Do Things that Don't Scale
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links.
Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sustaining and grew to 1500 subscribers.
I'm seeing the same thing again with a website I just launched (http://lsathacks.com), which has free LSAT explanations.
Very positive initial comments, but just letting people know about it hasn't resulted in a surge of traffic. Instead, I'm going to have to manually recruit people. Only then will I know if it's worthwhile.
My point is that this doesn't apply just to high growth startups. Almost anything new requires initial unscaleable effort.
Edit: The LSAT is the Law School Admission Test, a logic test required for admission to North American law schools.
Metareddit lets you track all mentions of keywords or phrases across Reddit. It let me find literally everyone who commented about the LSAT.
I'd love any feedback.
There might be some more worthy places to also incorporate search in (quora comes to mind)
* I couldn't block subreddits from the feed. In my case, LSAT is also a weapon in some popular videos games. On Metareddit, I was able to block the most common gaming subreddits so those results never came up. * Metareddit produced an actual feed I could check once a day for new comments. This is more of a search engine. * I have to hover over the link to see the subreddit. That's often very relevant
Apart from that, looks good. And obviously, these criticism depend on your use case. I used metareddit specifically for monitoring.
On commentfindder you can exclude specific subreddits with "-subreddit:askreddit" syntax or target subreddits by removing the minus. Of course, I should make this more obvious, right now its kind of a cheat code.
Source: I run metareddit.
It's a logic test required for admission to law school in North America, highly competitive.
Does the degree of inconvenience caused to you - in requiring you to figure out what LSAT means - necessarily require that you record your disapproval here?
The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.
Source:
My comment taught you that I had no idea what LSAT meant and that I thought it should be explained. Now look at yours for a moment.
"For the benefit of anyone like me who never heard of the LSAT before: it's the Law School Admission Test, a half-day test of reading comprehension, logic and verbal reasoning used by law schools in the US, Canada, and elsewhere."
(More work? Maybe. But all the information there is also in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the LSAT, which you said you already checked.)
If, as explained, the term is widely understood by the target market, then this criticism is invalid (but caused by the poster not knowing the target market). If the criticism was valid, and the target market didn't understand the term, then the site owner knows that he/she should add an explanation.
The actual definition is sort-of irrelevant.
It was, as I thought, fairly small relative to LSAT searches overall. But it's good to confirm that.
Also told me that there's enough searches to make a post along the lines of "What is the Law School Admission Test?" worthwhile, to catch students at the very start of their journey.
People investing too little effort in figuring out elementary things and in the process adding to the clutter of posts that distract from the trunk of the conversation.
Someday in the not so future, perhaps all forum posts everywhere can be auto-condensed and auto-recomposed for the purposes of brevity and clarity.
Eg: The Natural Language Processing technology licensed from SRI International, that was at the core of Summly, the app Yahoo bought for $30 MM.
Until then, we could do what sensible HNers always did - resist adding anything that distracts or leads the conversation astray.
HN is hardly perfect.
People already bemoan, justifiably so, that not enough striking and incisive stories make it to the front page.
Despite efforts, there is plenty of voting-ring activity that bolts undeserving stories to the top.
The weighing of upvotes and downvotes (based on the standing of the HNer) could be better.
These are all known issues.
While these things are gradually improved, we could help by not adding to the tally with this kind of redundant clutter.
Their attitude (having tried it) is now if the community doesn't build itself it won't sustain itself. If you've got a working community then you can promote it but this sort of work won't work to build a community that's not already there.
Not saying that what PG says isn't true for start-ups which are obviously different, but it may be relevant in your case.
I would be interested in more detail on how they reached the conclusion that pump priming is not useful. Do you have a link?
Because I did build a community entirely by priming the pump. There was no community there. So it absolutely worked in my case.
However, Reddit was an easy place to build a community, as I just had to tell existing Redditors who studied for the LSAT that there was now a subreddit for that. It was an easy sell.
I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service. While building an iPhone app, I suggested that users should have easy access to our hotline at every step of the purchase and post-purchase flow in case they ran into issues. The founder rejected this. Why? "People would be calling us constantly". We also spent enormous amounts of time and resources tweaking the app design to perfection (pre-launch), and attempted a massive press launch with exclusive blog posts/coverage while turning our noses at any sort of manual user acquisition.
Fast forward 6 months. That product failed.
Not sure if that is the case, but pg wrote last year[1]:
A YC partner wrote:
My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so ...
"Let's try it for a few days and find out. I'll answer the calls."
Like airbnb:
But seriously Loren I think that the company that you are at now might have already marked you in a way that could limit what responsibility and opportunity they give you. Because they know you're not happy perhaps (and especially after reading your comments if they do). Personally I think you are cut out more for your own startup if you can in fact "wear many hats" than in one area like engineering.
