Think Different – Think Users
foundersatwork.posthaven.com
foundersatwork.posthaven.com
As somebody who has been different their whole live, being different can happen when you don't take things as granted, because you will land on other conclusion as people who take things as granted.
But sometimes you will land at the same conclusion, for the obvious reason that a certain way of doing certain things is indeed very reasonable.
In my youth there were many people that tried to rebell against something, but in my eyes they defined themselves ex negativo: they acted a certain way because it was the opposite of the thing they didn't like. This is not free, because you are tightly coupled to the thing you want to differenciate yourself from. I always tried to instead decouple from those things and figure out which conventions are bullshit, which are in principle reasonable (but communicated or lived badly) and which are just prefect the way they are.
The key step however is not to take existing structure, culture and technology for granted and try to come up with your own ways of doing things. Realizing once in a while that you (badly) solved a problem that has been solved for decades can be humbling as well.
Prospecting, as opposed to farming. They find promising ideas, and try to transplant them into fertile soil. Match “idea people” with “make it happen people.”
Good prospectors can get quite wealthy. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it isn’t creating startups from whole cloth; it’s finding them “in the rough.”
It’s just that, for every Google and Facebook “unicorn,” prancing around SV, there’s a charnel pit, somewhere in the California desert, filled with 10,000 rotting corpses.
So, “thinking different” is one step, out of thousands, that is required to come up with a “disruptive” startup.
But I think that there’s also a great deal to be said for refining and optimizing the same stuff that everyone knows about.
Ford didn’t invent the automobile. He just figured out how to scale it. That involved some new thought, but also a lot of observation and refinement.
But I totally agree that a focus on the user is a really big deal. Jeff Bezos did that with Amazon, and it seems to have worked.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, and the same idea could be a success or failure depending on execution quality, and execution quality depends on people.
Making happen people are actually idea people, each of then have hundreds of ideas in their mind, that just have the guts to make them happen. They go in the arena and fight and most of the time they loose. Over time if they survive they get stronger and wiser and fighting becomes easier for them.
For finding those people that are a minority in the world you need attractors that attract people all around the world.
YC matches young "make it happen people" with money, resources and old people that "made it happen " in the past.
The "idea people" that believe they have a brilliant idea you should pay then 50% for are abundant and completely useless.
Once you become successful every day you will talk with one of those idea people that spend so much time dreaming and no time risking or working on their ideas, because getting in the arena and getting hurt is not enjoyable or beautiful.
“What it should feel like in an early stage startup is that you're having a little party with your users, and it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, because you're having such a great time.”
I feel like this is still underappreciated.
Sometimes what users want will get you to a billion. Sometimes it’ll kill you. What’s the difference?
Most founders would prefer better than 1% odds of course.
All users would like Fords in more colors than black, but all users would also like the low cost that comes from a simplified assembly line and repair center and distribution channel that comes from only having one paint color.
What users want will never kill you, but you have to consider all of the things that they want, not just the most obvious or apparent ones (or the ones with the loudest proponents).
They did, over time, choose car manufactures with different colors. But they also loved the price Ford could get for them making only one color available, at first.
The problem was that getting multiple colors made your car extremely expensive and the car had to wait way longer in the queue for the paint to dry. But only at first, over time those problems got solved and people could get to choose colors for cheap.
Today everybody wants closed 3d printers with swappable heads that could print multiple materials and support. They just don't want to pay USD3.000 for it when they can buy a printer for USD200.
If you want to be successful you always have to listen to your users. But you also need common sense.
That's how you distinguish between tilting at windmills and true gamechangers.
I sure hope some of these startups will take this to heart and serve the users.
I’ll pick on this one point. Software quality is infinitely better than it was in years past. My phone has an uptime more than windows 95´s theoretic maximum of 49.7 days. I never made it anywhere close to that because of crashes and bsod. Word crashing was a frequent experience. We all just knew to save constantly and reflexively.
Phones have uptimes larger than old conservative Unix workhorses
I think Apple not only has much better customer support than other FAANG's, I think they have objectively great customer service. If you have a weird issue with your hardware, Apple will almost always blindly give you a replacement. I mean, hell; you even have a brick-and-mortar store to go to and get help. Apple's software in recent years has frustrated enthusiasts, but I think the average user actually likes the aggressive simplification of UI and paring down of power-user features. There are definitely bugs, I can't argue that, and average users definitely run across them; but I'm not sure my aunt has the same perception of Apple's software quality as I do. In general, I think Apple makes things that people want to buy; if they were truly user-hostile, the balance sheet wouldn't look the way it does.
Nor are arbitrary appstore rejections with little power to appeal
But nobody else does anti-consumer patterns better than Apple either. Not even Google.
The big problem is, the average buyer doesn't see or know anything about that.
If you compare Apple's free support for it's software, or it's support for developers, to other FAANG companies then it isn't better. It's equally terrible. None of those companies are good at support.
I'd argue that macOS is several orders of magnitude more reliable than it was in the past. Early releases were terrible.
I know there are a lot of complaints about it here but I don't think that means much. People complain about everything here.