robfitz

The short version is basically:

1. You can still do full "discovery" (i.e., understanding what they're already doing and why, decision-making, current workarounds, etc.), which gives you a better foundation of understanding from which to come up with product ideas

2. But it's MUCH harder to do conversation-only "validation" (i.e., getting confirmation that they're going to buy and use your specific thing before it exists)

So in B2C (and also if building something deep into the future, like 3D Printing), you basically do your discovery as normal and then skip the commitments/validation, jump straight to a quick prototype, and follow the normal iterative product-first learning approach.

A couple Q&A videos (<5min each) that might be relevant:

- You can't learn everything, but can learn more than nothing: https://youtu.be/O16IefIu1zc

- Situations where you need a prototype to keep learning: https://youtu.be/EZGiaIxB0HA

- Traps and solutions to 'nice-to-have' validation: https://youtu.be/yxQoRp01HuQ

Funny you should mention it, that's (part of) the topic of my latest, about designing nonfiction like a problem-solving product (won't plug it here since it's off-topic, but easy enough to find).

Too many authors seem to forget that readers pay for every book twice: once with the cover price and then again with their time.

(And for most business/tech books, the second price is orders of magnitude more costly than the first.)

Anyway, happy it has proven useful and many thanks for the support.

You're totally right — it's one of those things that's always on the list but never feels like the day's top priority, and then one day you wake up and it's on HN and you feel like a dummy ;). Probably some sort of lesson for me to learn here.

(If anyone else needs it, the direct/secure gumroad PDF link is https://gum.co/momtest, and the paperback/ebook are on Amazon.)

Heya, author here. Fun to see this.

I wrote the book after becoming hugely frustrated as an introverted technical founder trying to "talk to customers" but finding zero books about sales/interviews/etc that spoke to my context. That first company (yc s07) failed just as I started to figure it all out, but the casual approach proved useful (and comfortable) in my future businesses, so I wanted to document it for other folks like me.

If it's helpful for anyone, I've been answering reader questions with little youtube videos that touch on some of the common misunderstanding and sticking points.[1]

Also, back when covid started, I also did a short series (5x 5min videos) about adapting the approach to remote interviews.[2]

[1] Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvHabB7atz2uWPZN5m7z3...

[2] Remote: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvHabB7atz2tOjQs1OMzj...

First round price was disclosed by Kyle Samani in this video[1] as $0.04 per SOL. They're currently up about 4000x.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68RqaSL3Ruk

You definitely can edit the code, but it's hidden within their plugin system.

If you're willing to spend 4-8 hours going through tutorials to understand their metaphors & setup, then you can find plenty of interesting ways to use it that are faster than "normal" coding.

But if you just jump right in on the assumption that your coding knowledge will carry you through (which is what I did the first time I looked at it and sounds like what you did as well), then you're going to have a bad time and end up without an accurate view of what it's good at, bad at, and where the trade-offs are.

Sure, writing helps with thinking, but the final written output is an educational product that ought to be built and tested around the needs of the reader, not the ego or indulgence of the writer.

(It's also worth noting that the article is built on personality-specific advice, and not everyone is wired or able to think via writing. I personally love it, but a whole lot of people will only receive useful insights and clarity by talking through new ideas and issues and not via of writing about them.)

Also:

* 70% of global trade is currently denominated in USD (oil markets, commodities, etc)

* US has a lot of debt to other nations

* USD is the global reserve currency, giving the US fairly unique economic power and security

If the USD gets printed into significant devaluation in order to support assets (like bonds, houses, corporates, stocks), then it reduces the real value of the debts that the US owes to other countries (since denominated in USD), which erodes their faith as lenders. Taken together, this:

* Erodes confidence in the USD as a global reserve currency and causes governments to look to other stores of value (e.g., government buying of gold has recently been at an all-time high)

* Artificially inflates asset prices, leading to a bigger crash later when the government support is unable to continue (due to reduced confidence from foreign lenders)

That's all pretty terrible for the US and USD, if it happens.

But there's also an equally credible (though counterintuitive) theory that the USD will actually go up in value (deflation) due to every other country in the world needing to take similarly drastic action and the US being destabilized the least (i.e., the least bad of a set of bad options and everyone rushing into USD and US investments for relative safety).

Plenty of very smart people are on both sides of this argument, but everyone agrees that we are buying ourselves some significant future pain.

There's one for sale in Florida for 295 grand. I can't imagine it's supposed to cost that much, so I'm assuming that either it's someone scalping one of the first 12 due to scarcity, or they'll be dropping prices significantly as they increase production quantities.

