Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time | Hacker News Reader

Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time

roshfu.com

88 pointschoxi42 comments

I feel this story demonstrates one of the "emotional vulnerabilities" of Lean Startup/MVP movement. You're going to crank a product out and then you expose it -- whether it's deliberately marketing it, pitching it to investors, showing it to friends, etc. You expect to hear something back like, "great concept, bad implementation," and so you just gradually improve the implementation until people stop thinking it's bad.

But sometimes you'll hear, "terrible concept, so I don't even care about the implementation," and that can be very demoralizing. Really, it should be taken as, "your implementation is so bad that I don't get the concept," which requires the same iterations of "improve the implementation." But it's too easy to basically just hear, "you guys don't know what the hell you're talking about so why don't you stop wasting everyone's time, including your own."

As we so often quote to ourselves: "your startup idea idea is worthless by itself." But that's not entirely true. Startup ideas indeed have no value to anyone by themselves. But they must have worth to the startup founder, because without that burning desire to solve that particular problem, how can a startup founder have the mental fortitude to persevere when their first iterations get very negative feedback?

This guy was not doing the Lean Startup thing, not in my view.

The only person who's opinion counts is the customer. And the only signal that really matters is whether they give you money. And then keep giving you money.

Showing things to "experts" and then quitting because people rain on your parade has been going on since the beginning of time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_v_ubcYsTI

Having been a judge at some of the Lean Startup Machine events, I think it's very important for participants to learn take criticism somewhat lightly. One should never disregard the observations or concerns that people raise, but one shouldn't believe them outright either.

Being an entrepreneur means seeing an opportunity nobody else has noticed, so naturally 90% of the people you talk to will think your idea is dumb or uninteresting. You just have to learn to sift out the valuable bits and come to your own conclusions.

that's a really good point -- I was thinking myself how you'd consolidate this with being lean and I think you articulated the difference very well

For me at least, the "fail early, fail often" philosophy builds up the emotional scars to get over being emotionally vulnerable.

Secondly: so what if that guy doesn't like the bunch of words I typed into an IDE. If he's not going to help me make software he likes, he's wasting my time.

Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.

It's an unfortunate fact about any creative industry that a person with clout can completely put the brakes on an promising idea just because it doesn't fit neatly into their worldview. This reminds me of the story when Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pitched Bat out of Hell to CBS. Clive Davis, the executive, says "Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C. You don't know how to write a song. Have you ever listened to pop music?"

Hurtful. But even though this guy was a pretty successful A&R person, he wasn't clairvoyant, as the album was a huge hit. It's unfortunate that it demoralized their team instead of serving as bulletin board motivation material.

Clive Davis was a piece of shit. But he was a successful piece of shit, so nobody realizes that he's actually a piece of shit. Everyone thinks he's Brian Epstein, but he's really no better than Suge Knight, if you want to make analogies. He takes what he believes are "great images" and puts his own cookie-cutter formulaic music behind it. Fake, fake, fake.

Just like these "judges" of the startup industry. Fuck them.

Exactly. The loudest voices and most effective negotiators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. The Suge Knight comparison is apt - someone with resources and intimidation skills, yet no talent pertinent to the meat of the industry, whether that's music production or tech. The game industry has it pretty bad, too, as far as promoting creatively bankrupt smooth talkers as soon as they've had the slightest brush with success. Try rewinding the clock a few years and pitching Minecraft to any of these guys, and they'd give you the game industry equivalent of Clive's rant, which I guess would be "Do you even play games? You have to have a narrative, an objective, a scruffy white male lead, and the ability to blow shit up. I don't even know what you're doing here, this isn't a game, it's a map editor. Nobody's gonna go for this shit." The solution is, of course, to scope your project like Notch did and release it yourself without listening to the cynics :)

you actually can blow shit up in minecraft, and its fun too ;)

As you said, this is true for any creative community. The most hard core and painful critiques I have ever seen came at a university architecture design show. Ask any theatre performer what they think about the critics.

Do you think the experts at the time thought the Apple computer was very good, or that personal computers in general would be anything more than a toy?

Grow a thick skin, or don't listen to "experts". You won't be around long otherwise.

> Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit about your team"? That's harsh.

