Filtering the noise created by vague business advice | Hacker News Reader

Filtering the noise created by vague business advice

crnkovic.me

51 pointsjcrnkovic19 comments

A lot of this advice is truly good. However, each of those “actions” requires you to learn what exactly that thing entails. It’s vague because it’s a gross summary, not because it is worthless.

Building a company requires a lot of different things. It’s impossible to break it down into a single nitty gritty list where each item is actionable for someone starting fresh.

Anything can be vague and non-actionable if you’ve never done it before. “Pick a cloud provider” can be just as vague as “Talk to prospective customers.”

The article does offer a great pointer. The questions the author asks are exactly the things you should do if you want to figure out how to do those things. Keep asking those questions, researching and learning, doing, and asking new questions. Just keep doing that and all of a sudden those vague pieces of advice will be concrete and actionable initiatives.

Once that happens, and someone asks you for advice, you will rattle off a list of foreign sounding concepts that the reader will find equally vague and I actionable. You’ll be talking from the perspective of experience.

The author mentions that these pieces of advice are akin to telling prospective pilots that to fly a plane you need to choose a destination, take off, and land. Yes they are generally true, but not in a way which isn’t obvious. Similarly these “business gurus” are peddling ChatGPT 3.5 level advice and passing it off as insightful.

> “Pick a cloud provider” can be just as vague as “Talk to prospective customers.”

The point is that for people who have never done this before, it’s not useful because they have no idea where to start. And for people who have, it’s not useful because they would already know how to do it and when to do it.

I don't agree with this. There's value in highlighting areas of "unknown but valuable" so the people can think about how to fill in the blanks.

EG - if I am not thinking about "cloud provider" but a trusted source tells me that's a really important thing, I can figure out how to move forward. EG - who do I know whose brain I can pick about "Cloud stuff?"

Most often the vague business advice shared is purposefully vague and is used as a marketing hook by the people giving it out to land on lucrative contracts/consultancy deals. For instance even for the books you recommended the reviews could go like this:

    - "Some useful information, but mostly common sense and nothing that isn't available elsewhere. I think the author struggled to make this into a book, as the subject could have been covered in far fewer pages and for a lot less money. I bought a few books on this day, this is by far my least favourite."

All over YouTube are fresh faced kids telling you how to make 10 thousand dollars a month with a sure fire side hustle. At some point, even someone like me who can be a bit slow on the uptake has to realize it's too good to be true.

Sounds like the new version of the personality who will tell you how to get rich quick, if only you pay for their booklet or seminar.

(TC;DP: The trick is to become a personality selling get-rich-quick booklets or seminars.)

I like your plane analogy and have been thinking in similar lines. My conclusion is different though—-Not that you should find better advice or people to listen to, but that you should give up the idea of finding someone who can tell you what to do. It’s understanding the things no one can tell you that makes for business success. The important knowledge is tacit, contextual, local.

Sometimes it takes wisdom and experience to recognize what previously-given "vague" advice actually means. Not just in business, but in everything. EG, it took me years of training/yoga before I really understood what is meant by "engage the core" or what my grandma meant by "if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you" (I mean the words made sense but it took a while to really see people following the herd towards destruction to realize how important and hard resisting it is.

I think the value of these things is not necessarily in giving you answers but in helping you realize there's some sort of gap. Even though "engage the core" doesn't tell me what it means (I suspect you can't just tell someone how to do it) - it does make me aware that "this is a thing I don't know" - which led me to explore the topic and more importantly, recognize when it happened ("oh! this is it, I need to cultivate more of this")

For the purpose of this article, it's helpful to distinguish between the "what" and the "how." ie: "reach out to customers" is helpful if it at least makes me think about "am I doing that? do I have reason to think I am doing it enough and well?" For someone for example who comes to a business from a technical angle first, an honest reflection may lend them to realize "no, I don't actually have a history of working with customers and don't know how to do it."

And that's a great on the "what" level. Once you see that gap and become open-minded to it, you can find paths to the "how." For example if I was in those shoes, I would ask myself two questions: (1) who do I know who is good at X (eg dealing with customers) - can I pick their brain on what this means and (2) how do I find 2-3 books/courses/something that can give me a foundation in it?

Going from "I never thought about customers" to "I recognize the gap, I found a trusted advisor and I built some basic knowledge" is the value-add of this type of generic advice.

I agree with you, very good points and very helpful! Thanks!

I think people just love listening to advice and will consume it indefinitely as it "feels" useful.

