Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

I'll come out with a contrarian point of view: I think you're wasting your time and certainly your money.

To have invested your life savings into this app which, uh, is really hard to determine what it does seems silly to me - especially since you have a family to care for.

Slack Meets GitHub Issues? Doesn't Slack already meet GitHub issues in that it integrates with GitHub fine?

The fact that you need a very long blog post to explain exactly what this does should be a warning sign that it's unfocused and released too late.

"It can help you manage everything from todo items to chat messages to blog posts to photos to fully-fledged projects, photo albums and even mini social networks! Really, the type of content you create is completely up to you."

That sounds like a nightmare to me, now I have to invest a lot of time to figure out exactly how this thing works? Start small, focused, make one small thing that does one thing well. Release it quickly, try to get a few people using it (hopefully paying for it) and gather some of their feedback. Find out how they're using it and what their pain points are. Grow from there.

I know you said opportunities where you live are few and far between, and you clearly have the skills, why can't you build a production ready application at an established company?

Finally, I'm being overly critical because I've been in a similar situation before - you spend months building something, release it, and argh! why aren't people coming? It's frustrating, I know, but your skills are better put to use elsewhere.

You spent 15 minutes looking at the beta version of a product, and you've made the decision that the creator is wasting their time? Have you considered that, having thought about it for months, they might understand the problem domain significantly better than you?

What if the product actually has tremendous value, but suffers from a marketing problem? That's a pretty easy problem to fix.

Rather than using your severely limited understanding to encourage the creator to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you should focus on tangible, solvable problems, or just keep your mouth shut.

Wow, great advice there "just keep your mouth shut".

For anyone who has actually invested a large amount of time in a dead idea, the above poster is right on the money.

I think you should take you own advice and talk only about things you know intimately. Lest your sentimentality gets the better of you, when actually trying to address a problem that could suck OP's life down the proverbial toilet.

> For anyone who has actually invested a large amount of time in a dead idea, the above poster is right on the money.

I think the issue here is that the above poster has probably not done his due diligence to actually verify the premise of this statement (that the idea is a dead one).

I could be wrong on that, but I see almost nothing in the post that refers to anything about his experience actually using the app.

For what it's worth, I'm trying to use it right now but I think the site is getting slammed by HN, so I can't actually use it. Therefore, I'm not going to tell the OP that he just wasted all his time and money.

> I think the issue here is that the above poster has probably not done his due diligence to actually verify the premise of this statement (that the idea is a dead one).

Correct, and further, I don't think a passive bystander can make that judgement. The opinion of any one person is irrelevant. If the idea is bad, the market will reject it.

I don't know whether you really are just hedging your bets to karma farm or whether you believe what you say but the author has stood up and asked what people think. What on earth is the point of everyone on here going "oh well it's not up to us to say what we think; he should just start stacking up debt on credit cards and bank loans until it's finished and then the market can dictate!"

That is the logical conclusion of your statement, and that notion is utter bollocks. If in 15 minutes someone is convinced that the product is lacking focus and vision then that is a valuable insight. It might just be that the person reflects on whether his call to action is obvious enough and tweaks his site to make it clear what his proposition is. Or maybe he has been holed up for months by himself in a bubble and has developed something no one wants. Rather sooner he finds that out than later.

This kind of namby-pamby "if you can't say something positive say nothing" mentality that I see in replies does a massive disservice to this community and people in it who risk much more than just a little bruising to their ego (whether it be financial or career).

How was traffic today?

1. I don't comment often, and when I do, it's not to earn magical internet points.

2. I am certainly not advocating diffuse positivity. If you knew me, you would know positivity is not my strong suit. :)

There's nothing wrong with saying that the product seems unfocused or overly complex, or suggesting that the creator focuses either the execution or its messaging. That's useful, constructive feedback that the creator can do something with.

There's not really even anything wrong with saying "I don't understand why anyone would use this" -- although that's not particularly useful feedback.

Jumping from these reasonable positions to "you're wasting your time" is where I take issue. It's a dangerous leap of judgement that none of us can or should make for someone else -- certainly with the limited understanding that we can gain after a few minutes.

The creator seems to have come here to get feedback on the product, not for an intervention.

stole the words out of my mouth. probably with less grammar issues.