Thats the sentence that got me too. It shouldn't be personal and that was very personal. Harsh comments about the idea, the technology used, the implementation, the design or even the presentation is acceptable but to say no one gives a shit about your team is almost like being racist (in the startup world).

I say this because it seems that the judge was making a judgement on someone simply because they might not have had any rockstar engineers or might not (up to this date) done anything of note, which really doesn't mean anything, simply judging the book by its cover without even willing to read the summary at the back.

I always take predictions like "no one will be using SMS in 10 years" with a grain of salt. Time has shown that experts are basically clueless when it comes to predicting that far in the future.

10 years from now, no one knows what we'll be doing, or if the mobile phone will even be an existing paradigm. What you did know at the time is that you were able to convince 300 people that it was useful, today.

I think if you can build something that is valuable to people today, you give yourself the opportunity to figure out what will be valuable to people tomorrow.

Yes, it's true that you should "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been," but if you have an open slapshot, take it.

Yes, what a boneheaded argument. Even if the prediction was true, there's a lot of money to be made in 10 years. Should we stop buying new cars because there will be hovercars in 2022? Those judges are going to be holding their breath for a long time, waiting for that glorious day.

They could start gaining SMS users now and in ten years those same users could be subscribed to Google Talk mailing lists through their system or whatever.

I predict we will still be using SMS in 10 years. While we're at it, email too will be used in 10 years.

Both may have evolved by then, but they'll still be the same underlying service. Never underestimate the impact of resolve of companies invested in technology to support that technology ad infinitum ad absurdam.

I think your only mistake after building something was showing it to "the experts" and trusting their decision.

Make something, get customers and succeed, don't get customers and keep trying, and you will eventually create something of value. At that point it'll be "the experts" calling you to give you money. Until then consider them useless.

I totally agree but with the caveat that I don't blame anyone, including the judges. We chose to participate in a competition and they gave us their feedback on what we did -- nothing malicious, we just pitched the idea prematurely.

... and it might still be a bad idea. the mere fact that sendhub has raised $2m does not mean that this is a good idea.

People told us we were crazy for months. During our YC interview PG told us it was one of worst ideas he'd heard. Thus, I believe founder conviction is one of the most important parts of building a company.

As an aside, SendHub isn't really focused on SMS marketing, there are lots of services out there for that - people use SendHub for both interactions within their business as well as communication with customers.

That's awesome, I have a lot of respect for your conviction.

This is rather off-topic, but this is a problem I'm having now with the product I'm currently developing (http://www.instahero.com). I believe it's a good idea and that there's a need for it, but feedback hasn't been great.

At any rate, this post gives me hope that I'm not wasting my time, so I'll try hard to get the MVP out and see what customers think.

Yes, yes, yes. Have people try it out.

Some of them won't like it, of course. They could be the wrong audience, or the wrong end of the right audience. You should only quit when a) you are sure no significant audience for your product exists, and b) your many discussions with customers haven't led you to discover an audience that you can pivot to serve.

That's very good advice, thanks. The usual problem, though, is that you don't know if it's worth building (so you aren't wasting your time), so you need to go with your gut if you consider that a market big enough exists for the sort of thing you're building.

I think there is a market, so I'll post here when the MVP is ready, and see if people find it useful. Thanks again!

Why would you need to go with your gut?

If you have gut feeling, I think the right approach is to express that as a hypothesis. E.g., "Small retail businesses need an easy way to take credit cards."

Then you can go out and interview a number of people in that market. If you find a lot of interest, get them to sign letters of intent. E.g., "If you create a way for me to take credit cards on my iPhone, I'll sign up for $10/month plus 4% in fees."

Based on your interviews and your letters of intent plus public statistics, then you do some math to see if there's a market there.

Please do announce your product here. Feel free to email me directly as well, and also consider joining one of the Lean Startup Circle mailing lists if you want to discuss LS techniques further.

Its a myth that customers will know a good product when they see it. They have to be 'marketed'. That's a big part of building a company, as much work as the product.

So its no shortcut to say 'just ask the customer', you'd have to pretty much build the company to do that in a meaningful way.

Because the question really is not 'do enough customers like this product?', but instead 'can you market this product to enough customers?'

I'm not saying, "Just ask the customer."

I'm saying that to discover if there is a market for your products, you need to study the people you think are in your target audience through direct interviews. And then get them to agree to buying something once you have it ready.