If in order to succeed you need to clean the bathroom (figuratively speaking), just go do it. Go beyond the job description; it's a startup, after all. Job descriptions are worthless, until you have a decent size and need some bureaucracy to survive.
If the founder is not seriously expecting you to do go beyond your comfort zone, you should seriously question his ability to lead the company to the next level.
"Hey, the company would be a lot better off if I spent some time on X, instead of my usual responsibility Y."
But as I said, if I were ever in this position, I'd just pack and go. It's hard to build a successful startup; even harder if the CEO thinks he/she has all the answers and is not open to collaboration and sharing the burden of the key early decisions.
This is particularly true when the company is small; not so much when you get to triple-digit headcounts.
Thanks for posting this. I hope you and others write more on failed products/companies. They are very enlightening, despite the details left out for privacy/embarrassment.
I think it's what PG calls schlep[1], or at least similar. Tasks like talking to users (not just your family and friends), scouring internet forums, reading everything you can to learn as much as possible about your demographic / target users and what makes them tick, going door to door (in the case of airbnb), being active on social media, etc. It's doing the stuff that nobody whats to do, because it's not glamorous, and it's not necessarily the most exciting. It's constant, it's draining (on every level), it's time consuming and its tough.
It may be easier to understand by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum - some sort of automated user acquisition: the expectation that a user acquisition plan can be conceived and launched, which will trigger loads of users knocking at your door, all requiring little to no maintenance afterwards. A strategy like this may include press releases about a new product and a giant paid marketing budget. Just flip the switch on those and the users start rolling in, then we can get back to building. ;-)
Would you mind sharing with us what you think had caused your product to fail?
Internally, we have been reluctant to admit that the product has failed (despite it being shut down and pulled from the app store). We have not discussed the product since we shut it down. We have not looked at what worked and what didn't work. We have not analyzed why it failed. Instead, we've chosen to blaze forward, focusing on our next launch.
Ahem...That sounds... ominous. Why not spend at least a lunch with a basic analysis? Use a fishbone. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_03.htm
Agree. Post mortem. Air crash investigation. More than just a lunch I would go for at least a dinner and learn from it.
If you think the idea is really good, you should ask for permission to develop it on your own as a side business. And if you don't think so... there's no point in chiding them for agreeing that the work isn't worth your time.
The goal is to learn new things as fast as possible. Since most people dither, "fail fast" serves as good, rough advice. With no extra information it's more likely someone is going to be shipping too slowly than shipping recklessly and pointlessly.
However, if you "fail fast" but also fail to internalize any lessons from that failure, it's little different from never having done it in the first place. You're committing the complementary sin to those folks who spend hours, days, and weeks tinkering until the product is "just right", except in this case it's the other half of the learning loop that's broken.
Real traction isn't something you can buy, so if you find it, stick to it and grow it.
Not only are you right, it sounds like in this case they failed slow. I've been in a situation like that before, it's incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.
"When you have traction, you'll know it. Traction is what allows you to learn. Then you might wanna try not failing, or at least, let features fail fast, but keep the overall ball rolling.
Real traction isn't something you can buy, so if you find it, stick to it and grow it."
This is true, but if step #1 is "getting traction" then there's a learning loop there, too. I'm not sure if what you're proposing is a process that looks like "try lots of things until you get traction and then worry about focused iterations."
If you are then I think when that approach works it works by accident. It's true you'll have a hard time coming by lots of quantitative data before you get traction, but that's only the strictest kind of learning. On the other hand, if each failure results in a complete product/market reboot, that's not learning -- that's guessing. :)
It sounds like this is what the OP's company was doing, though.
If your product didn't get traction, why not? What will you do differently next time? Will our product work, but not for the customers we thought it would work for? Is our first market too big, too small, too ill-defined? How will we know when we're succeeding or not, pre-traction?
etc. etc.
This mindset seems to miss the point of technology (and software development). It is the business impact, not the automation for its own sake.
E.g. we can automate the hell out of the office arrangements or whatever, if it does not have a business impact, we are just wasting our time.
I probably would have been majorly bummed out at that moment.
If you can even get close to doing that then you either have the world's best development team or you aren't trying to do enough. In a perfect world we would have time to automate everything, but time pressure makes us go for the minimal thing that will work.
A large part of this is essay is premised on the idea that developer time is expensive and slow relative to the manual process (which can even be done by someone non-technical in a pinch). If you're not 100% sure it's a necessary feature then it is a waste. In your case, throwing a phone number on the page was a very quick way to provide good support relative to an automated support system and/or a flawless well-tuned experience.
It really depends what process you're talking about, but its a worthwhile consideration that unskilled (but intelligent) labor is not cheap either (i.e. Foxconn has to be massive and in another country to leverage it the way they do).
