16 ms·

Users You Don’t Want

292 points by craigcannon 10y ago

mwseibel 10y ago
Hey folks - slightly different piece today - trying to get away from investor/fundraising posts as of late. Would love your thoughts/comments/questions. I'll check in a couple times over the course of the day.
- deleted 10y ago
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- qopp 10y ago
  Can you check the first sentence under the section "Saying No"?
- peterhartree 10y ago
  I enjoyed the piece, thanks Michael. Sorry for the boring feedback, but the post feels like it needs a bit more proofreading. Some of the syntax is a little confusing and I noticed a couple of definite typos: > So what should to you? Should be: > So what should you do? And: > Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business. Should be: > Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business?
  - mwseibel 10y ago
    thanks!
- athenot 10y ago
  This really hit home as I was involved in another startup in the video streaming space. The founder was chasing every shiny use case and before long we had followed many rabbit trails and not moved on core product. And you're 100% right: this resulted in us becoming glorified consultants. I'd add that staying focused on the product is hardest for those from a sales background, who are accustomed to following opportunities. In all fairness, having an engineering background, I'm prone to the opposite problem: not recognizing fast enough when it's time to pivot...
Animats 10y ago
That's a good argument against "accessibility". You're probably not getting significant revenue from the screen-reader people.
- Retric 10y ago
  Facebook for example would risk an 'accessible' website gaining a network effect and displacing them. So, it's not always a good idea to ignore small groups of users. Also, for organic growth you might end up with 1% more users at the end, but get there much faster as your compounding faster. Ie at 30% per month over 2 years (1.31 ^ 24 months) = 542.8 but at 31% per month that's (1.31 ^ 12) = 652.4
  - mwseibel 10y ago
    To be clear - I'm not arguing that you should ignore any user. I'm simply saying you don't have to comply with every user request and you don't HAVE to let a user request change the focus on your startup.
- the_watcher 10y ago
  The issue here is that you open yourself up to lawsuits under the ADA.
  - pc86 10y ago
    To be clear there has only been a single case where a website was found to be financially liable for lack of accessibility (in CA). Jurisdiction certainly covers most startups, but it's a single state. For the other ~88% of Americans there is no relevant case law on the subject. If you run a website in North Carolina with $15k MRR accessibility is likely a waste of your time unless you're in a niche that is in some way related.
    - emitstop 10y ago
      It's only a matter of time though.
nostrademons 10y ago
The "Uber for babysitters" example is interesting, because Uber's current $50B+ business is exactly the "users they didn't want". They started out as a black car service, where rich people (and it was envisioned only as a service for rich people) could hail a limo, completely legally. And according to this video [1], the reason they moved down-market into "ridesharing for everyone" was because they were getting C&Ds and fines anyway, and so it didn't matter that they'd conceived it as a service for rich people, the only way the could survive was to make it big enough and useful enough to ordinary people that they could get the laws changed. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54NIcx3HJSE#t=1170 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54NIcx3HJSE#t=1170
- mwseibel 10y ago
  I totally agree with you that often times your first set of users aren't the users you end up serving at scale. There are so many examples of this that they are hard to count. What is great about your example is that Uber made a strategic decision to open up to a new user base. Pivoting and serving new users/usecases is totally okay. Where startups get in trouble is when they move from niche usecase to niche usecase blindly based on a customer request.
  - Fordrus 10y ago
    What I think the parent poster is saying is that in hindsight, you can easily say which customers you were right to pivot for and which your were wrong to pivot for, but going in from the front no one, and I mean NO ONE can actually, really tell which customers are weird customization cases and which customers are revenue-bridges that will lead you to better market fit. There are always obvious cases in this mind of thing, but the larger point is that we could easily have been looking at an alternative history where Uber was on the scrap heap, and we would all stand here, wagging our beards, berating them for "moving from niche use-case to niche use-case" instead of doubling down and building something of long-term use and value, of executing on their vision. Instead, we're saying that Uber was an instance of a GOOD pivot, but at Uber, at the time it was happening, anyone could've made the argument, "Hey, aren't we just filling a really niche use-case here, of regular people who are willing to trust their lives to unlicensed strangers for a ride?"
quwert95 10y ago
>In the case of Justin.tv, pivoting to serve video gamers was the right move. Our video game broadcasters always represented a small but consistent group of users. It tooks us 4-5 years to realize how important they were. This stuck out at me as an avid Twitch user/follower (and sometimes a streamer). I think they need to re-realize this. The pivot result (extra effort and focus in Twitch) is being re-pivoted with the introduction of more general-content streams, like Creative, Music, and Social Eating: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Music https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Music https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Social%20Eating https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Social%20Eating And then there are the streams that push the limit: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Poker https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Poker https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Games%20%2B%20Demos https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Games%20%2B%20Demos I wonder why they didn't say 'No' to the users that these streams provide for, and revive/rebuild Justin.tv. Edit: Formatting...?
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I think of those examples, social eating is the one pushing the limits :p
