
One simple yet crucial thing I learned from YC's StartupSchool - artembugara
https://codarium.substack.com/p/one-simple-yet-crucial-thing-i-learned
======
michaelt
_> So, why don’t just go and ask people what is their problem, and how you
could solve it? [...] Elasticsearch. It was born when Shay Banon tried to
build a tool to search his wife’s cooking recipes._

It's a cute anecdote, but I honestly have no idea how you would get from "my
wife wants to organise her recipes" to "my wife wants a distributed multi-
tenant schema-free json document full text search engine"

~~~
eschulz
You're right, the anecdote does not give enough guidance on how to create a
successful startup that provides a solution for the users. Even though people
face certain problems and challenges on a daily basis, they often don't fully
understand these problems and have not been able to envision a solution.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
-Henry Ford

~~~
em-bee
this quote keeps getting used as an example of not talking to users, but i
think the interpretation is wrong.

henry ford seemed to know that people wanted faster transportation.

how did he know that?

the thing is that you are not asking people how they would solve their
problems, but instead ask them what the actual problem is.

instead of asking: what would make your work easier? -> faster horses.

ask: what is the biggest problem in your work? -> horses are to slow.

once you understand the actual problem, you may come up with a solution that
is beyond what people can imagine.

if people didn't want faster transportation, cars may not have taken off. but
i think that kind of problem was pretty obvious, so there wasn't a big need to
ask.

~~~
eschulz
You're right. The quote should not discourage talking to users, but it should
encourage true communication about the challenges that users face. In
agreement with you, an important point is that most all of us are unable to
articulate the specific problems we face everyday, and therefore we absolutely
can't just tell some smart industrialist or software engineer how they can
apply their skills to solve our problems.

------
ericol
I've been working for 10+ years for the same company. We have kinda of a solid
product in the market, and by "solid" I mean "it pays the bills for a bunch of
people, consistently".

We're in no way a stellar company, we're more on the "dark side" of SaaS, and
the reason as to why we have a selling product is that we cover, on the cheap,
a real need from our customers.

I'm _just_ a developer, and even thought I have a personal relationship with
the founders (10 years back it was just 4 of us) it's been increasingly
difficult to get them to discuss product development based on "what the client
needs". And that is after 8 years of development of a parallel, competing
product that got nowhere except eroding our first one.

I think the first question to ask is if the people that can take the decisions
are willing to take them.

------
shay_ker
"Talking to your users is your #1 founder’s task"

Saved you a click

~~~
pricees
It's so simple. It is by no means easy.

I am a wantrepreneur with 4+ failed side projects. These aren't only solo
projects. Two founders: no customers.

What comes first: the first customer or the first iteration of "an idea"?

I yield the time.

~~~
presidentender
First customer.

You find ten people in an industry, you ask them what sorts of problems they
have, or whether and for what they're using Microsoft Excel. If four or five
(or better yet all of 'em) have the same problem, or use Excel for the same
purpose, you build software that solves the problem or replaces Excel.

In a vacuum, your ideas are things that you can come up with. Maybe they're
problems you have, but those problems might not be problems you're willing to
spend money to solve. Often the 'idea' is something you as a founder think
will be credible, and you end up with a "sitcom startup"
([http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)),
something that might come from a writer's room.

I've never built a startup. I worked at a consulting firm that took money in
exchange for building the software that some sitcom startups tried and failed
to use, and I've worked at two successful venture-backed startups that
followed the pattern of finding a problem and trying to solve it.

~~~
java-man
The thing about Excel is actually a rather clever idea. Thank you, Sir!

~~~
arkitaip
It's also been done to death, which is why it's being thrown around like a
meme.

~~~
presidentender
The fact that something has been done well repeatedly and created a lot of
value is hardly an indictment.

------
JackFr
And yet the (probably apocryphal) Henry Ford quote "If I had asked what my
customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses" stands in
counterpoint.

Talk to your customers, but leave room for your vision. If the customers knew
the answer it wouldn't be a problem.

~~~
artembugara
Actually, I think it does not contradict.

Problem --> we want to get faster from point A to point B

So yeah, if you ask them the solution (not the problem) then you might get
such response.

That is why YC teaches you to listen to the problem then come up with you
solutions.

I would like to have a faster airplane, but probably there is a guy with a
teleport somewhere.

~~~
shawnMer
You got there before me, well said

------
Abishek_Muthian
Identifying and understanding the core problem from the user might seem
trivial for an experienced entrepreneur(who might have got burned couple of
times earlier for not doing that).

But, you'd be surprised how common it is for a first time entrepreneur to not
care for the problem, but to build something just because 'they can' and later
find out that nobody wants it. PG has written an excellent essay on the
same[1].