This is a good proxy precisely because you are marketing it to them. Understanding a customer's needs, showing how your product will fit the need, and then getting a commitment is basically a direct sales process.

This is one of the core messages of the Lean Startup approach: you can learn a great deal without ever building the company in a meaningful way.

Right, and its a message I don't believe in. Its not much use to ask existing customers without a strong marketing message - half the battle is the marketing.

So you only learn 'I'm not much good at marketing'. Or 'I need to work harder on marketing'. Nothing really about the product.

I see.

How many interviews have you done along these lines? And how many products have you taken from idea to on the market, and by which means?

Ive spent 20 years developing software, including customer surveys. Mostly through established companies, where the customer has a vested interest in cooperating.

Its often the same storey - the customer wants a horse that pulls harder and uses less hay. They don't want a tractor, they can't conceive of wanting a tractor, and they object to giving up the reins.

I don't doubt some information is worth something. But what's the success rate? What's the correlation between 'asking a customer' and sales? Nearly zero in my experience.

I note that you didn't answer my questions.

Your experience as described isn't really relevant to the Lean Startup approach, which would explain why your intuitions mislead you. The people who practice this method are aware of the "faster horse" problem and have techniques for dealing with it.

I often hear investors advise each other to have a contrarian point of view, not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of seeing the hidden gem that others think is a piece of coal. The same advice has been given to entrepreneurs too.

Some advisors are harsh. Judges at a contest, even harsher. It sucks when they deflate one's balloon, but there's nothing harsher than the market. Good investors know this, and this is why they rely on traction more than anything else - even their own judgment.

In other words: If this was an idea you were truly passionate about, screw the judges and validate the idea with customers. They're you're most important data point.

Thanks for sharing the story though. I've been in your shoes many times. It's been a hard lesson to learn.

I wouldn't kick yourself too much. The jury is still very much out on the Sendhub business model.

FWIW, I have a blog about it at http://gcrawshaw.posterous.com/ycombinator-vs-the-telcos

Stick around and you'll find that every idea you ever had and/or project that you abandoned winds up getting built by somebody else and funded to the tune of X-millions. That's a good thing... it means you have good ideas, or at least that somebody with money also thinks the idea was good. You can't look at this as missing out on anything, because A) You learned a ton and get to keep trying newer and better things. And B) Funding is not an accomplishment in itself, it's a means to an end. Time will tell if they become profitable or exit. If THAT happens, it's entirely appropriate to get licquored up and call everybody jerks. Also, "hello" from 6 rows up on the Chicago bus. :-)

haha, thanks! I wouldn't mind if they did well at all, they had the grit to keep pushing on with it where we didn't.

I am tired of "jury culture". These days people's highest ambitions often seem to be to impress some jury (most obvious in those horrible talent shows on TV). Screw the juries!

Maybe the teams themselves are a difference as well. Not to sound like I'm putting you down (you got enough of that from the judges), but these days when everyone is talking about "investing in great teams, not ideas" and talent acquisitions are some of the most profitable exits for startups and their investors, it could be that BOTH of your ideas really do suck, but someone figured out that SendHub has a $2 million team working on it.

It sounds like to me that the main problem was the design or presentation of the product. "SMS newsletters" does indeed sound like a terrible idea.

"Nobody gives a shit about your team.". What a jerk!

yeah, name and shame to save others the surprise of this judge's jerkiness.

I don't understand why people don't name these sort of guys. I mean, it's not slander or anything, if it was actually said, you're in the clear to name the person who said it, no?

Well, it's a funny thing, right? You want to be professional, and sometimes people do things they regret. Everyone makes mistakes.

On the other hand, how else do people know who these people are? There's no way for us to know if this is a mistake or a common occurrence.

Sure, that's true. However, the reader could probably judge this reasonably well, a one-time occurrence could be dismissed as a bad mood, but consistent behaviour like this would disincentivize dickish behaviour in people...

In their shoes I wouldn't name the person publicly. Maybe I misheard or misunderstood something. Maybe it made sense in some broader context that I missed. Maybe their dog or their mom just died.

Or it could be that they're just an asshole, but there will always be assholes. Much better to make everybody aware of asshole behavior patterns. Then they're ready to deal with the situation, which they're much more likely to encounter than the specific idiot.

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