Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, you need to more clearly define and say what exactly you do.

From a quick look at the projects and ideas you currently have, it appears to me that this is a really slow way to go about building products and may even lead people down the wrong path. Couple of things stood out for me:

Spending days on logo design and "testing" - you really can't afford to do that. It is better instead to build something and put it out. You can get 10 people to use a bad product, but literally no one will use your logo. This must be against lean, no?

Testing assumptions such as "People are comfortable dating within their extended friend group" - that's taking things too far. It's good to be skeptical of one's beliefs but you can't completely throw gut feeling and common sense out the window.

Doing such things may give one the illusion of progress but it is a waste of time.

I'm also wondering who the project founders test their assumptions with. If it's not with the intended users of the final product, then it's worthless.

Everyone loves giving product advice (hi!), but you can safely ignore most of it if their answer to the question, "Will you use this?" is No.

Making new products is hard. But you can't change that by asking everything to the users. You do have to trust your gut and build stuff. Regardless of what people say, their actions don't follow.

Making decisions with more than 75% of the information is by definition hesitation. - Josh James

Thanks so much for the feedback, first of all!

- ISSUE: Our process actually being slow. It's true that spending a week and a half on something like a logo design is not exactly lean production. But we're actually going above and beyond that. Junto is as much about bringing in feedback on all aspect of production as it is about providing entertainment and developing relationships with potential users – not to mention education about startup process. We want to create advocates earlier and give them reason to feel connected to the startups. Allowing their feedback on things like logo design is easy, inviting and fun for a lot of people. The amount of time it takes is simply a by-product of leaving enough time for people to respond.

And more importantly, behind the scenes, we are bustling with back-end development, wireframing, putting together the business plan and doing a lot of things that don't really make for good public updates... until they are completed. So there's definitely a constant-feedback aspect but it only publicly appears slow when many hours are being spent behind closed doors, iterating away.

- ISSUE: General assumption testing and not going with gut. We'd also agree that saying something like "people are willing to date within their friend group" is pretty general and kind of a 'duh' statement, but our assumption tests are actually more geared towards allowing viewers to share their experiences and gain insight from their stories. We've gleaned a nugget of helpful insight from every test we've done so far. And again, all of this kind of goes back to building a dedicated audience well before product launch.

So in many ways, we agree with you! And will try to be more conscious of such as we move forward. The order in which we do things and what we show publicly will surely change a lot in the coming months.

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