

Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time - choxi
http://roshfu.com/2012/05/04/seemed-like-a-bad-idea-at-the-time.html

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nhashem
I feel this story demonstrates one of the "emotional vulnerabilities" of Lean
Startup/MVP movement. You're going to crank a product out and then you expose
it -- whether it's deliberately marketing it, pitching it to investors,
showing it to friends, etc. You expect to hear something back like, "great
concept, bad implementation," and so you just gradually improve the
implementation until people stop thinking it's bad.

But sometimes you'll hear, "terrible concept, so I don't even care about the
implementation," and that can be very demoralizing. Really, it should be taken
as, "your implementation is so bad that I don't get the concept," which
requires the same iterations of "improve the implementation." But it's too
easy to basically just hear, "you guys don't know what the hell you're talking
about so why don't you stop wasting everyone's time, including your own."

As we so often quote to ourselves: "your startup idea idea is worthless by
itself." But that's not entirely true. Startup ideas indeed _have no value_ to
anyone by themselves. But they _must_ have worth to the startup founder,
because without that burning desire to solve that particular problem, how can
a startup founder have the mental fortitude to persevere when their first
iterations get very negative feedback?

~~~
wpietri
This guy was not doing the Lean Startup thing, not in my view.

The only person who's opinion counts is the customer. And the only signal that
really matters is whether they give you money. And then keep giving you money.

Showing things to "experts" and then quitting because people rain on your
parade has been going on since the beginning of time:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_v_ubcYsTI>

Having been a judge at some of the Lean Startup Machine events, I think it's
very important for participants to learn take criticism somewhat lightly. One
should never disregard the observations or concerns that people raise, but one
shouldn't believe them outright either.

Being an entrepreneur means seeing an opportunity nobody else has noticed, so
naturally 90% of the people you talk to will think your idea is dumb or
uninteresting. You just have to learn to sift out the valuable bits and come
to your own conclusions.

~~~
choxi
that's a really good point -- I was thinking myself how you'd consolidate this
with being lean and I think you articulated the difference very well

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Whodi
Ouch. It's one thing to have your idea panned, but to say "nobody gives a shit
about your team"? That's harsh.

It's an unfortunate fact about any creative industry that a person with clout
can completely put the brakes on an promising idea just because it doesn't fit
neatly into their worldview. This reminds me of the story when Meat Loaf and
Jim Steinman pitched Bat out of Hell to CBS. Clive Davis, the executive, says
"Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? If
you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I
don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C. You don't know
how to write a song. Have you ever listened to pop music?"

Hurtful. But even though this guy was a pretty successful A&R person, he
wasn't clairvoyant, as the album was a huge hit. It's unfortunate that it
demoralized their team instead of serving as bulletin board motivation
material.

~~~
tubbo
Clive Davis was a piece of shit. But he was a successful piece of shit, so
nobody realizes that he's actually a piece of shit. Everyone thinks he's Brian
Epstein, but he's really no better than Suge Knight, if you want to make
analogies. He takes what he believes are "great images" and puts his own
cookie-cutter formulaic music behind it. Fake, fake, fake.

Just like these "judges" of the startup industry. Fuck them.

~~~
Whodi
Exactly. The loudest voices and most effective negotiators are the ones who
tend to rise to the top. The Suge Knight comparison is apt - someone with
resources and intimidation skills, yet no talent pertinent to the meat of the
industry, whether that's music production or tech. The game industry has it
pretty bad, too, as far as promoting creatively bankrupt smooth talkers as
soon as they've had the slightest brush with success. Try rewinding the clock
a few years and pitching Minecraft to any of these guys, and they'd give you
the game industry equivalent of Clive's rant, which I guess would be "Do you
even play games? You have to have a narrative, an objective, a scruffy white
male lead, and the ability to blow shit up. I don't even know what you're
doing here, this isn't a game, it's a map editor. Nobody's gonna go for this
shit." The solution is, of course, to scope your project like Notch did and
release it yourself without listening to the cynics :)

~~~
_quasimodo
you actually can blow shit up in minecraft, and its fun too ;)

------
tg3
I always take predictions like "no one will be using SMS in 10 years" with a
grain of salt. Time has shown that experts are basically clueless when it
comes to predicting that far in the future.

10 years from now, no one knows what we'll be doing, or if the mobile phone
will even be an existing paradigm. What you did know at the time is that you
were able to convince 300 people that it was useful, today.

I think if you can build something that is valuable to people today, you give
yourself the opportunity to figure out what will be valuable to people
tomorrow.

Yes, it's true that you should "skate where the puck's going, not where it's
been," but if you have an open slapshot, take it.

