
Before You Grow - craigcannon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/before-you-grow/
======
downandout
Building something users love is, of course, the challenge. 99% of startups
are unable to do this, and some of those that can't still manage to raise
money because someone involved went to Stanford or is otherwise well-
connected, only to inevitably fail later on. Generally speaking, these days if
you don't have rabid fans of your product almost immediately among some group
of users - however small - the product as you have implemented it is destined
for failure.

If you fail to attain at least some group of rabid fans right after launch,
then you have to ask users and find out what changes you could make that would
turn them into rabid fans - if anything. If you don't get some sense of
agreement among users from the responses, odds are that you should move onto
another project. Products that the masses love are very rare. Creating them is
hard, and because it involves a tremendous amount of subjectivity and pure
luck, it will likely take far more than one try. But you can only fail at it
if you stop trying or let yourself get bogged down with attempting to make
something work that users simply don't and will never care about.

~~~
beat
VCs are optimizing for something other than love. They're optimizing for
potential scale. You can build a product that customers love, but with a low
ceiling for the market (like, say, building a really awesome surfboard). VCs
want to see billion dollar market potential. So they may invest in something
without real proof of customer love, or even customer need, just because the
market potential is great.

~~~
morgante
That might be true at the seed stage, but no competent VC is going to keep
funding you if you've launched and aren't able to demonstrate that some people
love your product.

Of course, product/market fit is not a sufficient condition for success. You
also need the market to be big enough.

~~~
beat
On the other hand, the OP's assertion that money just flows to people who
"look right" (my words, but true) without real regard for the product itself,
applies largely to seed money only. A proper Series A round (or more) should
require a strong product and customer feedback. So I think my point still
holds. Seed VC is looking at market opportunity and founders who "look right",
not a killer product that customers love, because the product may not exist or
have a significant customer base yet.

------
maximp
"And if you’re just starting out, take the time to build a product your users
love, no matter how long it takes. "

There's this weird balance between the lean "get it out as soon as you can,
fail fast" and "make sure it's a good product before you ship".

~~~
blazespin
No, the rule still applies. Get it out fast so you can find out if your users
love it. Just don't push it to a broader audience.

Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this. They release in foreign
markets (Canada, Australia, etc) and make sure their users love their apps
before releasing in the US.

~~~
bbcbasic
Time to release utes in the US!

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_\(vehicle\))

~~~
danieltillett
Pity there is no company left making these in Australia.

------
qwrusz
This is good advice but on a practical level isn't clearly compatible with
other advice like "fix the plane while it's flying".

Also I was under the impression YCombinator focuses on helping companies grow
and organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs. The
pg article even mentions growth targets during YC. If this is true then
companies accepted to YC should already have a product people love and be
ready to hack growth over the next 3 months. This clearly is not the case (eg
Airbnb joined YC after about a year not 1000 days).

If YC is not only about growth but also about helping companies at much
earlier stage still working on the product people love stage, that would seem
to be a challenge. What do YC speakers talk about? Growth or Product? It's
like putting kids learning Algebra in the same class as those ready for
Calculus, not easy at all. Maybe there should be two types of YC sessions
then? One for early startups still working on product, another YC for startups
working on growth...

Every founder I have ever met wants their product to be loved, but
unfortunately they need time and money to figure this out. Other issues: it's
hard to know when to walk away pre-product and pitching VCs without growth
doesn't seem to work. So founders raise money by showing early "growth"
without PML (product/market love), then they go back to work on the product
and when PML doesn't materialize in the first couple months they start to get
nervous and switch resources back to growth hacking their mediocre product so
they can be ready to raise money again and have another chance.