One classic mistake I've seen made time and time again by all sorts of companies is to think that support is free or cheap. It really isn't. It's a product unto itself.
If you try to scale/automate everything it's a recipe for a lot of wasted efforts. Make money first. Scale second.
In other words, scaling too early is premature optimization.
That said, I suspect that there are many founders who would be open to taking the show on the road. It's incredibly daunting to know what that looks like, or where to start. I feel like it's not laziness, just unknowable to people used to tech communities and test suites.
To that end, my friend Ted and I think we've figured out how to help these founders take the leap and get in front of real people. Those people might be clients, developers or community leaders.
If you're interested in what we're doing, let me know. I'm happy to answer any questions you have, here.
And if you need help with hard problems, you should definitely call Ted: http://usistwo.com/
I think this should be taken literally by many startups with national scope. Get the hell out of California, buy a used RV, stick the team in it and travel city to city while you build the startup. It's cheaper and you'll be able to meet more customers.
I guess you could say that my current "startup" is helping founders do exactly this. Specifically, the exact part that happens right after you concede that it's a potentially great idea and right before you have any idea how to make it happen.
Where to go, who to talk to, and why.
You can follow the origin of the idea starting here: http://reedwordsinamerica.squarespace.com/blog/2012/12/17/th...
I was walking across the country recently on the Pacific Crest Trail, and I had to come off the trail because of an injury. I have been looking around listlessly at the world, and trying to figure out what to do.
This video has struck me in an interesting way. It shows someone who is true of heart can find happiness in profound ways. It has also helped me re-imagine art, as the man painted the landscape and changed the feeling of a region.
It is a beautiful example of the change a single person can make.
Earlier today, I was tempted to tweet "What would a present day John Muir look like?" -- Interestingly I found an answer by another avenue.
Painting Coconuts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQxOKtCWEGE
The Knife Maker: https://vimeo.com/31455885
The Inverted Bike Shop: https://vimeo.com/36258512
Pins and Needles: https://vimeo.com/57247225
The New Wave of Barber Shops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gpm54WIyZk
Thanks for more inspiring videos. The man who plants trees was amazingly apropos because of my recent departure from a promised life in the woods. However, inspiration is always valuable.
EDIT: Here is a piece about the guy http://www.walkaboutchef.com.au/home/9-walkaboutchef/50.html
Every band is a complex business that has to get really good at managing multiple moving parts while entertaining people with great songs.
I'd like to elaborate on this point, because it's probably the most valuable thing I learned while working at Cloudkick.
Similar to how every Marine is a rifleman, I think every developer should be tech support[1]. It's an incredibly easy way to please users. Many customers don't realize how small your company is. They expect an experience similar to Comcast or Verizon: Listening to on-hold muzak interrupted by advertisements. Forced to enter obscure info such as an account number on a billing statement. Getting handed between people in various departments, each time repeating answers to the same set of questions.
To your users, it's as if they called Comcast and a cable modem firmware developer picked up the phone.
Could you imagine how much you would love Comcast if that happened to you? You'd still love it if the person said, "Oh sorry, that's a bug in our firmware. We'll probably have it fixed by tomorrow. I'll contact you with an update then."
That sort of support is impossible in a larger company. It makes your users outrageously happy. Many of them will praise you publicly and tell their friends how great you are.
1. Modulo standard disclaimers, working at a small startup, etc. I also think everyone should be in the on-call rotation, but that's another can of worms.
If you really care about support, you'll have people with that expertise doing it.
Also, developing is really something where being in the zone gets the most productivity, and support is usually an intermittent and sporadic distraction, it can be a real productivity killer.
I see why people say this in pricinple, I just don't think it's a good idea in practice.
It's possible for tech support to work out as a disruptive distraction, but it doesn't always have to be that way. And yes, there are programming things where being in the zone is crucial, but there are usually programming things where it isn't, too.
Hiring tech support staff is for later, when the product is solid, and the developers can't handle the flood of support requests any more.
Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that:
(A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever
(B) it is partially more useful because it is longer and more experience driven than some of his other "classic" essays (i.e. the theory behind why blub is bad and lisp is great)
(C) it is too long and could have been edited down a bit more
I didn't find it particularly long, though. It would be great if more top links on HN were as in-depth as this.
I'm in two minds about this. It makes it more accessible, but seems like it could divert attention away from the general point to the specific companies.
Target of this essay has the time to read something this long.
I'm saying that as someone that doesn't even need the info but yet I found it good enough (don't always agree with PG or anyone for that matter "just because") to read. I may read it again (ok I skimmed quickly first time because I have to get somewhere).
Lots of similarities between what I've done, what I've seen (in the traditional non "pg startup" business world) and what was written here.
This is priceless advice. For free. If you could follow it without coaching hep, you wouldn't need YC (except maybe for the connections and networking).
