People say that hindsight is 20/20. No. Hindsight is speculation with the benefit of never being able to be proven wrong.
Having read this "what we should have said" article, I'm suspicious that if they had done everything differently like they suggested, that they would have still come out to the same result.
Why? Because the idea of an article with a revision tree and multiple current versions is naturally confusing to users. No matter how nice the formalism is. Until you can start to think about and present things in terms that the users can "get", you're going to have a serious UI problem that limits adoption.
And even once you have that version, you still need to be able to compare and contrast it to things that people are familiar with so you can talk to people who don't "get" it yet.
It's interesting how many people see PG as the test of their company's viability (did he get it, didn't he get it?) when what really matters is what the customers think. Did they get it? Did they not?
All this handwringing over a post-mortem with PG, and I rarely see the same with regards to customers. Customers are walking from your site, failing to respond to your marketing, failing to convert, choosing competitive solutions, etc., and where's the post-mortem?
This is a valuable lesson. Not about what to say or not to PG, but rather, how much a poorly crafted value proposition or explanation of your product can instantly and quickly turn off your customers.
Make your products easy to understand, easy to purchase, and easy to get value from, and you will win. Make it complex on any of those fronts, you will lose.
It's interesting how many people see PG as the test of their company's viability (did he get it, didn't he get it?) when what really matters is what the customers think. Did they get it? Did they not?
Well said. Pg is an awesome dude, but I definitely wouldn't take his word as being final, vis-a-vis the possibility of my startup succeeding or not. I'd certainly appreciate his feedback and insights - as I think any one of us would. But, in a hypothetical world where our team did a YC interview and got rejected - we'd still take the attitude that we were the ones who'd been out on the streets talking to customers, that we had the deeper domain knowledge of our domain, and the deeper insights into what our business is going to be. So Paul's advice would be valued, but a "nay" from him would almost certainly not be sufficient reason for us to go "oh, sure, let's quit."
Make your products easy to understand, easy to purchase, and easy to get value from, and you will win. Make it complex on any of those fronts, you will lose.
I mostly agree with that, but note that some complex products still sell and make a lot of money... and they're complex because of the nature of the problem(s) they're addressing. SAP's ERP suite, for example, is very complex... but SAP make a ton of money from it. I'd say the goal is to be "as complex as need be, but no more."
Aside: this may also be an argument that SAP's business stands to be disrupted by someone who can do what they do, but with less complexity. Doing so is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm on it ;) Seriously! (in regards to disrupting the SAP business)
Interesting. If you're willing to talk about what you're doing at all, drop me an email. I'm working on an enterprise focused startup as well, maybe there's some synergy to explore or what-have-you. If we're not pursuing the same space (and we aren't doing anything ERP related, per-se) then - at worst - we could bat some ideas around and maybe help each other out in some fashion.
Hey, that means I'm not the only one thinking about start-ups and products in this area. And I totaly agree, SAP's business is about to be disrupted. The only point is, I'm not sure the time is right yet. And when it is, it will be quite a battle... And that's exactly why it's worth it.
The reason why PG is a test is that he is pretty good at judging who is likely to succeed.
One of the things that I think he's listening for is your ability to hear what someone is saying and respond on the fly. Even if you have a bad idea, if you have the ability to listen, incorporate information, think about it, and respond coherently, then your idea is likely to get fixed. If you have a great idea but don't have the ability to accept spontaneous feedback, you're likely to fail anyways.
So he doesn't need to hear how great the idea is. He needs to decide whether you're likely to find a way to succeed.
But "PG as the test of their company's viability" is because PG is a gatekeeper.
"but rather, how much a poorly crafted value proposition or explanation of your product can instantly and quickly turn off your customers."
People have to be able to understand what you are saying. You can't confuse them or give them big words or concepts.
Ironically PG isn't really a good filter for this because he is so high level. If you are selling to a pizza shop owner most likely they didn't go to Harvard and their brain isn't wired the way PG's is. OTOH a concept that the pizza owner understands can be understood by PG as well.
One of the things I always suggest (for researching business ideas) is to run stuff by "normals". Whether it be people at the train platform, Starbucks, or Walmart to use as additional intel and data points.
It ALWAYS makes sense to run your idea by the people who are living with the problem or feeling the pain firsthand.
As smart, talented, experienced, and helpful as PG is, for many (tho not all) of the problems that entrepeneurs claim to solve, he doesn't live that pain or understand it.
While PG may be able to understand at a conceptual level the pain points of a pizza shop owner, he probably hasn't felt the pain to know what pizza shop owners really struggle with. What is truly necessary versus a "nice to have".
Isn't the whole concept of the Lean Startup and the Customer Development methodology to test your idea with "normals" and not proxies, no matter how influential or gatekeeper they might be?
If YCombinator and PG didn't exist, how would you do it? Let's order some pizza!
To some extent, the startup scene is about high valuations, making the investor the customer.
The filters that gatekeepers and valuators use are very hackable.
Is it easier to hack a gatekeeper's filter, or to make an awesome product? I suppose it depends on your skill-set.
One can reasonably estimate that some double digit percentage of funded startups are where they are because they were designed to appeal to investors and receive high valuations.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought this article is about pitching to an investor. I thought that once your gotten your idea in front of PG that you've already hammered our your product with customers. Do organizations pitch to PG that have not tried anything with customers yet?
It seems to happen a lot, especially when many of these accelerators claim to invest in the team moreso than the idea. This is especially the case with TechStars. In which case, a lot of ideas are unformed, malformed, underformed, you name it.
Having read this "what we should have said" article, I'm suspicious that if they had done everything differently like they suggested, that they would have still come out to the same result.
Why? Because the idea of an article with a revision tree and multiple current versions is naturally confusing to users. No matter how nice the formalism is. Until you can start to think about and present things in terms that the users can "get", you're going to have a serious UI problem that limits adoption.
And even once you have that version, you still need to be able to compare and contrast it to things that people are familiar with so you can talk to people who don't "get" it yet.