switch11

There is a lot of value in this post

I'll list some pros and cons

Pros of this approach

A) Finding Product Market Fit (which is I guess what you mean by Marketing) is much easier when you focus on a niche

If you go very wide you might never be able to find the right product market fit

Going narrow makes it easier

B) [Perhaps most Important] Fast iteration. You move very quickly from

Being good Product Market Fit - meetings users' needs decently well

TO

Amazing Product Market Fit - meeting users' needs super, super well

There are lots of pros. However, those two are the biggest by some margin

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Cons

A) We're in a world where there is an overabundance of capital. So now you don't necessarily have to 'go niche'

You can go to multiple niches at once, or even wide

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B) Picking the right niche becomes incredibly important

Plus

It's complicated because how do you know you picked the right niche?

You might have a product that is perfect for hair dressers and personal massagers to book appointments, but you are targeting doctors

Sometimes, going wide has the benefit that the market tells you what your product is suited to

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overall this is a good post. The examples are too 'adjusted to fit the post' rather than actual examples where going niche helped

excellent comment

I'm going to give Brave a try

I use Epic and LOVE it. However, do need a second browser to remove my dependence on IE/Edge

That last line is why I come to Hackers News

well put, Sir/Ma'am, well put

PURE PERFECTION: And ironically all of this adds up to the fact they’ve assimilated into a typical type of Portland resident.

Apple is in an interesting position

A) Google already pays them $8 to $12 billion a year to have Google Search be the default search engine on Apple devices

B) The temptation that if they can build a very good search engine they can massively weaken their main enemy in mobile phones

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Apple should consider that Google stole the iPhone idea (when Eric Schmidt was on Board of Directors of Apple) and cloned it into Android

Google sooner or later will revert to such things

If Apple can build search and massively weaken Google it is a no brainer

Don't be like Bill Gates and when Apple was down instead of buying them or buying 40% in them, he played them as a 'look we have strong opponents' card in his anti trust case

If your enemy is showing you his neck, you should take it

good points

would also add

A) Whenever possible use Government subsides to subsidize your expenses, especially worker wages

B) Whenever possible screw over everyone you work with and exploit your vendors and business partners

C) Buy as much Government influence as possible. Even better, buy a newspaper in Washington so you can do overt (lobbying) and covert (who knows what dirt WSJ gathers on politicians) influence on the Government

Agreed 100% -> Both Walmart and Amazon are pioneers of modern union busting practices. They screw workers over as much as they can get away with to squeeze out the maximum amount of labour. Instead of writing this you could as well spit in the face of working class people.

History of taking advantage of people and the country

A) not paying sales tax

B) USPS subsidy

C) union busting and exploiting their workers

Actually, agree with this article

My advice would be to

1) Do iPhone native app if it is unproven market i.e. you don't know product market fit

Do iPhone first because

a) Apple has 66% of spending in Apps and 60%+ of spending in games

b) Google will make sure to slow your success if it feels in ANY way you could be a threat down the line

We have apps that were just disappeared after hitting fast growth, while no such problems on Apple or Windows (though Windows App Store is tiny)

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2) If you're doing something with known product market fit, and have resources, then build cross platform

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3) If you're doing something with known product market fit, and have limited resources, use react

HOWEVER accept that Native App will almost always be significantly better than app built once and deployed for multi platforms

One of the first of countless 'look at my X experience and let's build a generalized advice article out of that' articles where I actually think the author lucked into a truth

you can't

software engineers are not very socially adept and can't read people who are predatory

it's even worse with 'save the world' type software engineers

* the only thing you can do is make sure you get some stock

even then most predatory business side founders will make adjustments (the way Zuckerberg did) to take most of the stock for themselves

also percentage of people who win taking that kind of Wild Hail MAry pass

every startup is a wild Hail Mary pass

So you will get some really crazy 'starting scenarios'

Talk to anyone who started a successful company. There were always moments where chances of success went to 0.0001%

and apart from the founder/founders/ a few employees who drank the Kool Aid, no one else thought there was any chance left

yes totally

Not for the teens who have moved on

Not even for the millenials

But the older parents and grandparents

for them Facebook is pretty much how they view the Internet

And WhatsApp is taking over some countries - so there Whats App is the Internet

This statement makes a lot of assumptions ->

It is clear that Facebook is either unwilling or unable to effectively address the spread of misinformation.