The tricky part is that the wisdom is utterly simple. [1]
So if you say it concisely, it sounds like a fortune cookie. A lot of people won't believe it. They'll ignore it. Or they'll twist it into something unnecessarily complicated, and/or remap it into what they want to hear.
Maybe you could drop some Zen koan on their asses to stop them cold, a sort of mental slap to the face. Or more realistically, you could do what pg did -- write a somewhat long but clear essay. Hang enough flesh on the skeleton to get people to consider it.
- - -
[1] Simple is the sense of "not complicated". But not in the sense of "easy". It's hard work. On the other hand, it's gratifying work when you're getting feedback from real people and acting on it. Running that loop is energizing. But you need the energy because it's incessant.
I think what separates novice investors from good ones is that a novice investor will start asking questions that only make sense at a later stage. They're committing a cardinal crime in startups: premature optimization. For some reason, even though they explicitly say they invest at the seed stage, they're looking at it from a warped lens of "let me think about how this works, in your current implementation, at enormous degree of scale." And of course the implementation will change, so the logic immediately breaks down on itself because you're assuming the thing you see now will be the same in 5 or 10 years. The baby analogy seems perfect for this reason. A baby will arguably have little to no resemblance to itself in 5 or 10 years, everything about it will have changed significantly.
The nice thing is you don't have to explain these things to the investors that "get it." It just clicks instantly, and I think this happens even before the meeting--it probably goes all the way back to the introduction that someone else makes for you. Good investors at a seed stage understand there's some degree of risk in a small yet still fragile startup that has at least some degree of promise to it. From the top tier people I've spoken to in the past, they focus less on the specific numbers and metrics, and more on the "does this fundamentally solve a problem in the market right now? Is there a real need for this thing to exist, and what's better about this than everything else out there?" They look at similar companies in different spaces and draw interesting comparisons. "You guys are like this other company, which started out much like you did, and you're applying a very similar solution. I think this will work!"
The really good investors don't try and evaluate your company as a Series D investment, they look at where you are right now at the seed stage and see it for what it is, and what it could be. I suppose this all sounds obvious, but the real world is full of surprises that contradict assumptions.
It shows just how the founders built their engine, the pieces they had to forge, parts that needed to be jammed together in some way to just barely function, components that were thrown out for costing too much and working too little. Every successful startup has their own engine. Some may be exact replicas of others. They work because the problems they tackle have been well explored. And others are bespoke, tailored specifically to handle truly difficult problems, and which require an immense amount of exploration, experimentation, failure, and restarts. That's why an Instagram can take off with less refinement and horsepower than an Airbnb -- we've developed the tools and built the maps to tread on one terrain, but not the other.
It's been discussed on HN before, but here's another concrete example of this sort of thinking: killing the no-reply address. IMHO, there is no reason your startup should use no-reply for any emails, ever. Yes, it's a hassle to sort through all the out of office replies, but it's worth it.
Even if you tell people not to, they will reply to your newsletter or order confirmation or forgotten password message. And -- better yet -- they're often complaints! I like reading complaints. It's easy to find people to tell you you're doing great; I want to hear more about how we can improve. At my startup we make a point to reply to just about every message someone sends us (customer or not), but that's especially true of complaints. More than once I've gotten back replies like, "Wow I didn't expect anyone to read [my rant about how the site doesn't work on an Android 1.6 tablet]. Thanks for getting back to me!"
Since I haven't launched yet, I have a big file system directory (a folder) of articles on how to get initial publicity and users. While there is a lot good in that collection, it has looked to me like in total it wouldn't be good enough to get my little airplane off the ground.
For an example of the contrast, PG's essay had essentially no mention of an important role for publicity -- e.g., contact a writer at C|NET, TechCrunch, etc. for an article. Instead the essay had something that a founder could do on day one -- contact people they know and ask them to try it. Or try it for them and give them the results. And find a way to get feedback and then tweak the functionality. Good.
The essay just went to the top of my stack of how to launch. Best face validity with also the best author credibility, experience, and background of anything I've got on how to launch.
Sounds good. Write a little more software and then launch, one user at a time -- people in the family, people I knew at school, neighbors on my street, the guy I buy pizza from, the guy who repairs my car, etc.
Maybe I'll print up a supply of business cards that invite people to connect to the URL and then use the e-mail address there to give feedback!
Heck, maybe I will even be able to get some useful feedback from some VCs!
Systems that don’t scale, or that are reliant on the grunt work of humans, are not part of the training of engineers either. For so many engineers, an unscalable, human-dependant system is a bug, not a feature.
Is it too hyperbolic to say doing things that don’t scale runs counter-intuitive to an engineering mindset? (I’m a left-brained, analytical, systems-minded designer, so I’m definitely not trying to throw stones at my peers.)
