You're Overthinking It | Hacker News Reader

You're Overthinking It

engineering.gomiso.com

348 pointsmpakes53 comments

Upvoted just for this absolute gem:

[...] it also depends on where you are on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The lower on the pyramid your product is, the crappier it can look. If your product is core to helping people make money, pirate movies, or sell your useless couch, you don’t need a designer. But if you’re high on the pyramid, ugly/clunky UI makes it impossible to for people to see your vision.

Never heard this advice in reference to Maslow, but it's truth! I should print this up on cards and give it to a load of my tech and designer friends.

The entire "It's like [Craigslist/Amazon/eBay]... but with a beautiful design/UI!" fallacy falls to its knees with this paragraph.

I think that design could still be really helpful if its helps achieve one of those core 'needs.' Craigslist leaves alot to be desired when searching for apartments (my only experience with it) compared to Hipmunk's hotel search, which plots the results on a map with color/size coding.

I recently discovered padmapper while apt hunting, and it's a godsend. It scrapes craigslist for data and posts it to a map.

The killer feature is obviously to be able to look at a region and see what's available, but the filtering options are also way easier to use than craigslist's rather pathetic interface.

This is funny because housingmaps, mapping craigslist listings to google maps was the original mashup. The guy went and worked for google because he said he didn't think there were any good barriers to entry to run the idea as a business.

Craigslist is not just about apartments though. It's a general purpose online classified ad site. Building a lot of location plotting features might not have any relevance for 80-90% of the listings.

The advice in this article is dangerous for finding success and profit as an entrepreneur if your only knowledge relates to the needs of a developer. Developers are an infamously hard bunch of people to sell products to; as developers, I'm sure we've had all these thoughts:

- this is cool, but I could build something better (how many 37signal open source clones are there)

- this is cool, but way too expensive (Github complaints)

- this is cool, but let me use Google AdWords to get free upgrades (DropBox)

- this writing is great, but I'm blocking all the ads on the page (daringfireball)

Another problem is that when developers decide to do their own startup, the only domain they really understand is software development.

There are millions of people who have problems who can't code - building another bug tracker, productivity tool, email management app, GTD widget might be fun, but the economy of real "business" software that's out there is far larger and more lucrative.

Also you're missing out on opportunities that are outside of your field of expertise.

Just the other day I was watching Stanford's talk by David Friedberg about how he built the Climate Corporation which, in my words, provides bad weather insurance for businesses and farmers. The guy doesn't own a farm or a business that's impacted by weather, he's not a user of his own product, but he still went ahead and understood the intricacies of that industry and was highly successful.

Being your own product's user is fantastic, I think it really helps, however you'll be leaving out a lot of good ideas on the table.

Your argument rests on the weird assumption that the only thing developers do is write code.

Maybe I'm unique but my needs also include stuff like food, shopping, talking to friends, driving, running, clothes, and more.

Another problem is that when developers decide to do their own startup, the only domain they really understand is software development.

I don't care about the "domain". I've got a problem and I'm fixing it. I happen to be a developer, so I can use technology to fix it.

As the OP said, you're overthinking it.

"Maybe I'm unique but my needs also include stuff like food, shopping, talking to friends, driving, running, clothes, and more."

You probably don't spend 8-10 hours per day eating/preparing food, nor driving, nor running etc. You may engage in those things, but you're not an expert in those domains.

The OP point was that there's many lucrative domains out there that don't have optimal solutions to their problems yet, but most people who do software all day only really understand the ins and outs of the software dev industry as opposed to, say, the funeral business and their unique needs. Yes, you probably have been to funerals, and even said "wow, i've got a need/want for better funerals", but really digging deep in to an industry takes a lot of time and effort.

I bet Drew Houston wasn't spending 8-10 hours a day sharing files, neither was Zuck looking up student profiles all day long.

I don't agree with the notion that you have to understand the ins and outs of something to start working on it. See http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Do you think all of Basecamp's customers are software companies because that's the only domain 37s knows deeply about?

Funeral directors use Facebook too.

I wouldn't think "wow, i've got a need/want for better funerals". I would probably notice some specific problem and think how to solve it. If software can help, that's great, otherwise I'm not starting an undertaking business any time soon.

You end up needing to be willing to commit to learning a hell of a lot about an industry, and that's time you won't be developing. The tech, in most cases, is secondary to understanding the business needs and workflow of an industry. One of the most successful guys I know as a small business software guy took a year to take mortuary classes and work in the funeral industry to learn their needs before developing services for them.

I agree with this. If you want to be an entrepreneur, it doesn't matter if you start a construction company, a funeral service or flower delivery. You might not ever write a line of code and still have a perfectly profitable fast growing business.

The prob is that we're all tech geeks here and all we want to do is turn our fetish for coding into the next big thing, so we always try to think in terms of software solutions.

Facebook is an outlier. About DropBox, I'm sure Drew Houston spent every living hour digging into the intricacies of other solutions, the risks, what people wanted, etc when he decided he wanted to make DropBox.