~~~
wizzard
Yes, what a boneheaded argument. Even if the prediction was true, there's a
lot of money to be made in 10 years. Should we stop buying new cars because
there will be hovercars in 2022? Those judges are going to be holding their
breath for a long time, waiting for that glorious day.

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gravitronic
I think your only mistake after building something was showing it to "the
experts" and trusting their decision.

Make something, get customers and succeed, don't get customers and keep
trying, and you will eventually create something of value. At that point it'll
be "the experts" calling you to give you money. Until then consider them
useless.

~~~
choxi
I totally agree but with the caveat that I don't blame anyone, including the
judges. We chose to participate in a competition and they gave us their
feedback on what we did -- nothing malicious, we just pitched the idea
prematurely.

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jwb119
... and it might still be a bad idea. the mere fact that sendhub has raised
$2m does not mean that this is a good idea.

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ashrust
People told us we were crazy for months. During our YC interview PG told us it
was one of worst ideas he'd heard. Thus, I believe founder conviction is one
of the most important parts of building a company.

As an aside, SendHub isn't really focused on SMS marketing, there are lots of
services out there for that - people use SendHub for both interactions within
their business as well as communication with customers.

~~~
StavrosK
This is rather off-topic, but this is a problem I'm having now with the
product I'm currently developing (<http://www.instahero.com>). I believe it's
a good idea and that there's a need for it, but feedback hasn't been great.

At any rate, this post gives me hope that I'm not wasting my time, so I'll try
hard to get the MVP out and see what customers think.

~~~
wpietri
Yes, yes, yes. Have people try it out.

Some of them won't like it, of course. They could be the wrong audience, or
the wrong end of the right audience. You should only quit when a) you are sure
no significant audience for your product exists, and b) your many discussions
with customers haven't led you to discover an audience that you can pivot to
serve.

~~~
StavrosK
That's very good advice, thanks. The usual problem, though, is that you don't
know if it's worth building (so you aren't wasting your time), so you need to
go with your gut if you consider that a market big enough exists for the sort
of thing you're building.

I think there is a market, so I'll post here when the MVP is ready, and see if
people find it useful. Thanks again!

~~~
wpietri
Why would you need to go with your gut?

If you have gut feeling, I think the right approach is to express that as a
hypothesis. E.g., "Small retail businesses need an easy way to take credit
cards."

Then you can go out and interview a number of people in that market. If you
find a lot of interest, get them to sign letters of intent. E.g., "If you
create a way for me to take credit cards on my iPhone, I'll sign up for
$10/month plus 4% in fees."

Based on your interviews and your letters of intent plus public statistics,
then you do some math to see if there's a market there.

Please do announce your product here. Feel free to email me directly as well,
and also consider joining one of the Lean Startup Circle mailing lists if you
want to discuss LS techniques further.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its a myth that customers will know a good product when they see it. They have
to be 'marketed'. That's a big part of building a company, as much work as the
product.

So its no shortcut to say 'just ask the customer', you'd have to pretty much
build the company to do that in a meaningful way.

Because the question really is not 'do enough customers like this product?',
but instead 'can you market this product to enough customers?'

~~~
wpietri
I'm not saying, "Just ask the customer."

I'm saying that to discover if there is a market for your products, you need
to study the people you think are in your target audience through direct
interviews. And then get them to agree to buying something once you have it
ready.

This is a good proxy precisely because you are marketing it to them.
Understanding a customer's needs, showing how your product will fit the need,
and then getting a commitment is basically a direct sales process.