A super nice diesel boat like this would cost 20-50k. And 50 nautical miles range is... not much. I love boats, but it's hard for me to imagine the use case here. Hopefully it's like Tesla and all improves very rapidly (price, range, etc) after the early batches.

For kindle, at least, authors can do an "optional" update or a "forced" update.

The forced one is pushed to every device automatically, and Amazon strongly warns against this when you attempt to do it, becaues it deletes all the readers' notes, comments, and bookmarks. It's basically suggested to only use it for book-breaking issues where the current version is essentially worthless.

The optional one adds a little update marker to the book in kindle (similar to a phone app) and lets the user grab it at their own leisure, or ignore it. It's highly unreliable, but is the best practice for any updates which aren't fixing a book-breaking issue.

My guess would be that leanpub is more "full stack" (formatting, layout, website, etc) whereas gumroad is just a storefront. I use gumroad and like it, but you need a bunch of other tools in your pipeline.

> That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country.

Exactly. It only scales up to a point, but that point can still be meanintful.I live in Spain with fairly low cost of living and my (self-published) books have been generating >10k/month profit for several years now, which is several times more than I can spend.

Plus, books are completely zero-maintenance, pure passive income, which is a massive relief compared to any sort of tech product. Would recommend it to anyone who has the interest in writing. (And if you are one of those people, feel free to email me -- I'm happy to help.)

But as OP mentioned, it needs to be a good book. There are a million titles self-published per year and most of them sell approximately zero copies.

KDP phone support is shockingly helpful. I call them frequently and they're often able to accomplish stuff for me which doesn't have any sort of DIY interface. I call them at least once a month for something or other and am always impressed.

One of my friends just released a new edition and was able to it up and set the new version as canonical, which preserved the ratings, reviews, etc. I haven't done it myself and may be muddling the details, but I'd definitely call KDP support before throwing in the towel.

They do, yeah. As an author I'm desperate to get into a continuous deployment/iteration cycle for books, but the fact that kindle works this way really discourages it.

Hope it's helpful somewhat. Give me a shout if you have any further questions or issues with it.

Hah, me too, but couldn't write it till I had taken my knocks first ;)

The depth of the readings (1400 pages) and exam question is inspiring.

I think you're focused on making good learners great (which I assume is the journey you experienced in school), but there's also a fairly large opportunity in helping every student get up to a certain baseline of "pretty good". A student who can't grasp how to plot a point isn't going to benefit from Geometric Transformations.

Sailing is great if you don't mind (extremely) slow travel. I bought an 8m from 1972 for about 2 months' worth of rent and have since moved with it from the UK to (nearly) Spain.

I did it for different reasons than you, but it sounds like it might be a nice fit. Although now that I've said that, there are admittedly another set of environmental problems from the anti-foul paint, so perhaps it's just trading one issue for another.

I think the "career" you're talking about is entrepreneur, built upon the "skill" of programmer. On the other hand, if your "career" is programmer, you're limited by salary, and competing (largely) on skill, which a talented recent graduate could beat you at. If your "career" is entrepreneur, then you get a bunch of multipliers (as Sam calls them) which make your core skills more valuable.

For example, 10 years into your career as an entrepreneur, you'll have a network (and possibly financial assets, and possibly an existing successful business, plus vague intangibles like 'wisdom' and industry insight) which all lets you be vastly more effective than someone who is equally skilled but still in their first couple years.

I don't think Sam is telling you not to build any particular skill, but rather to put yourself on a path where, 10 years down the line, you'll be able to use those skills in a way that other folks can't compete with, thanks to the other assets/resources/multipliers you've built up for yourself, and the fact that you're playing in an area where there is a) the potential for scale and b) you own the upside if it works.

Caveat: I have no idea, just my interpretation of the article.

(I recently sailed through heavy shipping areas like the channel and Seine on a small sailboat.)

Assuming they can see you, the captain of a large boat will try to give way rather than squash you (they'd be _super_ angry about having to do so, though), but in practice they're already hugely under-crewed, so there's a large percentage of time when you (as a smaller boat) can't count on that. And even if they are actively looking out, small boats are just... hard to see. Almost all of the deaths in sailing come from a small boat's crew falling asleep without appropriate watch (you're meant to fully scan the horizon at least every 20 minutes) and getting run down by a big boat.

This is a long way of saying that big boats are already mostly automated, and I think everyone will be safer if we go all the way on it, along with more robust sensors, instead of just pretending that there's always someone doing a perfect lookout.

Very off topic, but I couldn't find another easy way to get in touch with you. If you're up for it, I'd be super keen to swap notes on self-publishing. (Or to be more precise, I'm super keen to learn about your experiences with subscription self-publishing, and I'm hoping I can return the value in some way. I've been doing skill-building biz books & a bit of textbook stuff.) I'm rob@robfitz.com if it's relevant.