Let's consider

What happens if Facebook stops 'misinformation'?

People go to places that have 'misinformation' because people are seeking what validates their already existing view of the world + people want to be excited and thrilled and entertained

Misinformation = way more exciting than the boring truth

It's not that Facebook is unwilling or unable to address the spread of misinformation

It's entire existence is predicated on playing to the lower instincts of humans

Facebook is set up to ENTERTAIN people and create a Beautiful Skinner Box for people where they keep chasing (likes) cheese and keep avoiding electric shocks (getting ignored, no juicy gossip, no polarizing and exciting news)

It's a Skinner Box

You do good things for the Box and it gives you a rush of dopamine

Create good content -> get Likes -> dopamine -> Skinner Box working as intended

Then against that good content, Facebook shows its ads

That's how it makes money

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It needs GOOD content i.e.

content that spreads content that gets people to keep coming back again and again and again content that gets people excited

Twain said -> A Lie has traveled around the world twice by the time the truth has put its pants on

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Facebook would never work if it became very efficient at weeding out lies, gossip, politically extreme content, misinformation

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Why does everybody start off with assumptions

A) Do we really think people want the boring truth?

B) Do we really think people who believe something want that belief to be destroyed and replaced with something else?

C) Does Facebook have any desire to 'fix' things? They have internal testing. Pretty much 100% sure it would show what happens if they 'fixed misinformation'

D) Do people want Facebook to 'fix' things

I don't see anyone complaining when Obama campaign was using Facebook to win elections

Now Trump is using Facebook to win elections so suddenly Facebook is the target of everyone in tech

Why a double standard? If a platform can be used to manipulate and sway people, is that dangerous only if it is used to sway people in a direction you don't like?

shouldn't it be considered wrong to manipulate and sway people in ANY direction?

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Facebook is basically a 'Appeal to People's Base Instincts' Engine

A skinner box

Everyone believes the nonsense that it is a 'social utility' or a 'social network'

It's not

It's a skinner box. Just observe how the normal people use it

Not tech people

Find some teenagers and see how they use it. Some people in their 20s. Some in their 30s

apart from the really old people (60+) who use it as a sort of communication site, everyone else is using it for really 'bottom of the barrel' stuff

- stalking their exes - checking on gossip - chasing likes (external validation) - showing off - pretending their life is better than it is

Agreed 100% with this

What the person wrote before is ludicrous because coding scales much, much better than sports

I'm not a big fan of the superstar idea. The only area where you can even have indentifiably top performers is in sports, where you have a contest that someone is going to win, and you want to pay up for the guy who is marginally better than the next guy.

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I've worked at one of the trillion dollar companies, at a smaller company that sold for $4 billion, and now run my own startup

In each case I saw examples of this

For the company that sold at $4 billion, the top two developers were at least 100x developers

at the trillion dollar company, there were many developers in 10X to 100X range, not just a few

and in my startup I'm lucky to have two 1000x developers

Of the examples given, I'd say

Linus and Carmack and Simonyi for sure

I'd also say Stallman

* I also had 2 college friends who were somewhere between 100X and 500X

one of them coded an entire stock trading platform as a project for a one semester college course. The Professor was astonished and so was everyone else It was fully working

the other worked on making a mobile version of an enterprise product. His team freaked out because he did more on his solo project than a 200+ developer team that was the 'official team doing it'

seems they gave it to my friend/college mate just to see if he had some new approach. They didn't expect he'd do more than the official team

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People don't understand mindset

we had one person in our college, this was back in 1999, he coded a FULL multi person chat software (like ICQ, but not as polished) in his first year summer vacation AS A HOBBY

If you really think someone like that is 'only marginally better' than people who clock in for 30 hours and then run back for 'work life balance' then you don't really understand coding

Coding is an art and a science

and you need practice and you need a sort of neural network in your head that keeps learning stuff specific to coding

Good Question: ssivark 2 hours ago [–]

Is it even meaningful for a company to be valued at ~$30B if it cannot guarantee survival & stability? In what sense of reality is this a “unicorn”?