You can pick up the domain knowledge while working on your product or before working on it, but you still have to get it somehow.

Another problem is that when developers decide to do their own startup, the only domain they really understand is software development.

I don't believe this to be true - most, if not all, developers have hobbies and interests. For example, I'm into photography, so I would much rather build a photography software that I would enjoy using rather than something to solve a carpenter's problem (just an example) that I don't really care about.

For me at least I find that the benefits for this is two-fold: one, like the author said, so that I can be my own critic as I possess the domain knowledge, and secondly, I'll be much more passionate about working on something that I care deeply about.

Exactly. Do something, lauch something, enjoy yourself, but dont call this a 'business' or yourself an 'entrepreneur'.

I'm somewhat curious what does all this have to do with the word "hacker" which denotes kind of approach to life really, in a way of "hacking" it.

Another approach, if you want to create something for a lucrative market but you're not a user, is to co-create your product with customers. This piece on how to identify a monetizable pain is great:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/11/18/nailing-th...

Clay Collins also advocates for a similar approach that he calls the "interactive offer":

http://mixergy.com/collins-interactive-offer-interview/

I think it's also a good thing to stop overthinking it in regard to Hard Work. The schlep barrier and uggh fields come to mind.

http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/

What are some ideas that you would do if you weren't concerned about "working smarter" or something having to be elegant from the get-go?

My most successful product has been a magazine (and let me define that success: very successful in terms of contacts it's given me, unsuccessful financially). The "build process" for that has been neither elegant nor free of mountains of schlepping.

Hi, what kind of magazine, is it an app magazine? Me and a friend of mine are making something similar, but for shopping in the android platform... Love to hear what you're doing!

Maybe I should write down every thing I use for a day and glean ideas from that.

Maybe you can write all issues that annoy you about each of those things you use every day, and then see if some of them are problems for others as well, and if they can be fixed? I heard once that it's a great way to generate ideas that might actually give value and bring some money back :).

I think there is definitely a problem with the realism that Hacker News unknowingly perpetuates. I would imagine people who read Hacker News are less likely to start companies because they are exposed to extremely intelligent people's comments on all things technological on a daily basis.

I think people forget that there are a lot of other characteristics besides intelligence necessary for successful Entrepreneurship

...so how would corporate banking systems get built?

Although I understand the sentiment, and have followed it with a number of my projects, an aweful lot of companies build and sell software that is not necesarily useful for their own purposes (banking, financial, retail etc).

A better and more general rule, and one that has been stated millions of times is simply its really REALLY important to known and understand your client*.

The client could be a 'normal' Internet user, or could be a multi-million dollar enterprise, but unless you understand them, you can forget trying to get money out of them! (and if they are a multi-million dollar enterprise, the people you need to sell to are very unlikely to be the people that actually use the system and you absolutely do need a mature product strategy and the necesary resources to even make a single sale).

Seems to me that the advice in the OP is intended primarily for someone doing a startup (or planning to). In that circumstance, you're probably not going to stick with such a high risk, even for high potential reward, unless you yourself fit into the group that would use it.

That is to say, you yourself are the client (sort of), meaning there's not so much need to make any effort understand the client, because you already know what you know/how you feel about $THING(/etc.).

It's a good point but there's a huge field of potential software and opportunity out there that we programmers are not the users of. Who should build it then?

Can you give an example?

I really don't get this narrow self-identification of oneself as a programmer. How does being a programmer stop or exclude you from being other things? I'm a programmer, husband, musician, cook, dancer, friend, teacher, comedian, shopper, businessman, writer, house owner, movie-watcher, music fan, son who lives away from his parents, and much more.

Programming is a great skill, but not my identity.

Sure, amongst other things I've written software for use by commercial pilots and nurses. I don't think I'll end up being either of those.

Start working really closely with someone who is a user.

Good point, but I think that is why there are more and more people preaching for teaching Everyone to learn coding. Education and support on how to help those users help themselves is how you can help. Anyway, there are far too few programmers to solve all the world's problems, so increasing the number of people being able to program something is a step in the right direction.

You just describe the complete and utter failure of Nerdistan: While the nerds solve their problems by writing software that caters for their nerd-needs (version control, editors, fluffy frameworks just yo name a few) , the rest of the world should just learn to program themselves when they want to solve their problems ...

There is a way out of this echo chamber though: don't teach others to program but let them teach you about their field.

A software industry who only caters for itself (the "scratch your own itch" fallacy) is irrelevant. How many Basecamps do you need?

I know what you mean by "let them teach you about their field", but I think the point of the whole discussion above was that you cannot design a very good product unless you use it yourself. I dont remember who said that in the first place, but I remember such things as "men can't really design stuff for women, because they don't really understand how they think". I am not sure if it applies to everything but there is some truth in that. In software, you can see a similar trend: Facebook is a good social tool because the funder actively uses it all the time. The iPhone is a decent phone because the CEO was going to be an active user. I have heard tons of stories from friends/coworkers where design decisions are taken by non-users, and they usually fail miserably once on the market.