Obviously this is all very complicated, full of exceptions to rules. In
reality product and growth have to be going on at once - but the timelines and
resources and challenges to do product and growth at the same time should be
part of the advice.

~~~
rsp1984
I'm not affiliated with YC in any sense but trying to clarify some things:

" _fix the plane while it 's flying_".

This is typically advice for startups that have found product-market-fit (i.e.
have a product people love) but there are a million other things broken. In
that case the advice is often to fix these things "while flying", i.e. while
simultaneously growing sales and the company in general.

" _organizes a demo day 3 months later to help them raise money from VCs_ "

I understand the purpose is primarily to help companies raise seed/angel
rounds, not big "institutional" rounds. And just generally make connections
for later.

" _The pg article even mentions growth targets during YC._ "

Clearly this is not applicable to all companies. E.g. what's the "growth
target" for a company like Rigetti who build a quantum computer?

" _One for early startups still working on product, another YC for startups
working on growth_ "

One of the primary (if not the most important) benefits of YC is the network.
You get that regardless of whether you're in product or growth stage.

" _pitching VCs without growth doesn 't seem to work_"

Depends on what you're pitching for. Seed and Series-A are two entirely
different games.

" _So founders raise money by showing early "growth" without PML
(product/market love), then they go back to work..._"

Good investors aren't fooled by that and will ask the right questions to
quickly uncover any fake metrics. Besides that a seed round is typically
raised on team, talent, idea and early traction, not growth.

~~~
duncanawoods
>> Seed and Series-A are two entirely different games.

Are you actually in a position to offer advice? What you say seems outdated -
seeds grew to multi-million figures such that "seed is the new series A" was a
thing back in 2013 - firms now offer "pre-seed" funding and "second-seeds"
seem increasingly common.

The assumption today seems to be that if you have no connections, you must
self-fund / bootstrap / FFF your way to traction to even attract angel
interest and for you, seed is for growth. However, if you have prior exits and
connections then you play a different game and can probably raise a MM seed
without even an idea of what your new business might be.

~~~
rsp1984
_Are you actually in a position to offer advice?_

Are you in a position to question that I am?

I've raised a seed round for my company 3 years ago and we are now going for
Series A. I feel experienced enough to share some of my thoughts. Feel free to
ignore it if you disagree.

~~~
duncanawoods
Sorry I said that aggressively. I'm tired of low signal startup advice that
does not address real-world complexity and it got the better of me.

What would have been fascinating, practical and not have raised my doubts
would be if you compared the metrics and institutions you used to raise your
seed compared to what you are using for your Series A.

Anyway, best of luck. Three years seems like a long time to live on a seed.

~~~
rsp1984
Thanks. We hustled to "Ramen profitability" so we don't actually need the
money. We'd still very much like it though to speed some things up and to buy
ourselves some ice cream to the Ramen every once in a while ;-)

------
AndrewKemendo
_You’ll have to rely on inorganic means like ads, marketing, or PR to maintain
your growth, and this gets very hard to sustain_

This is a point that I am always curious/skeptical about because growth will
always become marginally harder. So ads, marketing and PR are always going to
be necessary at some point.

Using his examples, facebook is creating airplanes to deliver facebook to
people they can't reach otherwise - talk about high acquisition cost. AirBnB
has a ton of TV [2] and Print ads.

Further, companies like abcmouse [3], dealdash [4] all blanket the airwaves
with their ads and seem to be doing well.

So maybe some companies/products lend more to traditional ad spend than
others, or maybe the idea that viral is the only way to grow and sustain is
wrong.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-
technolog...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technology-
behind-aquila/10153916136506634/)

[2]
[https://www.ispot.tv/brands/oLp/airbnb](https://www.ispot.tv/brands/oLp/airbnb)

[3] [https://www.ispot.tv/brands/d9N/abcmouse-
com](https://www.ispot.tv/brands/d9N/abcmouse-com)

[4]
[https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Tc0/dealdash](https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7Tc0/dealdash)

~~~
Mahn
The point is not to never do paid marketing, but to make sure that you have
something in motion that doesn't rely 100% on paid marketing before you do. If
people are talking about your product, paid marketing can help amplify the
signal and the reach (facebook, AirBnB), but if you can get no one excited
about it, if no one talks about it, then going all in with paid marketing is
akin to shoving down people's throats something they don't want; it's unlikely
to be sustainable even if you have large pockets.

------
jot
I recommend using [https://www.promoter.io/](https://www.promoter.io/) to
measure NPS. It's a brilliant starting point for getting useful feedback too.
I've ended up using it for the conference and coworking community that I run
as well as for a software product.

~~~
trg2
I would love to see a comprehensive list of all of these tools to measure NPS.
Does one exist?