PS. sorry to everyone else for the off-topic!

Upvotes & downvotes are used in a specific way here. They aren't meant to show agreement or support, but rather to recognise that your comment holds some interesting value (or lack thereof) for other readers. A quick comment of excitement is low value to other readers, regardless of it being an authentic feeling. Hope that clarifies.

Exciting news, much needed and you're certainly the team to do it.

One suggestion/request: you'll be privy to an exclusive data set -- not about how to run bootstrapped businesses, but about how to support them. And also, the ways in which the common methods of support/mentoring/etc fail with this category of company. I hope you'll take the extra time to document what you're trying and learning, and share it so that others trying to help elsewhere can leverage what you're learning.

In any case, all the best wishes with it.

I must have poorly explained. The strategic decision happens earlier, when you decide which idea to commit to. Certain ideas are both a) incapable of generating early profits and b) dependent on reaching uncertain milestones to unlock the next stage of crucial funding.

So if you don't have the personal finances to deal with that situation, then you make a different decision further upstream, in the past, by choosing to work on an idea which has either easier funding targets (allowing an early salary), or which can generate early profits (allowing an early salary), or which has lower development requirements (allowing you to work on it alongside another paying job).

The decision is about idea selection, where I agree with you. "If you need the money, then pick an idea which allows you to pay yourself quickly." But if you've chosen to play a different game (typical hypergrowth VC stuff), and you want to maximise your odds of winning at that particular game, then it's generally ideal to buy yourself more months business runway instead of more months of personal runway.

Perhaps still not clear, and I know it's an emotionally loaded topic, but hopefully that makes sense.

Regarding the other commenters baring their teeth to attack the UI, how in the world is that in any way useful or productive?

Just yesterday we were upvoting Collison's top questions, one of which was that the book needs to be reinvented for learning. In fact it's still on the homepage with 971 points[1].

I'm not saying this particular presentation is correct or the answer, but I'm thrilled to see attempts being made and can't imagine why you would be hostile toward someone for (and thus discourage others from) making the attempt to try something new.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105129

Edit: There's a similar hypocrisy behind the "doesn't work on X" observations in the other comments.

On the one hand, we talk about getting something launched and out there, and on the other we get on our high horse and complain that it isn't functional on every platform and screen size?

I feel strongly that this should be a supportive environment for new and interesting attempts (and thus uncertain and perhaps buggy ones).

I agree with your first 2 paragraphs, but the third is being overly simplistic (or potentially just not understanding the trade-off at play).

The scenario is that (roughly) 90% of the hypergrowth-style startups which raise a first round will fail to achieve enough momentum to successfully raise a second. And due to the business model choices they've committed to, failing to raise at that point is equivalent to going out of business. A first raise is often too small to be able to do everything they'd like, so they suggest decide that it's in their best interest (long term) to forgo a salary where possible, in order to buy a few extra months of progress before you're forced to start shopping for investment again.

Of course, folks give advice based on their own experience, but it doesn't always generalise to folks in different situations, which is potentially why that would seem like silly advice in (what I assume is) your scenario.

(minor edits toward the end for clarification)

In that case, Tesla would have lived and died happier if he'd had a Musk around to help him find a way to scalably and sustainably bring what he invented to the world.

Memorable though ;)

They claim 7-10% reduction in fuel usage, with fuel making up 60% of their total costs.

Given that they soon expect to be spending $5 billion/year on fuel for 800 ships, fuel spend is a bit north of $6 million/year for an "average" ship. But size seems to vary widely (they note that only the 80 of their largest ships are being considered for these sails).

At an installation cost of $2 million, saving 10% of an "average" ship would return 600k per year, or a 3.5 year paypack, which seems well worth doing where possible. And they'll obviously get better than that on their 80 largest.

Not a magic bullet by any means, but certainly seems worth using.

IMO your only real options are to (a) quit to do the other thing or (b) not quit and forget about the other thing.

If you're funded, you can't do both. But there's some nuance in how one can quit, which depends largely on how far along your current business is.

If you have multiple cofounders and a solid team in place, you can just leave yourself. You talk to the investors first, and give them some sort of perk, such as a right of first refusal, or even spin it out of the current company (which means they get a small equity stake since your current company owns some of the new one). This is all fine, but only works if your current business is strong enough to run completely without you.

If the current business isn't to that point yet, then leaving it will kill it, and dividing your attention is as good as leaving it. Not fair to the investors, not fair to the employees. So you sort of just grin and bear it. That's the hidden cost of taking funding and asking people (both investors and employees) to believe in you. But such is life.