I agree with you that spending a lot of time with others who are not like you is definitely an improvement, but it is still not going to be as good as if they were able to do something on their own.

By the way, that advice in the Steve Jobs biography isn't actually from Steve Jobs. I'm sure the OP knows this, but I just wanted to point out that it was from Mike Markkula's marketing principles paper entitled, "The Apple Marketing Philosophy"

This highlights one of my main problems with social media in general which is that popularity does not correlate well to utility. Even in a relatively niche community like HN there is still tendency towards shallower, more general articles simply because they are applicable to a wider audience so they inherently attract more upvotes. But if you're running a business, the most important thing will be domain knowledge, and the most useful information will not be something found in a blog post that goes viral, but insight and wisdom discovered by insiders who have concrete, applicable experience. Finding these people is of course much harder than popping open HN, but it's possible if you stay focused on smaller communities and networking within your industry. Keep your nose to the grindstone long enough and you will become one of these people.

That's not to say that there's no value to be extracted from popular subjects. Of course there is a lot of capitalization to be done on trends and fads, and mass markets are the biggest, but as a daily visitor to HN I think I can safely say that I could come here once every two weeks and gain almost the same marginal value, significantly less than what I'm gaining in daily work experience.

Something that I took away from this (awesome blog post) is perhaps not directly related: don't spend too much time worrying about competitors. Build your thing. Just. Build. It.

If you have innovated and not imitated you will have something that no one else has. It's really that simple. You could sit and fret about how easily Google could destroy you, you could worry about the fact that maybe Facebook offers a similar app/service/whathaveyou… None of that matters. Build your thing.

True originality always wins out in the end.

I agree with all that, except the end. By all means just built it, but true originality does not always win in the end. See success of Snuggie vs. earlier product Slanket for reference.

I have gone to work at a company within the industry I have built software for.

I have enlisted other companies within the industry to use our software before it is completed, so we can get it right before release.

My job is to help them reach required outcomes in the fastest and easiest way... this process has helped me to stop trying to imput what i think it best, which only clouds what customers really want to pay for.

Also really good advice:

A year into my first startup, my first major product epiphany was to never, never, ever try to build a product you couldn’t be a user for

You have to have the vision, understand everything around it. Relying only on (potential) outsiders doesn't cut it. You need prioritization, focus (" means saying NO"), simplify the UX... You need to be committed. Otherwise you just get "feature creep"

What evidence exists that building a product that you would use leads to a greater chance of success? I can think of plenty of counterexamples of entrepreneurs that have built successful products for an audience other than themselves.

I doubt you are going to fine the statistical evidence. Though that would be an awesome find.

The main reason I want to be the user of the product I make: it's 100 times easier to get out of bed in the morning to work on the thing you want to use that day. If you are working on something for someone else, and the "I'm an entrepreneur" honeymoon wears off and you are struggling to get your first revenue, it's HARD to work on that thing you think other people need. Even if you've got some evidence that other people need it.

Doing customer development is so much harder in practice than theory :) When you get to be your own customer, you get to save tons and tons of times waiting for folks to return your emails and calls.

A 'greater chance of success' is too loose a variable to really correlate with something like intuition. Success and its magnitude are highly variate. The best you can do is, as PG says, don't make the stupid mistakes.

Speaking of examples, a lot of products have come from building things for oneself (BaseCamp for instance.) Building a product you use may not be much of a help if you're making any fundamental mistake. However, it makes the life of the developer a hell lot easier.

When you are designing a service you use, intuition comes to your aid. Some things just feel right and some things just wrong. It is not something I can really put into words. Intuition, like determination, may not be something you could measure or plot on bar graphs but boy, it does matter.

Not disagreeing with the rest of the article, but what's wrong with craigslist? It's super clean, simple, fast, and easy to use. What could extra javascript/flash/ajax possibly add to the site?

You've thoroughly misunderstood design if you think it is "extra javascript/flash/ajax".

Go to craigslist, and try searching for only 1 BR apartments.

Would you really refuse to look at a 2 BR that's in your price range? Personally, I always just set a price and then take the best available. I guess if you wanted to pick a configuration and then take the best price, craigslist doesn't help filter much. But the price first approach is also the one every broker I've used took.

You're right. But keyword spam, daily reposting, and generic posts that direct you to another site are bigger offenders that make Craigslist really hard to use.

I would guess the vision is typically, well, "flash". In the "pizazz" sense of the word.

Let me just say thank you to the author. I pretty much over think every aspect of my life. Its good to have this little reminder.

You must know who their users and their needs, but not necessarily BE a user.

or, you know, you're overthinking the problem. ;)

In 5 words: eat your own dog food.

How does miso make money??

so true ....

Only making products that you are a user of is a great advice. Vote up.

Best advice in seduction also, for all those people who are reading a lot of "PUA"'s material.

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