~~~
lrmunoz
Sorry for the shameless plug, but just by coincidence, I have recently started
building a simple NPS tool. Currently it's only a landing page, but I'd
appreciate anyone interested to subscribe: [https://nps.io](https://nps.io)

I have extensive experience applying the NPS to the hospitality industry, and
I can tell you that it's not a marketing gimmick as I have read in some other
comments. That's why I decided to roll my own service :-)

------
web007
Who finds actual value from Net Promoter Score?

It's a vanity metric, just like asking "would you pay $10 for this?" instead
of getting someone to actually pay $10.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS)

~~~
danaseverson
You're correct, the number by itself, doesn't provide a ton of value beyond a
measurable KPI. For some companies however, that KPI is one of their core
metrics. Some companies even base compensation around the score.

That said, the NPS methodology is much more than the overall score. The real
value is in the individual scores, verbatim feedback and its proven ability to
tie those results into both growth and churn. All combined (and when done
correctly)it can help drive funding, determine PMF, guide your product
roadmap, forecast revenue and drive measurable growth (just to name a few
benefits).

Breaking it down to just a score is looking at NPS far to simplistically.

~~~
AznHisoka
atrributing verbatim feedback to NPS is misleading though. getting feedback is
just talking to customers, surveys and methods that have existed for years.
saying its part of the NPS methodology is giving it credit for something it
did not invent.

~~~
danaseverson
You're right, feedback isn't exclusive to NPS, but you're missing the point.
It's the type of feedback that is the critical difference here.

Yes, you can ask any customer any question and get a response, but does that
question/response elicit the same intelligent and predictive value of the NPS
questions? Will randomly surveying your customers generate the same response
rate as an NPS survey?

NPS is a proven methodology with predictive intelligence and high response
rate, what you're suggesting is not. The choice is yours though.

~~~
AznHisoka
"NPS is a proven methodology"

That's a blank statement that tries to be authoritative and sounds nice, but
where's the proof?

------
danieltillett
What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big
competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product,
actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they
use it?

~~~
quickConclusion
Then you want to bargain a discount, a faster delivery, a whatever, for being
a public reference.

In other words, if they want something, and want it badly, instead of
monetizing it with $$, monetize it with a case study.

Personal favor also. You go the extra mile for one user/infleluencer/decision
maker in a customer company. Then ask to return the favor: "could you spend 15
minutes talking to this prospect of mine, it would help me a lot".

They can say no, find an excuse. But it will hurt them because they know you
helped them unreasonably in the past, it was valuable to them, and you may be
less willing to do so in the future.

Some will say yes. You just need one or two.

~~~
mck-
We also encountered some customers like that - true evangelists but refuse to
partake in public endorsement for fear of losing competitive advantage. We
even offered discounts, but to no avail.

On the contrary, we found the European and Australian customers to be
completely different; competing companies in the same local markets seem to be
quite chummy and will share such information freely.

Obviously not to be generalized. We have North American evangelists too.

------
silvaben
I recently came across an app lets you measure NPS directly on your website -
[https://www.metriculator.com](https://www.metriculator.com)

Seems really nice. I figured it might be useful for folks trying to run an NPS
survey after reading Sam's recommendation.

~~~
elwell
I hate sites that have these.

~~~
elwell
IMO, if bothering the user at all, you should limit the number of options to
two. E.g., after finishing a certain process like submitting an order, you can
ask the user "Do you like our website? YES / NO". If NO, then you can take
them to another form so they can complain with details. Having choices 1-10 is
way too granular (we're not trying to get Yelp ratings). And popping up on the
screen makes me want to leave the site.

On the positive side, I have had pleasure of using some well-designed
interfaces, and the giving of positive feedback probably reinforced in my mind
that I liked the site. I.e., it made me cognizant of the good design.

