

The most important thing to understand about new products and startups - dfens
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/02/most-import-thing-to-understand-about.html

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koolmoe
It's interesting to me that Paul lists humility as an (the?) important factor
leading to successful product design. It seems like there would be a natural
tension between the courage it takes to found a startup and the humility it
takes to be successful.

I also wonder if honesty might be another word for the skill in question -
i.e., being honest with yourself about what works, what doesn't, and what's
truly necessary.

~~~
sanj
Strong opinions, held weakly

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pmjordan
I can see what he's saying: to make a great product, basically consider market
forces your local gradient, then follow the steepest descent. Surely, though,
that suffers from the same problem as the classic version of the gradient
descent algorithm: it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum. So I do think
your starting point matters.

His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline
email clients before gmail, the key to its success was its integration with an
excellent search algorithm. Without that starting point, it would have most
likely been pulled towards some local optimum which had already been
discovered. Okay, so Google is full of search experts, so maybe internal
market forces would have been different than those of the worldwide market.
Most startups don't have that kind of micro-market which takes them to some
kind of new optimium though.

Taking the algorithmic analogy further, in practice you would probably not
want to do pure gradient descent if it feels like you're heading for a known
local optimum, and instead stochastically/heuristically "go against the flow"
and experiment with idiosyncratic features.

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koolmoe
I don't think getting stuck in a local optimum is as important as the speed
with which you get there.

Techniques for finding a global optimum of a numerical function are expensive,
time-consuming, and often find worse solutions before they find the best one.
Do this in a startup, and your local-optimum-seeking competition will crush
you.

Seems to me that thinking there is a better solution that your users don't
know about (which led you to the local optimum) is exactly the lack of
humility that Paul was warning against.

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pmjordan
Sorry, I didn't actually mean you should try to go straight for the global
optimum (I'd argue there's probably no such thing) - I'm just wondering about
_known_ local optima. Solutions that already exist. I don't necessarily know
about startups, but in open source software, it seems that a lot of the time,
there's some slick and cool new take on a problem. As it becomes popular, it
eventually just grows in the direction of all the other solutions that are out
there, becoming yet another bloated clone. It seems to me that if you find
yourself going down that road, you should steer against that trend. Or should
you?

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Alex3917
This doesn't work for web startups, but for people selling real products I
think the best thing to do is apply the baggie test. That is, when Richard
Garriott made his first computer game he put the diskettes in clear plastic
baggies and gave them to the local computer store to sell. Similarly, O'Reilly
started his publishing empire by selling stapled xerox copies of a unix FAQ he
wrote at a trade show.

The idea being that if people would buy your product if they saw it in a
baggie, you probably have a good product/market.

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edw519
"if people don't want it, then you will fail"

Maybe the best advice you'll ever get here.

So find a customer early. Very early.

~~~
imsteve
My view is that startups aren't easy because there are no natural forces to
guide you. Not customers, not markets, nothing. All can mislead.

And I've become distrustful of one line advice.

~~~
edw519
I guess I'm a little bit different than many here.

I am TOTALLY guided by my customers. I wasn't always this way. I used to think
that something would be so cool, so I would build it, and often, the project
went nowhere. I was fortunate to have a co-founder at one time who insisted
that we sell it first, then develop it. I never completely came around to his
way of thinking, but now I understand where he was coming from.

My customers have never steered me wrong. They don't waste my time. They only
spend energy describing things that they really need, and invariably, others
need the same things.

The downside is that I never spend time working on my own pet projects. I KNOW
I can build a better bridge game, fitness program, or home inventory program.
I'd also love to blog. But all those things fall into the category of "No one
else asked for it", so I simply don't spend time on them. Maybe some other
time.

~~~
electric
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

\-- Henry Ford.

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paul
That's a great quote. It's important to understand that _listening_ to your
customers isn't the same as having them design the product (which would be a
mistake). In this case, the message that you should get from the customer is
that "my horse is too slow".

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indiejade
Quote: "MySpace is a great example of this. I'm pretty sure that their custom
profile page layouts were an accident. They didn't know enough to properly
escape the text that people put on their profiles, and that allowed their
users to start including arbitrary html and css in their pages."

Accidental is a good theory. It's always nice to poke fun at MySpace.
<http://www.zentu.net/open-space/myspace.png>

I sometimes wonder how it's possible for something like this to happen on such
a wide or popular scale -- does Microsoft seriously control or influence that
much of the W3 standards for compliance?

(edit -- sorry. I've obviously been writing far too much HTML lately.)

~~~
aston
When you own the browser market, whatever you implement becomes the de facto
standard.

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vlad
I respect the time PB has taken to write this post, but think this advice is
aimed at beginners. In my opinion, the most important thing about new startups
is to do it in an area with others your age trying to accomplish similar
feats, many of whom are slowly succeeding, and where tech savvy investors and
employees are. Smart people who can accurately assess your abilities as well
as help each other with honest feedback.

I've seen many variations of the same insightful opinions like that one, but
something very important that actually requires more than just product or
language choice is getting up off your ass and moving to Silicon Valley. For
that reason, that should be the most covered topic--at least in my experience.

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jkush
Like a lot of good advice that seems to be obvious or simple: it's the
condensed result of subject mastery.

You're right: it's aimed at beginners. It's also aimed everyone else.

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stener
Eric Schmidt walk around Google and says:"Dont fight the internet, man" :)

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michaelneale
"And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can
produce that viable product."

Indeed. Nor to they care what technology you use (assuming it isn't thrown in
their face).

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jdueck
The most important thing is creating things that people want, with a way to
make money.