"fewer grammar issues" !

If I had a dolla' for every similar throwaway comment about my own project, I would not need any funding.

Hey, maybe this can be a new startup funding mechanism. I propose "haterade.io", a betting pool where you can bet that projects will fail by a certain time. If you lose, your bet goes to the project.

Edit: the real problem is the OP's tone. I do agree that the founder of this project has an explanation problem, but the tone was "your project sucks and you're wasting your time."

My first bet is that haterade.io will succeed. Insert cash where?

I'm too busy to disrupt the hater market. Anyone else is free to take that idea.

For what it's worth, releasing something and finding little or no adoption of the product is often where the interesting learning begins.

I can't tell you whether or not it's worth pursuing, but I know that in my own experience it was. Our team spent almost a year building and launching a product that we ultimately shut down. We could have stopped and gone back to our day jobs, but the silver lining is that the core technology became the foundation for our current (seemingly unrelated) company.

While the now-forgotten product we launched was a failure, pushing past that resulted in a product that has been far more successful (funding, product-market fit, etc). There's no guarantee you'll pivot into success, but there's zero chance you will succeed if you stop iterating.

This is actually the description of how Slack came to be.

I agree with your assessment. I don't think this product has the type of competitive advantage needed in this highly saturated communications market.

I think you can use this to lead to better things. Iterate on the product, get some feedback, and attack it again. In the meantime, blog throughout the process. Get your voice out. If you generate interest about your product before you release it, you can generate more momentum when you launch.

Good luck!

Right on. Somebody should've told Mark about the saturated social media market, or Larry about the saturated search market.

There are so many communication tools, surely its a solved problem right. Ask a knowledge worker today about their favorite communication tool, and you will end up with a dozen answers in about a week's time. Definitely a sign that the problem is solved. There are a dozen solutions after all. :)

This is needlessly reductive and misses the point: the issue isn't saturation, the issue is that OP hasn't identified the USP of the product. Zuck knew full well that the USP of The Facebook was helping students get laid (or at least, find out more about that pretty boy/girl in your class). Larry knew full well that the USP of Google was that PageRank helped identify better quality web sites.

OP doesn't really know what the product is himself, so cannot begin to differentiate.

I'm latching, probably unfairly, to the comment about "market saturation". I give OP +1 for conviction, and -1 for lack of validation.

I agree, and disagree.

What this product would be useful for isn't explained well, and I'm not sure even the OP knows.

But there's clearly something compelling here based on the attention we've all given it.

> But there's clearly something compelling here based on the attention we've all given it.

It should be noted that the original title contained an "I quit my job" affectation, which may have biased the original upvotes for the submission. (which is why the affectation was removed)

If the submission was simply a link to the service instead of a story, I would imagine the results would be much different.

I'm not sure that conclusion necessarily follows here. This wasn't just a link to a product, but a story, starting with, "I quit my job and sacrificed a lot to get here."

Something being is interesting or worth talking about doesn't necessarily mean that thing is valuable (or a good idea for a company). An upvote doesn't necessarily mean, "I like this," but rather, "this is interesting" (or whatever other metric one uses when determining whether to upvote).

I upvoted the OP because I thought it was interesting that someone had quit their job and sacrificed so much to work on something. I didn't look farther than the Medium post because I feel like Slack already has this angle covered.

Or it could be that I'm just not the right audience or I don't get it.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work!

Don't be too ready to listen to people's words of encouragement, unless they're telling you:

Shut up and take my money!!!

Whoa, a contrarian point of view on HN?

"Did he say he wasn't in SF? Let's all yell at him and tell him that he sucks and his idea sucks. SF is the only place anyone who knows how to code / market / launch products lives and everyone else everywhere is dumb."

- Paraphrased 95% of the users on this site lately

#middlebrow_dismissal

Please don't mistake harsh but constructive criticism for middlebrow dismissal.

I don't think the top-level comment even criticized the app, though. The impression I have is that he has not tried it and doesn't even know what it is. If anything, the only thing he criticized is the landing page.

(And that's certainly valid criticism, but it's not a strong basis for telling someone they just wasted their time and money. A marketing problem can be fixed.)

overly harsh criticism.

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