Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

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I wish you'd also do one titled "How to find great markets"

I'm working on a blog post on this now. Unfortunately I understand this piece a lot less. If you point me at a market and say "build a product for this market", I'm pretty confident I could do that and be the best. But if you asked me to pick a great market, I'm not confident that I could do a great job at all.

I think finding and analyzing market opportunities is much, much harder than building great products. There are hundreds (thousands?) of phenomenal product managers, but only a handful of people that really understand markets. The few that come to mind are Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs (unfortunately he's gone now). I've read all I could find from them, but even they are having trouble articulating this, which suggests they don't have it entirely pinned down.

I'll see if the blog post goes anywhere in the process of writing it. I'd really like to understand this better.

If you point me at a market and say "build a product for this market", I'm pretty confident I could do that and be the best.

That's quite a bold statement! Any market? A social network, an online retailer, a search engine, a mobile phone, a browser, an electric car? Give me a list of those books you've been reading! But then of course, we could create a paradox - we can't both be best, can we? :)

I believe creating the best product has an amount of luck in it. The better work you're doing - the better are your odds, but at the end, like making an Oscar winning movie, like writing a top of the charts song, like writing a bestselling book, like a perfect storm, a lot of the right things need to happen. But that of course shouldn't stop us from trying!

Any market?

It would have to be a market where I can get a handle on the state of technology and its economics relatively quickly. I couldn't do it for biotech, or cleantech, or surgical instruments, for example. I'd also need to be able understand the users and their culture extremely well. I probably couldn't design a great breakfast cereal, or sneakers for teenagers in Japan.

I really meant this comparatively. Understanding markets is an order of magnitude harder than understanding products (at least to me), and is probably more important.

Understanding markets is an order of magnitude harder than understanding products (at least to me), and is probably more important.

I think this point gets lost all too often. It is a subtle but critical difference: a product guy can only do so much if you've picked the wrong sub-market.

Then there is the whole thing about what even constitutes a market. People refer to healthcare as a market. But healthcare has a few death trap sub-markets where you are just spinning your wheels and not likely to succeed. And then there are submarkets where you can building a half-assed product and still get traction.

Honestly, this has been the biggest learning lesson for me: that markets operate at a very micro level for startups. Too bad it isn't emphasized enough by folks preaching the whole pick-the-right-market idea.

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