Talking to users seems easy but where do you find them, will they talk to you, will you be ok if they tell you to f-off. Most users are busy, won't answer emails, won't answer calls (if you can drum up the courage) and the people who will respond will often be the wrong people i.e. people who are self-interested or unemployed and think you might have a job for them. The situation is not helped by the legions of outsourcing agencies pinging users with all sorts of offers daily.

It's disheartening, embarrassing and easier to listen to advice. The advice isn't wrong, it's just a warm blanket.

The article seems to be talking about "business advice" dispensed via tweets and Reddit comments? Why would anyone expect that to be of any value?

The answers to any of the follow-up questions posed in the article will vary greatly depending on the specifics of the business, so it's not surprising that there are no generally applicable yet specific answers. Even serious business advice/education from a reputable institution can really only provide you with an analytical toolbox or framework that you can then apply to the specific domain you are active in.

Ultimately, you get what you pay for (and if you're not careful, you might not even get that).

I agree, yet I also know of some podcasts and books that give the same generic advice. All of these can be valuable for learning — I learned a ton from Reddit, YouTube and other media.

I also agree that sometimes it can be too specific to the nature of the business, yet folks like Rob Walling can incredibly easily talk about how to structure emails that go out to potential customers, how to potentially price a SaaS based on different aspects, etc. Also, in one of his conference talks, Jason Cohen goes in depth on how to pick a good market with a recurring problem, instead of just saying “pick a good market”. In “The Mom Test”, Rob Fitzpatrick goes over a handful of potential conversations, and does not just say “talk to prospects”.

> "Build the landing page and pre-sell before building the product" But how do I structure the landing page that will convert people into customers? How do I price the product? How do I get traffic to the website?

None of those questions disprove the original advice... build a landing page without pricing, with some initial idea of what the product is, reach out to your ideal customer (prospects) and put out ads to get traffic to the website?

But what customer wants to waste time on a landing page without the key details?

I’m not saying that advice is not generally good. I’m saying that it’s too generic and that it’s often told by people who don’t know how to take action on them— just like me talking about how to fly the plane. Everyone knows the destination, but many can describe the steps to that destination. “Running ads” is much more complex than opening Google Ads and clicking the “Yes Google please run them” button.

You have to read between the lines with these business success hype merchants. They don't want to use words like con, exploit, choke-point. They coin words like smoke test, FOMO, make the customer open their wallet.

The author just hasn't been into every business book and read between the lines. The whole fly the plane to the destination is a too literal summary of the hint-hidden summary being offered by the guru. Of course the guru doesn't want his advice to survive resummarization, he only wants to sell the unzipped version that becomes a part of you.

I don't agree with selling courses but the detail is actually all there in books like Expert Secrets which advises you to become an expert on-demand, i.e. only after you have amassed an email list and asked them what they want from the course they just signed up for do you build the course.

It's kind of advising to put the cart before the horse and working backwards from success. I guess it gets you comfortable with putting the choke point before the horse too. I don't think it's an entirely admirable approach but it is not vague, it's specifically tailored advice for people who suck at business ideas and treating people "unfairly". "A baby's first adventure in the value of misdirection" would be a more accurate title but there is value in working this out yourself too. A book teaches and no one wants to disparage a teacher who helped them become who they are, it would be like disparaging themselves, so no matter if the advice works or not you will see praise for it.

Thanks for the kind mention in this article. I’m going to be honest, I started blogging and writing books (and now podcasting) because I was SO TIRED of the vague business advice I saw on the internet.

A couple weeks ago I saw a founder ask: “What podcasts should I listen to for practical advice on bootstrapping a SaaS?” And people responded with suggestions like Tony Robbins, GaryVee, and the Founders podcast (which summarizes business biographies).

Don’t get me wrong, those resources have their audience and fulfill a need. But that’s not what a bootstrapper needs to hear at that point in time. They need specific advice that’s as prescriptive as possible without crossing the line and becoming overly prescriptive. “Rules of thumb” if you will ;-)

That kind of situation is why I started talking about startups. To take an opinionated stance and be as specific as possible. Which is why I focus on SaaS and not entrepreneurship in general.

In any case, I appreciate the mention and consider myself among esteemed company with the other folks mentioned in your essay.

This seems extremely passive. He asks good questions, but then doesn't answer them.

Because I don’t think I know enough or that I am successful enough to give out anything more than generic advice like “pick good markets”. They are the example questions, not learning material.

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