------
fillskills
Small nitpick: The blog is hard to read with so much bright orange distracting
from the main content. I use a script to fix that on my browser. Thought the
feedback might help with the new blog.

~~~
yvsong
Orange, to Make Startups Great Again?

I try to let my own CSS (particularly fonts) on Safari trump the sites I read
a lot, such as Hacker News. Safari's reader view is good too.

------
vsloo
A lot of this has to do with experience and whether or not you're trying to
fulfill expectations (VCs, etc). You really don't know when a product will
become loved no matter how much you iterate and it's also impossible to know
for sure how long you need to "slog" it out. Some products become loved far
earlier than others. The best thing to do as a founder is to drive at your
vision hard as quickly as possible, acquire users to test multiple theories
and gather feedback, and iterate when there are signs. Even then, not all
iterations or pivots are created equal. There are many different ways to grow
a business (many of which veer from traditional silicon valley values) and
it's up to the founder to stick to his/her own values and to what makes sense
at the time. I don't think there's a single founder out there who wants to
build just a mediocre product. This is why product-market fit should be the
primary focus for any growing business.

------
debt
i don't mean to be a dick but citing airbnb and facebook seems like bad taste.
those companies are massive outliers with billion+ dollar valuations. nowhere
near your average ycom startup.

i think i'd be smarter to cite maybe smaller companies that exited in the
million/100,000 dollar range. seems more accurate.

i understand that ycom wants the people they're funding to focus on ideas that
generate billions as that's ultimately advantageous for ycom, but,
realistically, most of these companies will putter out or exit in the low
millions, which is still cool as hell too!

doesn't seem to make much sense for anyone to constantly cite huge outliers
like googs or fb or salesforce etc. when there's plenty of dope ass smaller
ycom companies that probably did exactly what sam is talking about: build high
quality, fun, exciting, engaging products.

~~~
brlewis
FriendFeed focused on being loved more than growing users and had a $50MM
exit.

------
pcmaffey
It's a delicate balance, for sure. Focus on product until you have something
that really works. But don't fall into the 'build it, and they will come'
trap.

As a side note: the new UI for blog.ycombinator is really ...uncomfortable. 3
columns? 4 if you count the social share buttons jutting out on the left.
Designed on a > 21" monitor :(

The list of tags doesn't need it's own column... each with it's own row. Just
make it a tag cloud above or below the blog list, and give a little breathing
room to the actual article.

~~~
LukeShu
The tags turn into a tag cloud at the bottom if your screen/window is small
enough (I had to zoom out to get them to move to the right on my dinky x60).
Smaller still, and everything (including the social share buttons) turns into
one column.

------
blacksmythe

      >> Airbnb slogged for 1000 days before discovering how to make their product loved.
    

Airbnb had a network effect product (marketplace of buyers and sellers).
Growth accelerated once they had enough of both.

    
    
      >> It’s unclear exactly when Airbnb implemented what’s become their most famous growth hack, ... 
        Craigslist had one thing that Airbnb did not - a massive user base.
        https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb

------
euph0ria
Everyone says to create a product that is loved (agreed), but how do you get
constructive feedback in the early days?

I've experienced that many users are unwilling to engage in conversation, they
test it and if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why.

Suppose one creates a new Whatsapp-like product, how would one, in practice,
go about gathering feedback?

~~~
nostrademons
The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and
won't communicate why" _is_ your feedback.

Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly
trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they
want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they
don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundreds of
iterations before you converge on something folks like.

This is also why founders that are building for themselves have such an
advantage: then you _do_ get some signal about exactly what you might need to
change, and why you would want it. You've got to know (and accept) yourself
pretty well to be able to listen to it, though.

~~~
euph0ria
Yes, I understand that it is a tacit feedback, but it is so binary that it is
hard to infer something from it besides we need to change.

Iteration, it feels like a company could use the run rate iterating and never
figure it out?

~~~
nostrademons
Most do. That's why most startups fail, after all.

The lesson to take from this is to get your iteration velocity up and your
burn rate down. If you can, you also want to be extracting as much information
as possible from the failures, so it's not _entirely_ random, but even if
you're brilliant and 100% paying attention there will still be a lot of them.

------
kriro
"""Startups are defined by growth, but growth isn’t step one in building a
great company."""

I'd argue it is. Building something people love is all about growth. If they
love it, they'll talk about and champion it. In fact measuring generic word of
mouth growth is a decent way of figuring out if people love the product (my
working hypothesis is that engagement is great but if they go beyond
that...we're golden).

