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Comment by MumbleMunki | Hacker News Reader

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.

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#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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