Ask HN: "How to make something people want?"

Can I give a suggestion? Get off the Internet.

I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean that the type of person who, when they have a problem, thinks: "You know, I bet there is some social networking service out there where I can post about this problem in a real pretty AJAX-y looking form and then Twitter about it to my friends" already has plenty of people solving their problems.

(They also make terrible customers, because one of their problems is that people keep asking them to pay for things, despite those things not being iPods.)

Instead of using the Web 2.0 darling, get out there and talk to Real People who have Real Problems. They work too hard. They don't see their kids enough. They don't make enough money. They are very willing to pay for solutions to any of the above three, but they might not even realize that solutions are possible! (99.9% of people who purchase my software never knew there was software available to do what it does until they got to my site, if you read their search queries.)

[Edit: Incidentally, don't ask Real People what they want. Ask them what their problems are. A lot of my customers see their problem as "I like playing bingo but it takes several hours to make cards by hand." You know what the preferred solution was for years? "I should spent a lot of money laminating the cards that I made by hand, so that I can use them again next year." It never occurred to most of them to ask for something that would make bingo cards in a few minutes for less than the price of laminating a set.]

Thanks, Patrick, I needed that.

Just read this post as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750375

Just to be clear, the concept outlined is not the concept I am pursuing, its http://plusjade.com . I just get distracted/discouraged now and then because "I am creating a website engine that makes websites". Who the hell needs that, how is it different from the other 2000 engines out there, and who is paying money for them? Of course I'm not dumb enough to NOT think about these things, its just...

yeah, I should talk to real people. Get it done.

Thanks!

Checked out your site. Have you tried going after a niche in the DIY website creation biz to differentiate your offering?

A thought...why not go after restaurants? Have a way to upload menu easily, a location with map info, maybe even online reservations. Fully outsourced, customizable and charge monthly.

When you do go outside, drop by restos and show them your screenshots (done in PS) and get real feedback. You can probably hit 10 restos in a day.

Note: this is just top of my head -- not sure if anyone is even doing this.

great idea!! and to reach 'ramen profitable' in a very very quick way (and a lot more tasty) offer to be paid partially in food!

A tonne of companies would be providing that sort of service to restaurants and they would likely already have a head-start, industry contacts, etc. You'd want far more of a niche than that IMO.

Thanks for the feedback. I think you are spot on. I've tried to force myself to think in terms of b2b because business are willing to pay for stuff that works. I'll put together some market tests and go out and ask people. thanks again.

Agile Programming process makes sure projects gets done. There are dozens of other project management methods, yet there are only a rare few processes that lets you discover what customers want, and how to get it to them.

Steve Blank developed a step-by-step, formal methodology to developing customers. Eric Reis's "Lean Startup" incorporates those ideas as well as others. Check out their blogs and get Blank's book. Why reinvent the wheel?

> Any input on the concept?

For a first foray into business, I'd recommend against building something that requires network effects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

For every Facebook or Yelp, there's hundreds of network-effects-based sites that never gain any steam, and they don't see anything from it. Also, what you're talking about is notoriously hard to get money out of.

For a first business, sell something to people. Take Hacker News' own Patrick McKenzie* (patio11) - he sells Bingo Card Creating Software. His blog is here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/

He sells things to people. If he tries something, he knows right away if it's working - he gets bingo card sales. If no one bought his bingo cards, he would know it's not working and he'd have closed his site. You learn a lot about business by selling things to people, and it's got the most clear and insightful feedback.

My last name is McKenzie. Kalzumeus is a burrito-loving dragon from a long-forgotten RPG campaign.

My business plan in 15 seconds: Find a problem that I could fix which hit a group of people I knew I could address. Develop the minimum salable fix for the problem. Sell it. Then start iterating.

Three thousand commits to subversion later...

Pardon me for mixing you up with a burrito-eating dragon, Mr. McKenzie! I am, none the less, a tremendous admirer of yours, and think you represent very well the highest chance of success for a solo hacker to make a part-time business viable. I reckon you're actually the case study on how to do it to profitability with minimum risk and hassle.

The other one to look at would be Peldi Guilizzoni's Balsamiq: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/ - but he happened to find a really good PR/blogging mix that hit right at home with his audience. I reckon that's a fantastic way of doing things in many markets, though the Bingo Card model would work in almost all direct-to-consumer markets. Fantastic stuffs, and congratulations and thanks for sharing the knowledge.

It's like that old joke, that the first telephone was the hardest sell (who ya gonna call?)

Joshua Schachter (delicious founder) said something about network effects that really struck me: make something that has network effects, but which is also useful and valuable even if no-one else is using it.

There's a related view that's applicable to my startup: make something that useful and valuable on its own, that can have additional network effects if others are using it.

BTW: I've searched for where Joshua said that, but I've not been able to find it (there were three points). Anyone know which interview I mean?

http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/17/joshua-schachter-lesson... Also this: http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&...

