
Ask YC: What causes startups to NOT build something users want? - Leon
PG talks about building what users want as the main indicator of a startups success, but there are a lot of startups out there building things that I can't see anybody wanting.  Why is this?  Are the founders not paying attention to their users?  Investors pushing the company in a bad direction?  Ignorance?  Ego?<p>Maybe it's hard to find out exactly what users want, but what can founders do to make sure they aren't getting caught up in a bad situation that's pushing them in the wrong direction?
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shimon
The thing you can do to make sure you're not caught in a cycle of pointless
work is to release the product.

Stepping back a bit, another thing you can do is pick a market that (1) has a
need and (2) is willing to pay for a solution. This works best for markets
where you have personal and business connections to powerful people, but those
can be built up over time. This is how much of the world's IT fortunes have
been made, building a more efficient time clock or equities trading system or
shipping logistics system. This is usually not something you can do with
"innovative" consumer webapps because innovation targeting consumers generally
implies letting people do something they didn't previously know they wanted to
do.

If you're doing a pre-release consumer webapp, I think your best measure is
how excited your team is about using the product. Sometimes this is hard to
separate from excitement about _building_ the product, but you should worry a
lot if there aren't a few coworkers and friends who are totally in love with
the product. Like, using-it-all-day-telling-all-their-friends in love.

You can take one spark of true love and work out a message that makes it grow.
But you can't take a thousand gallons of "potentially interesting" and turn it
into love without some significant new inspiration. And inspiration gets more
and more difficult to add the more committed your team is to its existing
product direction. Therefore it's very important to short-circuit this
commitment by releasing early and making sure everybody knows that the measure
of success is not lines of code, but attention and affection from users.

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dhouston
\- focusing on too small a niche

\- working on interesting technical problems that don't correspond to problems
that people need solved

\- making something that's only slightly better than what's out there (e.g. a
slightly better news site or social network) and expecting everyone will
magically switch or improves in areas that no one cares about

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mattmaroon
I feel like number 2 there is far and away the biggest.

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edw519
"What causes startups to NOT build something users want?"

Not having a customer.

I cannot overstate this enough because it's the easiest mistake to make and
I've already made it more than once.

It's so easy to say, "This is so cool!" or "I can do that!"

And then, "Who WOULDN'T want it?"

As it turns out, there's a very real possibility (even probability) that no
one would want what you think is cool.

Having a customer, OTOH, changes everything. They're way too busy doing their
jobs to ponder what's cool. They just want solutions to their problems. And
they'll tell you. Especially if you are receptive or know how to ask.

Most of the times customers told me what they needed, I probably never would
have thought of it on my own. And, invariably, those were the things that
ended up being closest to what other people wanted, too.

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rms
Not to pick on him, but there was a startup posted here yesterday that got
some harshly negative feedback -- it seemed obvious to many people that users
weren't interested in what he was offering. The most positive suggestions
suggested alternative product features. I think some founders build a product
for themselves and can't understand that it doesn't offer mainstream appeal.

It seems like an easy way to check yourself is to ask your target users.

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jamongkad
I think that's right on the money! Asking your target users what they want.
Maybe I could share a few things for what it's worth. Back then I wanted to
build a Yelp! like site just for the sake of it. I was thinking that guys like
me would benefit from it. To cut the long story short it didn't go so well.
Anyways a couple of months before my failed attempt I built a simple to-do
list application. My dad saw it and asked me what else does it do. To cut
another long story short this simple to-do list evolved into a full fledged
project management application that is aimed towards people who are in the
same line of business as my father. It's feature set was built specifically by
the recommendation of my users. And by God's grace I have four companies lined
up in the trenches ready to buy my software :-). So yeah without a FGD (focus
group discussion) my company wouldn't be where it is right now. I was
constantly amazed by the difference between what I want as a user and what my
target users want. So never underestimate a good FGD session or similar to my
case several FGD sessions.

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imsteve
Just weighing in here...

I'm never again considering what people say they want without a mountain of
salt. All too often, what people say they want ends up not being used at all,
not even by those who requested the change or addition. Users don't seem to be
magically smarter than the developers in my experience. Design by committee
has never worked so well for me. Especially in such a flexible medium as the
internet.

But, releasing early is a good way to measure what people will actually use.

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mattmaroon
It's best to listen to what people say they want, then ask why over and over.
You'll notice that as you dig through levels of answers to that question, that
very different requests come down to the same basic unmet needs. Then you
engineer a solution to that.

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imsteve
When the goal is entertainment though, I don't see that strategy getting you
far.

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mattmaroon
It works even there. Entertainment is as much science as any other business.
Even the most popular songs around are more or less scientifically crafted.

~~~
mattmaroon
I should say many of. Rock and maybe country are pretty much the only organic
forms of music you'll find on FM radio these days.

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marcus
Assuming you know/represent your users, if you are building something just for
yourself and don't care if someone else likes it, great. But if your goal is
getting users to use something, build a company around it, ask them & follow
them.

Assuming your most vocal users represent your average user or target audience,
read this Guy Kawasaki's post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=89088>

Fear to question your old beliefs, think of the PayPal story. They originally
thought they'll do payments through PDAs and put up the website as an
afterthought. A week later they noticed everybody is using the website and
almost no one is using the PDA software they wrote. They panicked and shutdown
the website, until someone had the sense to say "if that is what our users
want to use, lets let them", if they had insisted that PayPal only be used
through PDAs you wouldn't have heard of them.

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Shooter
You would think that just asking your potential users what they want is best,
but then you have to worry about self-report errors. As has been noted.
(Customers lie. To you and themselves. Accept it.)

I'm fairly stupid and I don't possess a crystal ball...but since I also don't
want to waste my time on things that don't pan out financially, I've spent
quite a bit thinking about this question. I like to keep things simple, so I
will generally only start or buy a company if it does one or more of the
following (the more, the better): 1\. Make the user money. 2\. Save the user
time. 3\. Save the user money. 4\. Get the user laid. 5\. Save the user's
life/improve their health.

There are a few other rules. Numbers 2 and 4 should never exist only on their
own. Number 5 is often one of the most difficult to execute because prevention
is harder to sell than solutions. And all of the potential ideas have to be a
superior enough solution that they outweigh the switching costs for the
customer (including the switching cost from nothing, inertia is a bitch!)
Number 2 is the most likely to suffer from the "unwanted solution" problem
(for various reasons, an outlining of which I suppose would better address the
original question.) Multiple streams of income and multiple customer bases are
always good things, just to hedge your bets.

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wlievens
Maybe you make something you want yourself, and figure you may not be alone in
the world?

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imsteve
Very true.

My technique these days is to find what the widespread masses will like and
then work backwards until I find something that I will like too. At this rare
intersection, I build.

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koolmoe
I don't have any experience in a startup, but just thinking on the problem
leads me to believe that not releasing early would be a big contributor.

Seems to me that if you release early, you'll get more interesting[1] feedback
while your app is in a nascent stage and you can more easily change direction.

[1] By interesting, I'm mean that the feedback on a more fully developed
release is more likely to be of the window-dressing, change-this-font-to-
helvetica-16 type, while feedback for the early release will often be directed
at adding desirable features.

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rokhayakebe
quite frankly i think it is a trial and error process. there really is no
proven technique. think it, build it. build it fast. assess response then
react.

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morbid
can you please quote some examples for this...

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Leon
Do a google search on 'failed internet startup'

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nreece
Inexperience.