I'd say ignore all kinds of growth except word of mouth growth. I don't care
about user acquisition schemes...as soon as the word of mouth growth flattens
the alarm bells must go off and all other measures are probably just life
extending measures.

I'd also say ignore "growth hacking" especially of the "I'll trick people to
like my product" variety. Genuine product improvement is the best growth
hacking there is.

------
tjholowaychuk
Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs,
build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that
will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these
days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding
but the company may last more than 3-4 years.

Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefully that
will give you time and financial freedom to build more complex products down
the road.

~~~
coffeemug
_> don't get funding from clueless VCs_

Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it,
the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be
wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be _very_ wrong, but
they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better.

TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

~~~
tjholowaychuk
Removed my "clueless" generalization. It's anecdotal, but most that I've
encountered (relating to SaaS products) don't have much of a technical
background at all, just throwing money at buzzwords, meanwhile they think
critical services such as logging aren't worth going after, just because it's
not trendy. I'm sure it varies from industry to industry.

~~~
jzwinck
Logging is indeed a critical part of many processes, but it's very hard to do
it in a way that pleases everyone. Most loggers don't even support renewable
inputs like bamboo.

Before you think this is a mere joke, consider that normal people don't even
know what computer logging is, much less want to become a user of a logging
service. The addressable eyeballs are few, and it's a market chock full of
free products already. Plus the most serious consumers always end up with a
bespoke proprietary solution.

------
blizkreeg
Do people have thoughts or pointers for building something users love when
your product depends on there being enough users using the product? Dating
apps, platforms and such.

When a single user gets no utility from your product if there aren't enough
already using it, what does one do? You kind of have to spend some money
marketing to get the initial word out. This is something I've been struggling
with. We've been doing a lot of writing content and there's some word of mouth
happening. We spend small amounts on FB too. But we're seeing a lot of users
drop off with the reason "there just aren't enough other people using this".

~~~
jgh
Didn't Tinder start off by seeding your experience with friends of friends on
facebook?

~~~
blizkreeg
I believe Tinder did a lot of going to campuses and throwing parties, that
sort of thing.

------
pedalpete
I really wish we could see some metrics on products people 'love'.

I'm working on a product that is seeing great growth (free atm), and what
appears to me to be good customer engagement.

When I break things, users email and let us know, time on site is good, etc.
etc. At what point do you go, yup, this is something people love.

Of course, I'm still making product improvements and figuring out what people
will pay for.

------
statictype
I'm curious about how this maps to enterprise products? Can you create an
enterprise-targeted product that users truly love?

Any examples of this?

~~~
pinky07
Yes: [https://www.Odoo.com](https://www.Odoo.com)

But we did not follow Sam's path. 1/ we made resellers and developers happy
(being open source played an important role early on) 2/ we grew 3/ we made
end users very happy 4/ we grew much faster

The reason we took this part is that it takes a lot of time to both build the
enterprise features, and make it great. We built the scope first and made it
great after, which is not an usual path.

Disclaimer: I am the founder.

~~~
statictype
Nice.

How do you grow your reseller network?

I would presume that reseller's interests don't always align directly with
end-user interests?

------
huangc10
My takeaway: Build a product that people will love (don't forget about
yourself too!). If not, fix it immediately before it's too late/difficult.

------
tlogan
Easier said than done :-)

But, I have a better advice: Do not spend money and time promoting something
that sucks or it is not useful.

------
bedros
that's actually why best startups are those who make products for themselves,
so they tested on themselves first; they don't really need public launch date;
because the product is already being launched and getting instant feedback
during development

examples are airbnb and dropbox

------
tsunamifury
I have an even harsher take.

In the old days if you didn't have a product that "sold itself" (i.e. loved)
then you'd just make it cheaper than the competition.

These days software products are by and large free (your users pay in time),
so there is no obvious competitive strategy on similar products. If you don't
have evangelical user base that loves your product and spreads it or at least
a well defined niche use case, you've literally got nothing.

There is no room for "Facebook but cheaper". Heck there isn't even room for
"Facebook but marginally better" anymore.

