Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing | Hacker News Reader

Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing

startupclass.samaltman.com

194 pointsbjenik19 comments

I feel that this lecture generated less comments (maybe less upvotes too) than the previous lectures. I would guess that this is because we might think we are "so over all of this". I mean, we all think we already know this "get out of the building" and "talk to your customers". We think "c'mon, this is so basic, we are more sophisticated than that". And I think this is a mistake.

Underestimating this initial process, taking it for granted, we create the perfect environment to trick ourselves in not doing it. We might tell ourselves that our product is a SaaS for a very specific crown that we can only find online, and there is no street fair or postal office where we can find them. We might tell ourselves that a $100 Facebook Ads campaign is good for testing our assumptions. Or that is not necessary to get really immersed on our industry, because we already know what is wrong and how to solve.

These are all little lies that convince ourselves that our particular context is different. Sure it is. Sure you might not find your customers on the streets, but that is no excuse to not talk online to your customers, be constant presence on a forum, and arrange meetings with those who happens to be on your city.

Most of advice for startups out there are for those who already have some traction, a few employees. So people might skip the skills and attitude necessary to go from 0 to 100 users or customers. This is the perfect lecture for this crowd.

this lecture definitely has the most practical advice so far (not that the others weren't good as well).

adora also spoke at the female founders conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eP3-ra8nZY) and her story about her and her brother's persistence in systematically climbing the learning curve of product/market fit was one of the most memorable. you can tell that she was speaking from real, hard-earned experience for each of the lessons she related in this lecture.

and i love that she threw in a basketball reference, even though you don't usually just throw the ball around. =)

agree on the basketball reference, the analogy definitely made it easy to understand

It is far too easy to say "I know I know something" and mistake that for being able to do it when the time is right. This piece is the rocky piece, the point where it's easy to be carried away with enthusiasm for something you haven't built yet, add features on to a prototype no users have ever used, or simply not hear the truths we want to hear because they bruise our egos, our decisions, and our pride.

If you can't get in touch with your customers to get feedback at the earliest stage, how are you going to get them to use your product? And if you don't want to talk to customers because you're ashamed of the prototype or you want to show them something 'perfect', you'll never talk to them at all.

This lecture is a bit more dense in practical content, so some people like me, need more time to watch fully again and digest before echoing in a chamber :)

What I liked about her lecture is that unlike the previous ones that were full of general ideas about starting a startup, she related her practical advice to her own experiences and the mistakes she made. Examples are very useful and for me they ingrain the underlying ideas to a greater extent. Also learning about what not to do is just as, if not more important (see PG's lecture of counterintuitive parts of startups) than learning about what to do.

I think it generated less comments because a lot of the content has been seen before, frequently. It needs to be in that course, but the HN audience has probably read a lot of that advice already.

I'm expecting much of this course to repeat things we already know from reading PG's essays and other blogs, condensed and clarified. That's not a bad thing, as you said it's good to keep it in our heads. And I think there will be new nuggets of wisdom embedded in the stuff we "already know".

30 Quotes from the Adora Cheung's lecture here: https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/30-quotes-from-ado...

One reason why I think this lecture probably hasn't generated as many comments/upvotes is because there may have been too many topics put into just 1 lecture. I think it may have been more effective if the content was split out into maybe 2 or 3 separate lectures that went into a bit more depth like.. -Building a product (covering the MVP, the decision process around what features are most important and what's not, etc) - Customer Development/talking to users (the environment to interview them, types of questions to ask them, types not to ask,etc) - Growth (different types of growth, what Homejoy focused on at each stage, potential challenges they went through etc)

I recognize that since it's a Stanford course, they are probably capped with the amount of time they have during the semester as well.

Timestamped notes: https://timelined.com/how-to-start-a-startup/lecture-4-how-t...

The interesting thing to me is that the "n00b approach" is basically what Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and friends did at Paypal.

1. build product in secret

2. exclusive press launch

3. wait for users

4. buy users

5. give up

They built the product in secret and raised money. They did a huge press launch "beaming" money from PDA to PDA. They waited for users, expecting Palm Pilots to be huge only to see they weren't. They decided to focus on eBay sellers and literally bought users for $20 each. The difference is they didn't give up.

Palantir and Space X also started by building products in secret, press launches and then lengthy sales cycles to get users. Ditto for Apple's "restart" in the late 90s and early 2000s. Maybe a relentless n00b approach is the way to build more transformative products and companies.

Notes: http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/10/01/htsas-lec04/

I would love to know how many sign-ups and customer appointments did Homejoy get after this lecture, across the 5 countries it covers. Am sure the ROI on this 50 minutes lecture will give more sign-ups than any FB or google ad campaign :-). What a cunning way to grow!

Adora's talk was very well done. Her use of metrics and graphs to explain various parts of a startup's life was valuable. Frankly, each type of company she discussed (B2B, consumer, etc) could be expanded into their own talks.

One point that rang true was when she said that you may hit a point where the economics of a specific business don't make sense. IME, the economics of a business often look one way before you start, but become increasingly real as you gain early experience with the business. I'm not sure if she was trying to hint that a pivot discussion needs to happen after the real economics of an idea become known, but that's what I got from this point.

The reasoning behind the ad campaign is that if the ad price multiplied by conversion is below LTV, it's worth it.

This seems to be fine in a market with few other competitors, but in heavily contested categories (e.g., SaaS) shouldn't you be multiplying that by customer churn? Seems a bit presumptions to assume that once a customer signs up, they're going to spend 100% of assumed LTV with you and you only.

LTV normally incorporates churn as part of the calculation. If it didn't then unless you have a time-value-of-money discount in there, the LTV of a customer would be infinite. Perhaps you're positing that the LTV refers to the actual physical Lifetime of a customer - but, statistically, that just turns into a churnrate too (sad to say, even 100% of a consumer's lifetime is more than a 0.5% churn rate spread across the whole population).

Thanks for the clarification, makes sense.

I finally got around to watching the fourth lecture and I have to say, this has been the best of the lot so far! The preceding classes have come across to me as a collection of (humorous) soundbites. This class felt much more relatable and, as much as a lot of it could be cast as common sense, it was a fantastic synopsis of what works in reality.

Definitely going to rewatch this lecture soon!

Loving these lectures so far. Anyone involved in or thinking about a startup should watch them. The recommended reading is also excellent.

MOOCs are notorious for fast drop-off in the size of their engaged audience. It will be interesting to see if the same applies to this lecture series (I realise it's not a MOOC!). Perhaps this explains the reduced number of comments.

This girl seems like a cool person. I originally didn't watch this because she wasn't "famous". But personally I found this one of the more inspiring talks after watching it.

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