There's a huge cultural issue, its not just education. I'm not agreeing with this, but I'm going to tell it like it is, ignoring the problem isn't going to make it go away. So, that disclaimer said, "Engineering is for the smart kids, the ones smart enough not to end up working $8/hr until their call center gets offshored." "You better spend 80 hour weeks on your own time learning (trendy language of the week) or you'll end up in a call center at $8/hr until your job is offshored." "If I wanted to tell people which key is the 'any' key then I wouldn't have wasted all the time and money going to university." "I would never date someone working in the call center" "Sure its a call center, but sometimes we promote people out if they're any good" That's just real world modern business culture, and it needs to be addressed completely not "well, if we add a seminar to the engineering curriculum that'll surely take care of it"
At all companies I've work at, pretty much everyone thought customer service was the lowest possible level of humanity. Which is too bad; a mere job shouldn't define someones (self) worth as a human.
Places that claim to prioritize CS are usually just marketing, and certainly don't really mean it. If they did, their employment policies and wages would reflect it. They never do.
(edited to note, obviously this is a huge wedge a startup can take advantage of. Having someone who can speak English and expects to be rewarded financially is going to result in somewhat better service than modern international megacorp inc (bad) script readers)
There's a specific discipline within Engineering, of people who put together technology with employee training manuals, company policies, and sometimes even incentive structures which bring into existence entire markets, to make sure a process is carried out. These people are called Systems Engineers.
A typical Systems Engineering problem: design a satellite launch mission. Piece out the work, the calculations, the part sourcing, the safety checks, etc., so no part (human or computer) will malfunction or "jam" without a redundant backup being ready to take over. Make sure all work and outputs have been checked. Make sure all people, parts, and processes for doing the checking have been checked, and are regularly maintained. And make sure all relevant processes are adaptable to changing demands in the future, so this mission design can be reused to build and launch another satellite, later, even if we don't have the same companies to source parts from, or the same employees, or even the same satellite. Make sure all this making sure continues to happen after you're gone, without anyone in particular needing to keep the whole thing in their head--because that's way above tolerance for an average human "part" in your System.
A Systems Engineer's work, especially at the prototyping phase, involves just as much talking to and convincing customers and partners, providing training and walking through use-cases, as it does writing code or doing calculations or building models.
You might have guessed where I was going with this. Start-ups are indeed Systems Engineering problems, and really, they need Systems Engineers to build them. I would say it's a shame that we consider someone an Engineer at all without training in Systems Engineering; it really is the holistic body of training tying all the other Engineering disciplines together. A Civic Engineer could model a bridge, but a Civic Engneer with Systems Engineering training can model the structure of the maintenance contracts required to upkeep the bridge, and find the most cost-effective incentive to encourage people to avoid trying to take their oversized cargo boats through the pass. In a way, Systems Enigneering has a lot in common with Game Design--just with the proviso that the "game" is played by real people as an aspect of their real, every-day lives, instead of writhin a voluntary Magic Circle of play.
I should note, though, that as a Systems Engineering problem, "starting a start-up" has a unique property--rather than being built and then launched, start-ups are launched, and then built. A startup is basically a partially-designed seed System, which has just enough utility to "live" (it's Minimally Viable!), and which will then require more Systems Engineering to be done "in-flight" (customer discovery/pivoting) to keep them viable. This necessitates a Systems Engineer actually be a component of the seed System, as architected, at least until the System reaches a state of maturity (which is precisely defined as the point at which a Systems Engineer is no longer needed for the System to avoid "running down."
If you'll indulge me in a metaphor, a start-up is like a modern fighter plane. It used to be that, having lost power, a plane could simply continue to glide toward its current (ballistic) trajectory, because it had static stability. However, it turned out that statically-stable designs had weaknesses (warping under sufficient torsional forces, for example) and to increase manouverability past a certain point, static stability would have to be sacrificed. In a modern jet fighter, then, we have a plane constantly tending toward shaking itself apart--and a set of electronics giving it continuous micro-adjustments so it won't. In other words, we have a System that can only function as long as there is an intelligent agent adjusting and tuning it from within.
--where the parallel breaks down, of course, is that a fighter plane flown for long enough doesn't continue to grow until it becomes a Boeing. But then, if they had aviation control electronics as intelligent as a Systems Engineer, I don't see how getting a fighter plane to pick up parts, join them to itself, and expand out until it could fly passengers five days a weeks would be an intrinsically harder problem than turning an idea in your head into AirBnB.
One thing you should be able to notice from my description above: there's no reason the Systems Engineer running a start-up, has to be the one who designed the start-up's seed System in the first place. I would say that the whole point of a start-up "incubator" like YCombinator is to do most of the Systems Engineering work in constructing viable seeds--including picking good teams of Systems Engineers to run them. That the people executing on their Systems are frequently the ones to suggest the initial idea for the seed System they end up working on is more an artefact of human-nature+ than anything to do with YC's business model as such. I would flip the role terminology around: YC engineers the seeds; then the founders--part of the constructed seed System--incubate it, until it no longer needs continuous System Engineering for its ensured viability. (At which point the founders either give up on being Systems Engineers, or leave to start something else.
