6 Lessons I Learned as a Crappy Bootstrap | Hacker News Reader

6 Lessons I Learned as a Crappy Bootstrap

mumblemunki.com

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I would add three more lessons (from my failed startup):

1. Cash is King

2. Get feedback early

3. Business = Trust

3.5 Design is just as important as functionality.

The first one I learned the hard way - I put off monetization in the hopes of advertising revenue picking up [See Footnote 1]. The second one I realized was probably more crucial to attract and retain evangelic customers [Footnote 2]. And the third was went my server crashed and I lost everyone's data [3]. The last I learnt a lot more recently when I launched my book: Ice Cream Startups: http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z The reason for this was explained in great length here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/26696517701/design-a... and Joel's take on usability: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html Short version: Affordance is the user being able to intuitively use your software/product through it's shape/design/etc. One example is how horizontal bars on doors suggest a "push" action, and a vertical bar suggests a "pull" action. Developers, myself included, often ignore this only to eventually learn: if a product feature requires a user manual, scrap it.

[1] [PDF] Case study on Tivo - Freemium vs Advertising models: http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/emplibrary/ModelingTheEffectsOfAdAvo...

[2] Guy Kawaski's The Art of Being a Mensch - Chapter 11 in The Art of the Start, Richard Branson's advice on freebies: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/74952--good-customer... and Zappos: Delivering Happiness: http://deliveringhappiness.com on creating evangelic customers.

[3] Not everyone get's it right: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/500000-gmail-accounts...

I completely agree. The part that I found extremely difficult was actually getting users that COULD generate feedback. Granted, I'm sure a lot of that stems from the design part as well. Although, it's challenging to get users to go past the 'let me just take a look around' where they see early stages and are put off from the project.

#2 was originally "Listen to users." And it skipped my mind on how hard getting users to give feedback was (this was 10 years ago). What I did instead was check out my reference competitor's forums for threads like "bug fixes" and "feature requests." I wasn't listening to what users said they wanted, and I built my product anyways, without their requests in mind. In retrospect, it seems obvious that users were dealing with problems with existing solutions, and there was a pain point I could address. If I didn't address these points, it would mean my product would drop to just as much irrelevance as my competitors were doing at the time. This leads me to another lesson: Establish a reference competitor. It shows validation for a product/market fit, and is less expensive for you to copy+improve than innovate from scratch (I call it the first mover disadvantage).

Girish talks about addressing pain points here: http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-c... coincidentally from a user comment he discovered on our very own hackernews, and then built a profitable business out of it.

That's a really good move - listening to the problems that users have with competitors. It's humorous how we'll start things because we experience a pain point, yet keep our noses down in the work and ignore everyone else's problems afterwards, or at least not actively look for them.

At what point do you consider the first mover disadvantage to become irrelevant? For instance, Google Search and DuckDuckGo - DuckDuckGo aims at the anonymous search pain point, but the algorithm is not (and probably will never be) better than Google's. Unless it's a massive flaw in the core product it seems as if it'd be difficult to migrate users from competitors to your own product.

Thanks for all the insight and the good articles - it's a lot of material that will help me currently and in the future. I experienced a 'I never noticed the kettle was black all these years' kind of enlightening on some of the information, which is always nice when you realize you're just blind in some regards. I actually remember reading that post by Girish a long time ago, but had forgotten about it.

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