~~~
user5994461
There's plenty of room for other Facebooks. In fact, there are major
competitors to the likes of Facebook & Linkedin & Google.

They just happen to be national companies (russia, china, some european).

If anything. The thought that they have no competitors/alternatives is just a
display that SV totally ignore the local non-english competitors (no matter
how engrained they are in their market) and generally disregards anything that
is under 1 billion unique users.

~~~
brianwawok
This is only for ad base products.

Tesla has far under a billion users and SV loves it.

Many b2b startups have a few hundred to thousand users.

If you want to sell Ads and be free, you need billions. If you have an actual
product you charge money for, you need far less.

~~~
lacampbell
What if you want to sell users data? Isn't that what most free web and mobile
apps are really selling?

I have a lot of great software ideas (great in that I wish they existed and
want to use them), but no clue which could actually be monetized effectively.
Billions of users seems like a tall order, and not a sensible thing to pursue.

~~~
brianwawok
Easiest is b2b. Are any of your ideas something a business would pay to use?
Start with a product that cost say $50-$500 per month.

Much easier to sell 100 copies of something than get 100 million people to use
your software.

------
aacook
TL;DR - Two good ways to measure if you're making something people love: 1\.
Your users actively tell their friends about your product. 2\. NPS surveys.

In the beginning it seems like the best way to measure if people are telling
their friends is by not measuring at all. Just talk to users. You'll find out
if people are about to tell their friends or how new users found you (an
existing user sent them your way).

I'm always weary of surveys since they can be a dangerous mix of qualitative
and quantitative. NPS seems solid since there's no denying a number. Sometimes
I see NPS surveys that only ask for the rating (1-10) and don't ask a follow-
up question ("Why did you choose 5?"). This is such a missed opportunity since
the "why?" text can contain feedback gold. There's also no substitute for
following up after the NPS survey to do more in-depth qualitative feedback
gathering through user interviews.

I'm curious to hear more about what Sam thinks about measuring DAU/WAU/etc in
the beginning.

------
logicallee
Comment withdrawn. I've withdrawn this comment, but per site policy /
encouragement I'm leaving my original comment below the lines.

Pre-edit:

\---

I liked your comment but you won't believe how I felt about one part:

>Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this.

I'm sorry, I just found it very distracting... like you use clickbait title
interspersed in your writing. I tried to replicate the effect for you at the
top of this comment. There's nothing wrong with what you said, it's just kind
of like the format of clickbait titles, you know? Thank

EDIT: got voted to -1 but I'm keeping this - it's genuine feedback for
someone. the phrasing "do this one neat trick for this" doesn't come from
normal writing or conversation and I find it distracting in an otherwise nice
and informative comment.

~~~
morgante
They're obviously parodying the "one neat trick" trope.

~~~
logicallee
I don't think so because they're not talking about a marketing gimmick, but
rather talking about an actual business strategy - I just found it
distracting. They could have at least put it in quotation marks if they really
meant to include it in their writing for some reason. I've withdrawn the
criticism.

~~~
dllthomas
I don't know if it's a "gimmick", but it seems precisely "marketing".

~~~
logicallee
I think you didn't get the point blazespin wrote: they said (or I read it as
them saying) that since there's no way to get a "test market" in the U.S.,
rather than blow their "one shot" on the launch version which they can't
iterate on before the whole U.S. market sees it, they use a proxy for a U.S.
test market: they use a smaller foreign market. They don't care about
"burning" those users or losing their "one chance" to launch, since those
markets are small or at any rate a smaller launch. They then take their
learnings, incorporate them and launch in the U.S. with a first version that
is markedly better.

so it's product development. the point isn't about marketing at all. (Except
in a broad sense.) it's a product development trick, like a closed beta. I
don't think you would call a closed beta "marketing" exactly.

at least, this is what I read the comment as.

~~~
dllthomas
That was the point I got from it. My point was that it sounds a lot like
what's done by the people I know who work in marketing at big companies.
Marketing is not just (or even mostly) advertising.

~~~
logicallee
all right :)

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chefandy
Saw the title, assumed it was going to be about weed.

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joss82
Wake me up, before you grow grow.

(Sorry, could not resist)

