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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

That does seem like the best way to go about it, but I have family who are doctors and they frequently talk about how tired they are of tech guys who read "The Mom Test" who now skulk around asking probing questions about pain points in a doctors daily work.

It just seems like any time there is a repeatable process for doing something, people will latch onto it and then do it until it is totally exhausted. Tech Entrepreneur especially has such a low barrier to entry and so many 'How To' guides that it feels super impacted.

Makes me wish software was closer to art, where someone has something they need to make just for the sake of bringing it into existence.

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> they frequently talk about how tired they are of tech guys who read "The Mom Test" who now skulk around asking probing questions about pain points in a doctors daily work.

Those tech guys are doing it wrong. If you want to address a particular market, the way you learn about the pain points in that area isn't to annoy the people working in it. It's to work in it yourself long enough to understand first hand.

I'm certainly not saying to avoid asking people for their expert advice, I'm saying that interviewing people is better done once you have enough baseline experience to know what questions you should be asking.

Great point! It's very difficult to build for a domain in which you're not an expert (non doctors building for doctors, non lawyers building for lawyers etc). You're going to lack a lot context, knowing what's important and how people use existing tools (versus what they say about how they use existing tools).

Considering that business is about compounding unfair advantages, if you have to hire people to tell you if you're going in the right direction it's going to be tough.

"business is about compounding unfair advantages"

clipped into my book of quotes

Tbf, medical software is a whole world unto itself. They do actually need serious solutions to their innumerable software problems, but it's really really hard to deliver those solutions for a whole host of reasons, from legislative to monopolies.

I think that's not a but, what those tech guys should do is to build and run an entire hospital. Exactly that isn't realistic, but something along that.

1: https://toyotatimes.jp/en/series/beyondmobility/004.html

2: https://global.toyota/en/mobility/frontier-research/40390293...

Exactly.

The unspoken thing about startups/the mom test is that now the majority of startups try to do it that way.

Well, 90% of startups still fail.

So why do the thing that 90% of the time doesn't work?

Really successful startups tend to be strongly unique and lead by a few years of personal experience with the problem. Perseverance and defiance(to the way things are/problem remaining) can't be bought though and it won't sell a book.

That, and when people ask me about my problems, i tell them about it. But then i realize they want to know about problems that have a scalable or easy solution they can build.

In other words, I gave them my damn problem but they arent interested in solving them.

So no, i aint talking to you about my problems anymore

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