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Fed is printing infinite money

So $30 billion is not $30 billion

AirBnB offers the potential of high upside

Do you park your 'free, Feb printed money' in the bank, and then at some point its value is less than it started

Or do you park it in AirBnB or another IPO, where it might go to zero, or it might go ten times

Everywhere IPOs are booming. Because money is being printed and there is nowhere for it to go for a good return

agreed 100%

AirBnb is looking for bagholders

anyone with half a brain knows now is the absolute worst time to invest in something like AirBnb

On the other hand, if the IPO flops, and prices go down a lot, then it might become a worthwhile risk

Could they have chosen worse branding than calling themselves 'Five Eyes' ???

this is brilliant -> On the other hand, Chrome is nothing without promotion on google properties and being installed by default on Android. Chrome would need to pay Google an extraordinary amount to continue to be the default browser on Android. Maybe even the same amount as what Google would pay Chrome to be the default search engine provider.

Chicken? Egg?

this is an excellent point

Google pushes Chrome EVERYWHERE

Now that Chrome is the leading browser they are turning off targeting for everyone else, so that only Google has access to target users

The solution is to STOP the monopoly of Search

So that a new thing like Google Chrome can't happen i.e. Search can't be used to take over another space

I feel exactly the same

At the same time - if you are on the Dev side it is well worth it to learn as much about marketing as you can

There is an Art and a Science to creating these Marketing Treadmills and making them work

The dream is

A truly talented dev team that can make an AMAZING product

MERGED WITH

A splendid marketing team that can really market it

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While there might not be very many similarities, you can always learn from what people do to market and sell their product. Heck some of the best marketing strategies are used by people who have things to sell which seem completely pointless

I reluctantly but wholly agree with everything polote wrote:

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in analytics there is this HUGE market which today is not addressed by anyone, its how to make more revenue from a website.

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I've searched high and low for analytics software that will let me

A) Measure the key things and come up with 80/20 Pateo Principle insights

B) After implementing changes, help measure the impact

Yet all analytics software seems designed to just capture stuff

That's all they do - 'capture stuff'

There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance

As a former H1B holder who walked away from a Green Card because being a bonded laborer for 10+ years to a large tech company wasn't my cup of tea

I agree 1000% with you on this -> H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone.

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It's bonded labor of people desperate to get into the western world and/or get into Silicon Valley/US tech scene

It only benefits large tech companies

A) US citizens have lower salaries (lucky ones) or don't get jobs (unlucky ones)

B) H1B workers are paid less and are bonded labor

C) US itself loses out because many of those people would have started companies

Do you want people starting PinDuoDuo, FlipKart, Meituan Dianping, Shopify type companies in US or in other countries?

Then why instead of letting these 'brightest people from around the world' become entrpreneurs in US

are you asking them to spend 22 to 35 being bonded labor for data surveillance companies like FB and GOOG???

Here are the problems

A) Google pushing its own services over better services owned by others

Example: Yelp was the best reviews service for quite a while

Google was stealing their data and putting Google Reviews first in results

This was an obvious negative for customers as instead of getting more reviews and better reviews at Yelp they were getting lower reviews and lower quality reviews at Google Reviews

B) Google doing secret investments (such as in RetailMeNot) and sending customers to RetailMe Not instead of other discount sites by putting RetailMeNot #1 in every search result

3 to 4 years later REtailMe Not was sold and only then did it become public knowledge that Google Ventures had invested in it

Google was not looking at who had the best deals for each retailer and putting that first. It was putting the company it had a personal stake in, first

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C) Companies that were growing very fast, such as Vroom and were considered dangerous

Google was inundating search results with negative reviews and negative posts about such companies

This was inaccurate and misleading. That particular company ended up IPO'ing

However many other that were offering customers a great deal/better service got hurt by Google search engine manipulations and were not able to survive

D) Google miscategorizing and manipulating results for potential competitors

This is the law suit and the European fine that Google got

There were companies like Findem that had to close down because Google 'disappeared' them from search, as they were potential competitors

So instead of what is best for customers - multiple search engine options - Google was hiding what it considered dangerous competitors

E) Pushing Chrome and taking market share and building a second monopoly (in browsers)