Another fun analogy: a start-up requires the care of its founders in the same way a fortis requires the environment of the womb. This would make YC an IVF clinic--though with some aspects of a pre-natal care facility as well. :)
+ Less cynically, YC can be said to just be making the capitalist assumption that knowledge of what the economy wants is distributed among the people on the ground in each domain. That's assuming the founders have knowledge of their domain...
People have hundreds of things they want from you and/or your company. Your product is just one of those things. That leaves 99 other things you could provide that have the potential to absolutely delight them.
In other words, what are the 99 ways BESIDES your product that you could delight your customers or make them more awesome?
Paul is right - consulting doesn't scale if you're paid to do it. But man does it make people happy if you share your time and creativity generously.
Happy people are more likely to have a higher customer lifetime value. And you can take that straight to the bank.
I really wish I could remember the name of the company, but theyr were acquired very quickly for a stupidly large sum of money.
Their strategy required the user to manually call each service provider to change the physical address to PayMyBills' so they would receive all the paper and process it. This created huge barrier of entry (who wants to call every single provider to change their address?). At the same time, if you end up signing up you're likely to stay in because of the time it took you to go service by service to change your address again.
FWIW I don't know what happened to PayMyBills but today their site redirect's to one of Intuit's service.
The point the piece is making is the difference between the actual value of launch publicity (marginal) measured against the typical founder conception of the value of that publicity (enormous).
I've "launched" a bunch of stuff in my career and that part of Graham's piece rang especially true to me.
Here's an esoteric example (I have a few more of these) - Qik's founders believe many years later Scoble's coverage of them was the reason for their launch being successful. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/03/qik-started-in-a-garage-dis...
Or the Warby Parker guys attributing their launch success to Vogue covering them (something I know they deeply believe to be true) http://mashable.com/2013/03/07/toasting-success-warby-parker...
We had a couple "soft launches" - one where we put up our first email-collecting landing page and invited some people we knew to use the service (Sept '12). Another where we turned on self-signup on our website and invited more people (Nov '12).
Then after a couple months we had some solid active users and a small number of customers, we were also able to get 2-3 good press articles in the same week, which we now consider our official launch (Jan '13).
I think it's good advice to just keep "launching" until somebody notices :)
Dropbox went to YC and to TC 50 and did "double-sided affiliation" and has a great product and and and... etc.
I read stories about the Instagram founder doing a "bar test". He would show people his app in a noisy bar, with half of their attention. If they couldn't figure it out, then the app was too complicated or too hard to explain.
He also had some very unscalable experience at previous Stanford company (don't remember the name now).
The press can only explain the a product -- it doesn't make the product fit the market.
I think the biggest difficulty non-"famous" hackers face in user recruitment is it's hard to figure out where and how to successfully do it.
I believe tumblr was a side project as well while the founder was consulting
I would also be interested of examples
Now two years later we have 250,000 monthly users, and we're getting ready to roll out our technology to them in a few months.
When you are building an app for people, businesses, or whoever, you have to go where they congregate. Pick an existing social network with a messaging channel that people haven't grown apathetic to. Then you have to have an onboarding process that's simple. Then you have to develop a sales process and maybe even incentivize your existing users to sign up others. Viral coefficients decrease your user acquisition cost. And so forth.
That's why we built our framework. We spent two years solving the problem of "how do you build the next generation of successful, useful apps? And soon we will see if we were right.
I wrote this back in 2008: http://luckyapps.com/blog/?p=12
So, there's a lot of work for us to do yet.
re: consulting-- one advanced technique is to put the consulting "into a box" i.e. define precisely what the consulting package is, and offer this standard service at a standard price. If investors/etc. give you flak, tell them that your customers need this anyway, and at least your getting paid for the trouble. FYI I'm doing this now: many of our customers are young companies that need advice, and instead of taking an hour+ to give it free, we take a few hours and charge them. The actual work can be delivered by a number of people, so it scales fine.
adam (6 startups, 3 IPOs - #7 takes this advice to a whole new level and we're winning big, in spite of concern from my friends in tech, who exactly fall into the trap PG is talking about)
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch.
This set me right. I have been obsessing over the big launch. I laughed at myself after reading this.
And on a tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something.
Yep, that's me. I'm anticipating ridicule from my friends.
The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.