This is one of the core messages of the Lean Startup approach: you can learn a
great deal without ever building the company in a meaningful way.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Right, and its a message I don't believe in. Its not much use to ask existing
customers without a strong marketing message - half the battle is the
marketing.

So you only learn 'I'm not much good at marketing'. Or 'I need to work harder
on marketing'. Nothing really about the product.

~~~
wpietri
I see.

How many interviews have you done along these lines? And how many products
have you taken from idea to on the market, and by which means?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Ive spent 20 years developing software, including customer surveys. Mostly
through established companies, where the customer has a vested interest in
cooperating.

Its often the same storey - the customer wants a horse that pulls harder and
uses less hay. They don't want a tractor, they can't conceive of wanting a
tractor, and they object to giving up the reins.

I don't doubt some information is worth something. But what's the success
rate? What's the correlation between 'asking a customer' and sales? Nearly
zero in my experience.

~~~
wpietri
I note that you didn't answer my questions.

Your experience as described isn't really relevant to the Lean Startup
approach, which would explain why your intuitions mislead you. The people who
practice this method are aware of the "faster horse" problem and have
techniques for dealing with it.

------
mikeleeorg
I often hear investors advise each other to have a contrarian point of view,
not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of seeing the hidden gem
that others think is a piece of coal. The same advice has been given to
entrepreneurs too.

Some advisors are harsh. Judges at a contest, even harsher. It sucks when they
deflate one's balloon, but there's nothing harsher than the market. Good
investors know this, and this is why they rely on traction more than anything
else - even their own judgment.

In other words: If this was an idea you were truly passionate about, screw the
judges and validate the idea with customers. They're you're most important
data point.

Thanks for sharing the story though. I've been in your shoes many times. It's
been a hard lesson to learn.

------
geoffc
I wouldn't kick yourself too much. The jury is still very much out on the
Sendhub business model.

FWIW, I have a blog about it at <http://gcrawshaw.posterous.com/ycombinator-
vs-the-telcos>

------
rralian
Stick around and you'll find that every idea you ever had and/or project that
you abandoned winds up getting built by somebody else and funded to the tune
of X-millions. That's a good thing... it means you have good ideas, or at
least that somebody with money also thinks the idea was good. You can't look
at this as missing out on anything, because A) You learned a ton and get to
keep trying newer and better things. And B) Funding is not an accomplishment
in itself, it's a means to an end. Time will tell if they become profitable or
exit. If THAT happens, it's entirely appropriate to get licquored up and call
everybody jerks. Also, "hello" from 6 rows up on the Chicago bus. :-)

~~~
choxi
haha, thanks! I wouldn't mind if they did well at all, they had the grit to
keep pushing on with it where we didn't.

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Tichy
I am tired of "jury culture". These days people's highest ambitions often seem
to be to impress some jury (most obvious in those horrible talent shows on
TV). Screw the juries!

------
hammock
Maybe the teams themselves are a difference as well. Not to sound like I'm
putting you down (you got enough of that from the judges), but these days when
everyone is talking about "investing in great teams, not ideas" and talent
acquisitions are some of the most profitable exits for startups and their
investors, it could be that BOTH of your ideas really do suck, but someone
figured out that SendHub has a $2 million team working on it.

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pbreit
It sounds like to me that the main problem was the design or presentation of
the product. "SMS newsletters" does indeed sound like a terrible idea.

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iamleppert
"Nobody gives a shit about your team.". What a jerk!

~~~
chikakicks
yeah, name and shame to save others the surprise of this judge's jerkiness.

~~~
StavrosK
I don't understand why people don't name these sort of guys. I mean, it's not
slander or anything, if it was actually said, you're in the clear to name the
person who said it, no?

~~~
tedkalaw
Well, it's a funny thing, right? You want to be professional, and sometimes
people do things they regret. Everyone makes mistakes.

On the other hand, how else do people know who these people are? There's no
way for us to know if this is a mistake or a common occurrence.

~~~
StavrosK
Sure, that's true. However, the reader could probably judge this reasonably
well, a one-time occurrence could be dismissed as a bad mood, but consistent
behaviour like this would disincentivize dickish behaviour in people...

