

The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (2006) - staunch
http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

======
colintan
Quite possibly the most important paragraph in this essay for a product at the
customer dev stage (and probably easy to underestimate... it's a very subtle
point):

"There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important
is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How
often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they
did?"

It's hard to attain the perspective of a completely fresh user when you've
been in the trenches hacking away for so long. And as I've discovered, if you
can't explain it, you can't sell it, cos no one landing on your site's gonna
pore over the genius invisibly possessing it like a ghost in the machine.

