Listening to users is bad.
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
Contrast this with your typical business: your best customers are the ones who join early and stay forever. Customers have an interest in the site/software continuing to evolve because they anticipate they will continue using it. Long-term customers are excellent sources of feedback because expertise with your problem domain is something to be sought after and carefully cultivated, rather than a black mark.
Or so goes the conventional "Your success is your own un-doing." online dating industry mantra. Most sites today are so terrible that a user is forced to run a near endless gauntlet of trials and tribulations before they meet anyone remotely suitable. This leads to a scarcity mentality which many people react to by 'latching on' to the first acceptable person. As a corollary, many people think that online daters are only in it to search for 'the right one.'
But in reality, most online daters would in fact like to meet "the reasonable 10" and have some options to choose from. That was our thinking behind http://flowmingle.com . We wanted to lower the cost of finding a reasonable person and setting up a date, and make going on a date a likely and regular event.
In this way, yes, your customers eventually leave, but in the meantime they have had a good experience and will come back if they need to. The supply of single people is endless and lucrative for an effective site that treats their customers well.
Flickr? Craigslist?
To create something game changing you have to be like apple, you just build interesting stuff and test it on users until you find something that works and then you release it to everyone.
How will we know if it works if you don't listen to the users? Quantitative information always benefits from qualitative feedback. It's really not enough to know what's successful if we can't tell how or why it's successful.
Also, the advice from almost anybody creating new and interesting products is to place yourself in the shoes of the user and build things that you yourself would find useful. Who should we be listening to then?
"X is bad. You must do Y to succeed."
Absolute statements like this are almost always dangerous to make, and I don't trust the articles that make them. Success or failure at anything is all about making the right tradeoffs. Advice should focus on helping you weigh those tradeoffs intelligently rather than dictating absolutes.
But dictating absolutes is so much easier, and I guess that's why everyone does it.
Very well said indeed!
is the best thing I remember reading on YC. I've read books that were less profound then that sentence. I always thought that, but as a newbie inventor/entrepreneur, it's good to have put so succinctly and up front.
Movies don't have 10 directors.
I thought English wasn't his native language, but maybe it actually is after all!
But then again, even in the comments in this thread, there's yet another guy who wrote "then" when he was (hopefully) aiming for "than". Too bad spell-checkers won't save you from that one. Not that I've ever used one.
Once again, I refrained from reprimanding him because this is HN and we're supposed to be a bit more understanding here.
I'll take this opportunity to point out, though, that one would have to be stone-cold retarded to pull off a grammatically equivalent mistake in my native language, Finnish.
Probably should have been, "To create something game changing, listening to users is bad."
For the other 99%, ignore your users at your own peril.
Like 500 people suggested and agreed about X. Definitely want to listen to that!
Then pay attention to how they react to it.