I kept thinking that adding features was the way to keep getting more customers. My minimum viable product was a build system + share-new-version-with-beta-users. The laborious things I needed to do to acquire new customers I thought were adding new features: add a package manager, add test integration feature, add a code review tool, add iOS support, and so on. It just dawned on me that I haven't thought about the other laborious things I need to pay attention to: meet with the numerous mobile developers I know, do demos at local meetups, and constantly talk to people about my product.
This is probably the most important thing a new entrepreneur needs to realize. Envisioning a world where everybody is using your product isn't enough. You need to figure out how to get to that world from this one, and that is where many entrepreneurs don't have a strategy, and subsequently fail.
Mike Arrington, before he was of Techcrunch fame, recruited us personally for the new company he had been hired as CEO/President of, Pool.com. Lest anyone thinks he does not know how to hustle he does. He can and was very persistent and determined with anything I threw at him. That ended up being a great relationship lasting many many years after Mike left the company. I feel fairly certain that a regular biz dev guy would have given up with what I threw at Mike. You may not have heard of Pool.com but they made a ton of money and were very successful.
And yet on the flip side, I see no one in the MBA/business world who is effectively doing the opposite i.e. creating a forum and/or institution in the mold of YC/HN for "business guys" to develop a fundamental understanding of (and respect for) technical leadership and software engineering concepts. I wonder why... Is it because it's more difficult, or more because business people just don't care and never will?
People often say that YC changed the VC industry, but in a way I think the YC and HN models together are slowly but surely disrupting the "business education industry" as well.
Thoughts?
I have to say, as someone who left a big Fortune 500 company (which was a start-up when I joined it) just one week ago to start my own company, it's pretty refreshing to read articles such as this one. It's completely antithetical to being stuck in a large software group where you're trying desperately to have any contact whatsoever with customers to try and figure out what they want.
EDIT: spelling
Now, I'll never use RepairPal. They've wasted my time twice. So, if you're going to take the time to reach out to users manually, make sure to actually follow up on the responses you receive.
Essentially, every startup is a user-acquisition startup in its own domain, and it's hard to beat the good ones at their specialty.
Though i submitted my startup over 2 months ago and havent heard anything back.
We at blogVault love the above line. We often have our customers ask us for help with things completely unrelated to what we do. However, we always refuse to be paid for it. We always tell them that we are in the business of backups. Everything else we will help out but could not accept any payments for. It ensures that we don't have to commit to deadlines etc.
"The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."
As someone in the "Startup Scene" for many years, and especially as a Software Consultant, I've talked with hundreds of people about their startups. And this is probably the number one insight I wish more people had - startups are not just "having an idea" (what people used to think), they're also not just "idea * execution" (which is a great concept but incomplete). Rather, the fundamental building blocks of a startup is "what are you doing" and "how are you getting users". Almost everything else can be missing in the high level discussion, but not those two. It's taken me many years to understand this, and PG just put it in a very succint form.
I am not dangerous, but I now know enough to be useful. I am trying to make my customers happy. The first feature I added after launch was something my first paying customer asked.
My product helps senior citizens to control their medications (what, when and how many pills they must take, which days, and alert when they need to buy more pills). I will start to put handouts on drugstores. Better than hoping elderly internet users know their way through google ads.
I spent 3 hours watching the first prospect to ever use my product taking a look at it for the first time (that would be my father). I left with literally 50 notes of what I should do immediately and some more thoughts of future features.
I am not a hacker, but I guess this helped me thinking more about what people want, because there was not much I could do from my own ideas and knowledge.
I would say that smart MBA try to learn to code to build something great, the next Dropbox, something that match their ambitions. When patio11 is your reference, not Bill Gates, or Zuckerberg, it is easier to keep your motivation. (Please, don't read this as me saying patio11 is not a great engineer, i couldnt know, just to illustrate the difference of ambition)
The reason for not talking to customers - I am hesitant - I am an engineer, I design stuff, I dont talk to people, that is not my job. I guess the problem and automate the system do that 100s of thousands of people can use it.
After reading the article, for the last 2 days I was very restless, maybe I still am. I was hesitant. But today I took the courage to take the product to the user and sat with him, showed the product and tried to solve just his problem, in a non scalable manner.
For those who might want to know exactly with respect what I am talking about. I launched a crowdfunding campaign for a hardware product - www.indiegogo.com/projects/tangle . The project is still live. The reason for doing the crowdfunding campaign was it because I was shy going around selling the product door to door. I did take feedback from friends but it I wanted to put it up on a platform and let things happen by itself. After launching the campaign, I realize how much people hustle to get the product to work on a crowdfunding campaign. Now I am taking the product offline and trying to sell it to customers directly.
This post is kickass... It just injected a lot of sense into me.
In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup.
Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.
Many businesses that you see as "mass scale" may have began life as "small scale" ones. Check your assumptions.
"[5] If you're building something for which you can't easily get a small set of users to observe—e.g. enterprise software—and in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on cold calls and introductions. But should you even be working on such an idea?"