Microsoft had an anti trust law suit and was almost broken up for pushing IE using Windows

Google is doing EXACTLY the same thing

Google Search Google Docs all google properties are constantly pushing Google Chrome

not based on any criteria other than Google owns Chrome and sets Google Search as default browser on Chrome

Basically, the list is super long

Google is using the defence that users pay nothing

HOWEVER, it is taking user data and monetizing it and another company can share that monetized money with users OR can provide a better service

We don't see it clearly because it is being done in almost every area

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any promising company that might do well, is attacked or hidden

In China we have lots of new companies come up

However, no such rise in US

US look at companies going IPO. It is almost all Enterprise

Why?

Because Google, Amazon, Facebook are doing a very effective job of stifling innovation and killing off any fast rising company via various illegal means

If not for the Apple App Store we would see even fewer customer side/consumer side startups

Google is using control of Google Search, Android, and Chrome to keep out ANY company that competes in any way with Google (and google does lots of things)

Amazon is using control of marketplace to make sure no 3rd party sellers can become very big

Facebook is using its monopoly in social media and understanding of what is growing fast to buy up anything that it considers dangerous, and limit those that might become dangerous

These are all well documented

Your questions are postured like Big Tech talking points

This claim is downright laughable -> the quality of the service is impeccable

For many Google properties there are much better options

We can see many things such as Google+ closing down

However, other very good upcoming products are never given a fair chance

We should completely remove 'advertiser' angle. That's a false direction

The right direction is

What is best for customers?

Is Google interfering with that?

If so, then it is abuse of their monopoly position

As simple as that

Just because you offer a free service, does not mean you can do anything illegal you want and claim 'customer is not paying anything' so it is not an abuse of monopoly power

Basically what Google is doing, or trying to do

-> Screw over EVERYONE who is on the customer facing side

If you run ANY company that is growing fast and adding lots of customers, then Google wants to stop your growth/kill you

because they consider every fast growing customer/consumer side company a threat

-> Most startups don't realize this fully. The large tech companies are attacking EVERYONE with a divide and conquer strategy

They know that tech is very fluid and things can change very quickly

So they basically have a list of 1,000 to 10,000 consumer-facing companies they consider dangerous (possible rivals)

and they are manipulating search results, hiding organic traffic, and doing other attacks against ALL of these companies

When it becomes too big, or too late, then you see things like the Attacks against Tik Tok

and for that you had to

find a job

get/consult a lawyer to make sure everything was good

do the whole change

and end up in the exact same situation

Situation: You are tied to ONE employer and if something goes wrong they can just end your job and kick you out

I've done the change so let's not pretend it is some super easy, doesn't matter thing

Also, if you have to leave US where do you have to go?

If you have to go back to UK or Canada that is no big loss

If, on the other hand you have to go back to China or India or AFrica then your entire family is #$@$#$%

they also promised to not share data between services

which is also broken

very true

People don't seem to realize that sooner or later EVERYONE will be under attack from this sort of '10 large companies that own everything' model

They seem to think - Oh my job is safe, so what do I care if taxi drivers/waiters/delivery people/warehouse workers have a tough life

sooner or later you will be a target, and then you will wish you had not ignored when everyone else was being taken out

because there will be no one left to save your job

comment of the day

It's exactly what I thought when I read the headline

I find the following things really help me get in flow

A) (If this applies to you) work at a time when rest of the world is asleep

B) Have some medium quality thing going on at the same time

Ideal is NEtflix as they have a lot of mediocre shows. It should not be too good or it will distract you. It should not be too bad or it will distract you. Just good enough so that it is OK to watch but you don't care what happens in the actual movie or show

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That's it. As quiet as possible + one medium quality distraction ongoing so the part of your brain that wants distraction gets it

Then just focus on your work

Let's look at some background

1) The issue is that Google is attacking competitors using the App Store as a weapon

Google Pay is one of the biggest payment apps in India

It attacked PayTm, another very big payment app, by making its app disappear

2) So lots of Indian companies are using it as an opportunity to do BOTH

A) Point out Google attacking competitors

B) Google taking 30% cut is unsustainable

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Now, in INdia Android has 95% market share

So Apple gets a free pass by virtue of being so tiny in India