Comment by spolsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spolsky | Hacker News Reader

Success does not come from Getting Real, or from Lean Startups, or from any other business book. It doesn't come from sitting in your room reading Inc. Magazine or Joel on Software. It doesn't come from great typography or presentations worthy of Steve Jobs.

I'll bet if you look at your server logs, you'll see that this post on Hacker News got you more traffic than you've had since you launched. I would guess you got about 35,000 humans listening to your story tonight.

Get it? It's a story. It's about the story.

Sitting around the campfire telling stories.

You can reboot, relaunch, pivot, A-B test, Go Lean and Get Real in your room until the end of time but until you have a story to tell you're not interesting and if you're not interesting nobody will pay attention: not poor teachers, not rich teachers, not anybody.

OK, congratulations, you have now learned one thing about business. If you'd like to learn another couple of thousand send me an email and come work for me in New York; it looks like you're a pretty decent product designer and programmer.

This is not an example of someone following the advice of the smart people and failing. This is someone not following advice and making most of the common mistakes people warn about.

He's a sole founder, working part-time, in Colorado, on a problem he doesn't have, in enterprise software, for schools, with no distribution plan, no team, no domain expertise, in a niche market, and giving up after 1 year.

Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck against himself.

A couple of your points are narrow-minded. I have to live in the bay area, work on a team, and work on it full time to build a viable business? Come on, there are other paths to success.

Your points about domain expertise, and working on a problem I don't have are right on. I learned the hard way it's way harder to build software to meet someone else's needs. (Even though 3 immediate family members are teachers, including my wife.)

"Of course, he still could have succeeded, but he definitely stacked the deck against himself."

At least he apparently landed himself a job :). Being positive.

(I don't deny that fact that yours are good points.)

The real story might be that his product just isn't as good as the competition. It took 10 seconds of searching to find https://www.igradeplus.com/, which on the surface looks like a much better offering.

He seems critical of his customers and dismissive of his competitors, both of which are big red flags.

You are correct. Not as good + niche = death

My attempt at a story was taking a stance in the ongoing education reform controversy. It earned me the chance to write the post for GOOD, and got the one blogger to cover my app. That one guest post got me all 10 of my paying users.

Story is huge, but I couldn't make it over the hump. Maybe my story wasn't compelling enough.

Thanks for the kind words, the advice, and the offer. Will send you an email shortly.

Just curious. I read Running Lean and always had problems with its advice. I just recently got my hands on Lean Startup and think the advice is a lot better.

Running Lean is part of the problem. People can't tell you what they want, you can only observe what they actually do.

You should have pivoted Knack so that its customers were parents who wanted to track the progress of their child against other children. That's what parents just love to do. Parents should have been begging their teachers to use the tool, then it would have been adopted and you probably could have charged a lot more for it.

Right, but the problem is what do you do if you have no one to observe? That's where Running Lean makes sense to me. Start with highly structured interview scripts and hypotheses, and piece together data by limiting the possible set of answers.

A pivot for consumers sounds like a great idea, but we all know consumers are more fickle than professional audiences. Turns out teachers behave a lot like consumers, which I should have figured out much much sooner.

So, I'll just repeat what The Lean Startup would say (or at least my interpretation):

a) You still have your hypothesis, but you can't validate them until you have actual data. People's opinions about how they might act to some situation in the future is not data. People actually using your product is though.

b) Smoke test demand for the product in the first place. You could have created a sign-up page in a weekend and spent a few weeks marketing that if you wanted to feel comfortable with potential demand. These guys did just that and had thousands of sign-ups before they even begun programming their product (http://vizualize.me/).

Go on Facebook right now and share a link to a webpage that you can track. When you share out the link use the headline "National grade statistics released. Is your child a genius or falling behind the curve?". Tell me how many people clicked on that link. That's your smoke test. My gut tells me parents are not exactly your typical consumers. Parents emigrate to new countries where they have to work menial jobs but so that their kids can attend better public schools than what would be available to them at home.

c) Create a "concierge" MVP for your first few customers. It's an MVP version of your software that the first few customers use in which you can assess the usefulness of features before you program them.

You could have set your wife up with Google Docs templates and watched how she used a few templates over the course of a couple of months of teaching. You could have scaled this out to a pilot program of a few customers, and setting up the templates could have been a weekend job. Only after getting feedback about likes/dislikes with the Google Docs templates solution would you have started to build your software.

Joel, what would be the story behind trello?

This is an incredible response.

The core problem is that he tried to make & sell a product to people who are not tech-savvy, who are famously slow adopters and who are also famously broke & skinflinty.

To people, in other words, who didn't want what he had.

All the story in the world won't fix that.

That's why Jarrod is learning a better, more effective approach in my 30x500 class :)

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