I've been thinking a lot about 'solving the problem of not identifying the
core problem' in my work as a startup coach, which lead me to the creation of
needgap[2] - A problem validation platform. Of course, creating another
platform is not going to magically solve anything; my personal goal with the
platform is to understand the 'language of the problems' to differentiate it
with the 'ideas'.

So far, I've understood from the platform that - _Identifying the core
problem, is much harder than coming up with a solution aka the startup idea_.

[1][http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

[2][https://needgap.com](https://needgap.com)

------
coziestSoup
I wonder if this obsessive focus on what the customer wants from the get go
causes startups to optimize to the local minima, as opposed to trying to go
deep in an area and coming up with a radically new idea/technology that can
then find unexpected uses. Reminds me of the quote "If I had asked people what
they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Not necessarily a bad thing,
but it does seem to me there are other ways to start a company.

------
ReDeiPirati
The second thing, and even more important, that you will discover later and YC
StartupSchool didn't teach you is _how_ to do this. People lie, are biased &
don't know what they want most of they time. You will probably learn this in
the hard way or probably never, but you know, it's part of the journey of
every entrepreneur.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> In a London apartment, Shay Banon was looking for a job while his wife
> attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. In his spare time, he started
> building a search engine for her growing list of recipes.

This incidentally is one the big reasons why diversity is so important. Often
the best software is written to solve problems we ourselves are having or
those close to us. If we write software for people we would otherwise not have
any contact with, there are going to be severe mismatches between what is
written and what is really necessary to solve the issues. This is why I am
happy to see startups and teams in places that are not Silicon Valley.

~~~
benjaminjosephw
Very important point but it seems like "diversity" is a taboo word on HN. For
a community of intellectually curious people, that seems odd.

Diversity isn't just a code word for a political ideology. Its about the
ability to encounter other perspectives, ideas and ways of seeing the world.
There are so many problem spaces that we've not even begun to explore in much
detail because we don't encounter them in meaningful ways.

At some point the balance will have to shift (maybe we've already reached that
point). Tech entrepreneurs will have explored all of the obvious and lucrative
avenues and the opportunities in the unexplored problems will seem more
attractive. Maybe at this point, we'll have a bigger emphasis on discovering
problems outside of our own experiences.

Or maybe I'm being overly optimistic in seeing a limit to potential for
solving lucrative problems in deeply explored problem spaces. We'll perhaps
always be able to create new tech products that solve the same kinds of
problems for the same consumers.

Maybe, a shift in focus towards less explored problem spaces would need to be
intentional. If that's the case, being open to discussing diversity well as a
community surely is a sign of how seriously we're taking problems that are not
our own.

------
harrisonjackson
I'd add-on that talking to your users/prospective users weekly also means that
you are selling weekly.

Is there a way for someone to give you money? Are you attempting to charge
people money?

How do you expect your business to work without either of these??

------
nick-garfield
If you're in the "talking with customers" phase, you should also check out
"The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick.

http :// momtestbook .com (EDIT: I just noticed this is an http site...
breaking up the link into pieces for now. Sill recommend Googling the book)

The tldr; is that as soon as you tell someone about your idea, it's going to
bias their subsequent answers. They're going to lie to, try not to hurt your
feelings, want to get rid of you, etc. So if you're trying to validate an
idea, the most important rule is "Don't talk about your idea".

What "The Mom Test" recommends is to instead ask prospective users about their
lives and specifically to recall individual moments when they had the problem
your idea will supposedly solve. With this "unbiased" recollection, you (as
the entrepreneur) have to put 2 and 2 together to figure out if people 1)
really have a problem and 2) are open/looking for a solution.

------
Kiro
> One-liner

What does this refer to?

~~~
chrismorgan
I presume it refers to a one-line description of what your startup is or does.
Being able to succinctly describe this is very valuable if you’re trying to
convince people to buy, use, invest, be interested, _& c._ You might think
this was obvious, but many don’t actually do it. Deciding on this helps you
focus on what you reckon is important, too, so it helps you to steer aright.

~~~
mncharity
Helping PhD candidates prepare to present their research, I was struck not by
the frequent inability to give a succinct outreach description - I was kind of
expecting that - but by how non-trivial it was to help them create one. And
this was _after_ their theses were largely done. So I'm less puzzled now by
how often it's not actually done.

~~~
redis_mlc
Correct.

Also writing it down avoids the problems of:

1) somebody thinking they know what they're going to say, then not being able
to on cue

2) being non-specific.

Similarities with mission statement or elevator pitch.

