Hone the Core of Your Product | Hacker News Reader

Hone the Core of Your Product

jamesyu.org

37 pointsjamesjyu5 comments

A user shouldn't have to understand every feature of your product for it to be valuable.

This is the best take-away and couldn't be more true. I think the majority of startups get it wrong. I consistently hear founders talking about 10 tiny features that when combined, their service is better than Facebook.

This seems like excellent advice.

I've got a heuristic for finding when you're not doing this: when you say "we'll make our product free for now, but we'll charge for premium features later, when we have some that people would be willing to pay for."

That seems to be less common now than a few years ago, but I've encountered it a lot. It's a good sign that you don't think the core is valuable.

How did you decide what the core of Parse is? If you happened to start with it, then how does one go about finding the core of their product?

Parse was started to solve a problem that all of us had seen and experienced. But, that's a long story, and I'll save that for another post :)

The core is the MVP. I'm personally a big fan of Steve Blank's Four Steps to Epiphany http://steveblank.com/books-for-startups/

In short: you need to build, test, iterate with real customers, and truly understand that the problem that you're solving is big enough for a business. Then, double down.

I was hoping you'd give me a lower level answer. I'm familiar with Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Lean startups, MVP, build, test, iterate, etc etc. But I'm sick of reading theories and the same one or two case studies being repeated as proof.

It doesn't sound like you started Parse with exactly the same core of the product that you are focusing on now. Reading about your journey towards it would be more useful than high level generalisations because they sound like magic mantras.

Sorry about the harsh tone, maybe I'm just bored of startup advice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com