structure rather than creating a new one. That means the potential market sizes are smaller, the risks are better judged by people with advanced technical degrees, and the effectiveness of capital is less. All those make them a poor fit for YC.

> It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it.

I really want to believe that your statement is true, but it appears to be eliding 4 dimensions into 2.

All businesses, regardless of size or type or industry, will run the risk of going out of business. Let's call this market risk [0]. Market risk is to businesses as dying is to humans, with the small difference being that businesses can postpone dying by pivoting to a different market. (Humans have not yet figured out how to postpone death and it is unlikely we ever will.)

What makes startups particularly exciting to discuss on HN is that they come with an additional challenge: technical risk.

Both risk types suffer from the what/how dilemma you pointed out: what to sell & how sell it (market risk); and what to build & how to build it (technical risk).

To mitigate technical risk is why YC strongly advises batches to camp out of SV for the first few months of the life of the company due to the agglomeration benefits -- the unusally high concentration of technical talent, relative to anywhere else in the world. This increases the odds they'd meet the kinds of technical people necessary to solve the "how to build it" part once the "what to build" part has been identified. If "how to build it" is impossible due to the laws of physics, or not yet possible due to the underlying economics, a startup can fail fast and focus on what is technically possible within the ambits of their meagre resources. With technical risks out of the way, a startup is no different from any other business.

Running a physical bookstore has nearly zero technical risk but suffers from lots of market risk due to competitive pressures from a better stocked bookstore opening next door, or from half a dozen new bookstores hoping to mop up the economic surplus rumored to be present in book selling in a highly affluent neighborhood. Or from an out-of-state competitor like an online retailer.

"What to sell" & "how to sell it" are existential questions that will always hang over the head of any business as long as there is competition.

I'd say that the primary risk of any business is understanding what to sell and how to sell it. Just ask any mom&pop bookstore that closed due to Amazon. Or Jawbone, even though they surmounted their technical risks with a ~$1bn war chest.

[0] https://brendansterne.com/2015/10/07/technical-risk-vs-marke...

Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ignorant) idea of what to improve, or to oscillate between different focus points based on possibly incoherent or inconsistent customer feedback.

I have yet to meet a startup for whom hiring a market research firm and depending upon the results in the report gave them useful information that turned into a big opportunity. There's a simple reason for this: if such a report exists, then a big company who actually has money has already hired that market research firm and executed on those results, and that market opportunity is closed.

I can scarcely believe this response!

The same would be true of any activity the start-up could do to gather intelligence on a market opportunity, whether it is incubating a prototype and obsessing over user feedback, consuming market research, getting feedback from potential investors, etc. etc.

If doing X could reliably lead to growing the product revenue underpinning the startup, then there is an arbitrage opportunity for any better capitalized actor to swoop in and do X first/better.

I also think your claim is implicitly very narrow in imagining a certain type of startup.

For example, my sister opened a popup restaurant that participates in a weekly farmer’s market in a large public park near where she lives. She absolutely spent money on marketing reports and restaurant consulting to understand if her ideas for menus and how to operationalize cooking the food quickly, on-site had any likelihood of being profitable.

The idea of just piloting the menu and kitchen strategy, then hoping to pivot based on feedback, makes no sense for a startup business like that, where you need hard research data on the market before even prototyping a product.

The difference is that if you do all the research yourself, nobody else on earth knows it, and hence nobody is going to sell it to the highest bidder. If you've discovered a huge untapped market that can be served in a scalable way, you're certainly not going to sell that information; you capitalize on it yourself.

A popup restaurant is not a startup in the sense that is normally discussed on this site - namely a scalable business that focuses on owning an asset that you can sell access to lots of different customers, over and over again. When you own a popup restaurant (or any other small service business), your customer base is limited to the number of people you can physically serve. If, however, you own a software app that is the go-to place that people go for meals on demand, you can sell access to those customers to many small popup restaurants, and charge them a good fraction of the additional profits generated by customers you bring in the door.

That has a big effect on the market dynamics. There's room for many popup restaurants, because each is limited to a small number of customers. There's only room for one or two Yelps, or DoorDashes, and they all tend to get in each other's business, because there's no limit to the number of customers they can serve. If there's going to be thousands of companies in your space anyway because each of you is limited by your work ethic, there's no harm in buying information from a commodity information provider (who, BTW, is going to be making a lot of money). If there's only going to be one winner in your space, you better be it, and the existence of a market research firm who's aware of your market is a good indication that you're already too late.

True, best not to make generalizations.

I feel like it could apply to pacemakers as well. I feel like certain qualities, features, annoyances, subtle benefits, etc could only be experienced if you actually went through having one installed, dealt with it every day, etc.

Being "a user of your own product" is a cheap proxy for caring about quality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com