When pg says, "Should you even be working on such an idea?" -- is he saying that he questions any startup that is focusing on enterprise and which cannot be sold to fellow founders in a YC batch?
He once wrote "enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money", so I suppose he doesn't love enterprise software that doesn't have a long tail customer base.
But, wouldn't this exclude a lot of interesting ideas in education, healthcare, government, finance, etc.?
If you deal with enterprise problems and enterprise software, go for it. If you haven't ever dealt with enterprise problems, what are you doing making a start up for what you don't understand well.
If I found a startup that wants to improve how car dealers sell cars, but I never worked selling cars, nor I know car dealers, why I am founding this.
I have worked in government IT for years. When some breathless sales dude tells me that he has some sort of amazing solution for X that allowed Goldman Sachs to cure the common cold, I'm intrigued. When the sales dude doesn't know what a government procurement contract is, I just shake my head, because we probably wasted an hour or more talking about it. Worst case scenario, the sales dude captures the imagination of some big shot and gets fired because instead of selling stuff, he wasted 6 months filling out forms and missed his quota.
The guys who sell to my vertical already know how I'm going to buy the product, and sell to the attributes of the product that matter to us.
I feel like this exception is another potential pitfall because it is so easy to think e.g. "if this doesnt look polished, users will think that we arent professional" and that is a big hit.
Although that is a more clear case, there are more ambiguous ones: imagine that your startup is doing encrypted email. What level of encryption/protection do you go with at launch? Do you go with the best practices as good as the founders know of or do you get an audit from tptacek? The latter is probably wayy out of your price range as a startup, but if your security takes a hit people wont know if they can trust you with their important information. What is the right line to go with here?
Basically it demonstrates the problem with aiming for the best ratio of user satisfaction to effort in each feature of your product. If each part of what you build covers 90% of users' needs, that sounds pretty good. But if your product has X main features, the percentage of users who will be entirely satisfied is 90%^X, which gets low very quickly.
You need to focus on servicing all of someone's needs, not most of everyone's, but consequently all of no one's.
In a way, this essay deflates the concept of 'proof' in the lean startup mentality. There is no way to prove that an idea will be a good one (although you can probably filter out particularly bad ones).
The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get. When you're so big you have to resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them.
Why can't you do that once the company gets to a certain size? I don't have any experience with these things, so it's not clear to me. Surely there must be some better alternative than focus groups.
When you had 100 users, it was feasible to get detailed feedback on 90 out of 100 users. When you have 1.5m users, you cannot get detailed feedback on 1.35m users. Dealing with much smaller fractions of your user base, sampling error grows into larger and larger an issue. That's not to say there aren't wonderful statisticians working on sampling issues, but fundamentally it's not the same as actually interacting with the vast majority of your user base.
However, at some point short-term velocity is also contributing speed bumps that are barriers for reaching the next level. I certainly wouldn't want to be doing this ad-hoc or without consideration.
[8] If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters. They'll have a better influence on your product, and they won't make you expend as much effort on sales. And though they have less money, you don't need that much to maintain your target growth rate early on.
Very interesting perspective.
Funny thing, I read the whole OP thinking about how all these ideas would work in a hardware startup, and came to conclusions similar to his before reaching the point about it in the article.
Crowdfunding brought some fresh air to this world, but I still miss an active community as the software startup one is. Maybe I am missing something?
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0QztbuDlKs_ZTk2M2RhZWItYzk3...
Reminded me of, all people, Mother Teresa. She started in Calcutta in 1948. People mocked her: What difference do you think taking care of one poor person will make? But that was her focus: One person at a time. "Do small things with great love."
So too in the quite different field of technology startups.
However, Teresa and those like her are a total fraud.
Aren't lots of service companies killed this way? Bending over backward for some client? Maybe they are small companies rather than startups...
Guess I'm being picky though: pg's point is an excellent one.
Most useful post i've read from pg as well.
There are lots of people with good taste, sense of style and quality (read Pirsig's book) and enough self-discipline to follow do what one is preaching, but it is an extreme rare situation when such people have enough influence to make things their own way.
I guess a half of YC business is about trying to spot an employ such obsessed individuals, no matter what exactly they want to accomplish. Early funding of even one of such guys worth waiting and funding hundreds of mediocre, especially if one has connections to channel or sell them off.)
Igor Sysoev was obsessed with efficiency (in that time c10k problem was actual), so src/core and src/os/unix should be taught in colleges (btw, the module system is already an over-engineered mess).
There are many other examples, but the big idea is simple - spot the right people, all that numerous micro-optimizations, while valuable, are superficial.
What (if anything) are you obsessed with?
But aren't they?
BUT THIS ONE IS GEM. Probably the Best. Also remember, even after doing all this there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. But this one has all the optimal paths.