Thanks for the links, though the one I'm thinking of had them as three bullets points. Actually, it sounds like I may be thinking of a slide presentation, not an interview.

Two problems:

1. Market: People don't know what they want til they see it.

2. Development: You don't know what problems your idea has (nor their solution) til you see it.

It's an entrancing dream to anticipate all this stuff, which is what corporate new market development and new product development is all about. It's hardly effective (that's not how that corporation began anyway) - plus they are better at it than you.

Build your idea, hacker. Build it, and gaze upon reality!

"Market: People don't know what they want til they see it."

Ditto that. If people could figure out for themselves what would solve the issue they had, then they wouldn't need a start-up to provide it.

"Development: You don't know what problems your idea has (nor their solution) til you see it."

The military has some saying along the lines of "No battle plan survives the first engagement." And Bill Gates has said "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

For me, three years of talking to people online with little in the way of results has convinced me that there is a huge information gap and this is what I need to overcome. But no one could "tell" me that. I just had to figure out why I am getting such poor reception (and so much hostility) for a solution to a problem that everyone desperately wants fixed. The solution I offer doesn't fit with their concept of what a solution should look like and they can't wrap their brains around it. There are two types of people who are relatively more receptive. Both groups are intrinsically less accepting of current dogma than is typical.

Instead of making something people want, make something that you want first. Solve your own problem. 6B people in the world, I am sure someone will have the exact same problem as yours.

If your product could not get mass usage, at least, you will always be the user of your own product.

The biggest problem with this meme, that 37 signals seem to be a champion for, is that the kind of problems that hackers have are also pretty easily solved by the same kind of people. And so the hacker problem space is often over-run by others and open source software. A recent case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740789

But take patio11's company, which solves a problem that none of us probably thought existed, the bingo card creator. Suddenly you have a nice big audience for a fairly simple program, but because it's the kind of problem that hacker community never comes into contact with it's nice and profitable.

So I'd be careful on following this advice unless you're a truly amazing hacker (e.g. afaik 37signal's guy wrote the rails part of ruby on rails). The bar is much higher in the hacker problem space and has to be because in the end, the 'I could write that in a weekend' syndrome often prevails :)

Doesn't halfbakery.com do something along these lines?

The main problem I see with your idea is that consumers/users have no benefit or incentive to continually use your site.

They are providing their time and input on something that doesn't exist. People take time to provide input at Yelp because, in return, they can find a good restaurant. People vot on Digg because, in return, they find funny/interesting stories or videos.

You want lay-people to provide you with input but you're giving them nothing in return ... except the possibility that a business they would use could exist in the future.

Thanks for the link. I just conceptualized the idea an hour ago so I do share your concern for the users. I just remembered that launchly.com was a pretty close match. The concept is actually very useful, but its clear launchly has just launched and the userbase is not very big. Also the pricing seems outrageous. But its a better implementation in that the sites have to already exist. This answers your question somewhat because you can offer users who provide feedback an upgrade to whatever the site it is they are reviewing. For example free access for a year or whatever. Thanks for the reply.

I don't think that people provide input so that the sites they like survive. I don't think people vote on Digg because they realize that if no one votes, Digg dies. I think people just like to share their opinions and express themselves. If a restaurant pisses you off, then of course you want to tell other people to avoid that restaurant, not just to help them, but also to spite that restaurant.

I don't see this working out very well, unfortunately.

For one thing, although users can express needs and desires in very vague terms, they can't usually be specific enough to actually help someone that's trying to implement an idea.

I _think_ it was Guy Kawasaki that described this in "Rules for Revolutionaries", but it might've been Gladwell in "Blink" -- I don't remember now.

Anyway, you're usually better off making observations about behavior and then attempting to solve the problems that you see there. In this case, you could frequent web designer forums and the like, as well as the forums for competing software, and see what the most common complaints and requests are.

Yeah I could see the actual user feedback being nowhere near what the intended feedback would be.

Great idea about frequenting your competitors forums! I actually religiously do this, and it is indeed extremely helpful. The only problem I have with this is I have no real idea if their target market is/should be my target market and of course, is the market lucrative? In other words, I might be optimizing a product that kicks ass relative to users of forum x, but are users of forum x even the ones really dishing out the money? Guess no matter what solution, you won't know until you just test the damned thing yourself. Thanks for the comment!

I think you'd be better off building a test version of your idea and then iterating from there.

You don't want to fall into the trap of talking about a thing and never actually doing it. :-)

http://steveblank.com/2009/02/23/theres-a-pattern-here/

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

This is more general than what you want but if you haven't read pg's 'why smart people have bad ideas' it's well worth it. http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html

The main issue with that is the people who you target may not be the people who spend time on the internet looking for websites where they can rate your ideas.

Make something YOU want. Hope you're "most people."