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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

seems like we've heard all of this before

That wouldn't be surprising. This is kind of like an experimental result: if you optimally compress the advice for starting a startup down to around 10 sentences, what are they? It's the nature of compression that everything in the compressed version is in the original.

Even so there were several things that seemed new to me. Let me check.

I never quite realized till now that a version 1.0 was (or could be) nothing more than a pretext.

The rectangle metaphor and the point about one side being easier to change is new; I only thought of that a couple weeks ago.

The greater difficulty of lying to yourself when expanding userwise is something I don't think I've written about.

I don't think I've mentioned that founders' own standards for customer service are artificially low, or that customer service is mostly a way of studying users.

I don't think I realized before that being cheap was interchangeable with iterating, or mentioned that a culture of cheapness keeps companies young.

I don't think I've written about how paying distractions are so much worse than other kinds, or that it's specifically because they work like interrupts.

I didn't realize till recently that the right metaphor for a deal was a background process.

And I definitely didn't realize till I'd actually written out the list which would be the most important one, or that it was involved in half the others.

Not that bad for an essay only 2.5 pages long.

The 1.0 being a pretext really rang true for us. It was interesting noting comparing how what we thought was important with what people were actually the critical things in making a purchase decision were, but nobody tells you those things seriously until they can look at your product and see what it's not.

Paul is probably exaggerating a bit on that rule, to make his point across. You can have a version 1.0 that actually solves a real problem! But you know what he means...

You can, but I'm tempted to say that if you're a first-time founder that it's probably luck. Having something out there was what changed our thinking from "this is the software we're making" to "this is the market we're addressing". It still took a while to really sink in and figure out what the implications of that were, and it's no doubt a process that we'll see continue once we push the next bits out.

I couldn't say this at the time, but now that the Etherpad playback version is public you can see that I originally wrote that this was an exaggeration.

I've heard similar things, but not exactly that you should favor completely satisfying a small number of people over partially satisfying a large number. That directly affects decisions I'm making now.

careful..in getting carried away by this advice though..unless your product targets large enough market you would not get opportunity to experiment/fail and succeed so yes start the inferno by targeting small niche but don't be esoteric unless you are going to get premium for being exclusive..

The feature requests I'm getting now are not esoteric. They aren't exactly "needs" either. I don't know how much the "make few love you" rule applies to satisfying wants rather than needs. But as I prioritize making existing users very happy vs fishing for a larger number of users, pg has certainly given me food for thought.

I agree..what will be useful is long thoughtful analysis, case studies around such points that expose nuances of decision making and evolution of ideas/business models and not copycat lists which assume there is some sort of formula in the start up success..

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