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Comment by candu | Hacker News Reader

One issue I have with posts like this, however awesome/uplifting/well-intentioned they may be, is that they attempt to generalize mostly anecdotal evidence to general advice.

Is this an engaging and inspiring story? Yes, and it's great that people feel free to share their stories (successes and otherwise) here.

Having read it, do I have a better idea how likely this strategy is to work for any given person/company? No, and I don't know that anything short of an exhaustive longitudinal study would help there. (There's some mention of studies on creative hobbies, but it's a bit of a leap from there to repeatable ROI.)

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"Having read it, do I have a better idea how likely this strategy is to work for any given person/company? No"

Au contraire @candu.

The founders identified limited cash and made a decision to change tack. A new idea was tried on an observation and a hunch. A prototype was cheaply created, in both time and money and launched, then validated. The only question left unanswered is homework for the reader, "what idea" to try?

Really? Create something small and useful for your primary audience that you can give away for free to drive referrals to your business. Raise awareness and build loyalty. Sounds pretty specific to me. They even included data on four side projects they've successfully used this strategy on.

Bingo. And assuming somebody did actually have a really amazing and effective marketing strategy, they would be heavily disincentivized from sharing it. By its nature, marketing is about outcompeting other companies for attention and sales, so the less competition, the better.

So just based on bayesian probabilities, if you are reading marketing advice from somebody, it probably is bad (or wont apply to you). If you are reading a story about an effective marketing strategy somebody used in the past, it probably doesn't work as well anymore.

As you state, this doesn't take anything away from the entertainment value of the story, but it is just entertainment and marketing, not advice.

What If "the marketing advice" you're reading is the actual marketing?

no ifs involved: blog was specifically listed as one of their marketing platform and HN as their target audience.

>One issue I have with posts like this, however awesome/uplifting/well-intentioned they may be, is that they attempt to generalize mostly anecdotal evidence to general advice.

That's the reader's job. It's they that can and should make appropriate generalizations from the multiple stories they read and listen to.

The posters job is to post their anecdotal evidence as true to what happened as they can, including giving any insights of what worked for them.

As businessmen we don't operate with perfectly accurate and complete data, detailed scientific models for every action and perfect confidence (those don't exist in business anyway).

What good businessmen do is make sense out of the chaos of empirical information, which includes both their experience and anecdotes, and use it AS IT applies and IF IT applies to their particular market and special circumstances.

This isn't general advice. I would say it's quite actionable.

Know your market and its audience. Build simple tools that provide value targeted towards your audience. Profit.

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