- dublinben 10y ago
  Does it really matter what the content of the stream is, as long as it is bringing in viewers? They've built the Twitch brand around games, but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind.
  - quwert95 10y ago
    Kinda, sorta. I, personally, want it to matter because Twitch's mantra and goals are still focused around being 'for gamers.' As a user, I feel like the "purity" of the space has been diluted. I am not alone in this. From a business perspective, I guess anything goes as long as it gets eyeballs on ads, people buying bits (Twitch fun bucks), and more channel subscribers but simultaneously balancing the friction that new features have with the established userbase. >but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind. Youtube Gaming, Afreeca, and many others still exist; hopefully Twitch doesn't rest on what they have in regards to streaming. Twitch is also no longer just a streaming site; it's a software and wiki/database company now with the acquisition of Curse. Curse definitely brings in it's own conversation of "Users You Don't Want." Edit: Added Curse stuff.
Pinatubo 10y ago
> Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer. Meanwhile on Tumblr: "Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers."
- mintplant 10y ago
  > Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers That's not exactly incorrect, is it? The title of the article is "Users You Don't Want" and the author gives a developmentally disabled person as an example.
  - Pinatubo 10y ago
    No, but it's funny how many people are ignoring the main point of the article to get angry about the hypothetical example.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  "Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers." No reason this should be an issue (provided it is handled tactfully) as many daycare centers aren't able to take on special needs children, either.
ryandrake 10y ago
Been through this at medium sized companies struggling to sell. This kind of customer is alluring but poisonous. Company: We sell Product X! Toxic Customer: I don't want Product X, I want Product Y. If you're willing to bolt Product Y onto one of your menus I will pay you this stack of money for it! Company: $$$! Bam! The company just went from being a product company to a custom engineering service. You will have to drag Product Y along with your product forever as a big lump of technical debt. After a few repeat iterations of the above, you will have a franken-product with random features hanging off of all ends, confusing to general users and impossible to maintain. If you're a Product X company and one customer wants Product Y, stand your ground and tell them to go find Product Y somewhere else. If tons of customers want Product Y, maybe pivot and become a Product Y company and ditch Product X.
- mwseibel 10y ago
  Yes! So many startups in YC encounter this exact problem in their early days...
- pc86 10y ago
  I think 49.9% of executives agree with that and 90%+ of product people/developers agree with that too. The problem is that it's rarely X and Y. It's almost always justifiable, though. Imagine X=1 and Y=100. If you sell 1 and a customer asks for 100 it's easy to say no. If they ask for 50 or 25 it's still easy. The problem is when they ask for 2. Or 1.5, and are willing to pay big bucks to get it. It's hard to know whether your line should be at 2 or 20 or 80, especially when you can make business arguments for all of them and they all come with buckets of money attached.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Oh, yes, it's a difficult call. The customer might even start in with this (stop me if you've heard THIS one before): "Hey, we'll pay all your NRE for you and you get to sell it to everyone else including our competitors as part of your product!!" Do this, and your product people (if you have any) will all quit, and your engineering talent will start thinking "If we're just another custom engineering consulting company now, why don't I just go over to one of the big consulting firms and make actual money doing the same thing?
bluedino 10y ago
I wish I could apply this to my 'internal customers', aka departments I don't want to work with.
GuiA 10y ago
> Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer. If you open a restaurant, you bet that there are certain building codes you'll have to follow in order to accommodate e.g. people with disabilities. Right now, as the article points out, it's not something that most tech companies have to worry about unless they choose to, but perhaps it should be. As startups disrupt entire industries with little regard for the existing legislation, entire niche of users could find themselves marginalized. For instance, hotels have to build a number of accommodations for people with mobility problems. Airbnbs don't. What happens to that segment of the population when/if Airbnb completely kills off hotels in a particular geographic location? The web is already hell when it comes to accessibility concerns; and it seems like tech companies with a foot in the real world are just carrying this trend over. This is what people mean when they talk about the need for inclusiveness when designing tech products and companies; otherwise, you're just building a world where parents of developmentally challenged teenagers are even more excluded than they already were. I agree with the core point of the article, but the example chosen to illustrate it couldn't be worse. Yes, it isn't your responsibility to solve everything for everyone, but that doesn't mean you can just choose to ignore the social contract altogether.
- gautamdivgi 10y ago
  This is a good point. Same with Uber. Most Cab companies are required to provide access to wheelchair bound and disabled members of society at no extra charge. Not sure if Uber has the same requirement - and if and when it starts moving cab's out of business it will definitely prove to be a problem.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    There's a few people with assistance dogs who get denied service by Uber. Sometimes that's because the driver has an allergy, but often it's just because. EDIT: here's one lawsuit from Arlington: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/blind-woman-sues-uber-says-she-and-her-guide-dog-were-refused-service/2016/06/02/7391156e-28f8-11e6-ae4a-3cdd5fe74204_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/bli... Here's another from London: http://www.itv.com/news/london/2016-04-21/blind-woman-who-was-refused-uber-taxis-takes-drivers-to-court-for-discrimination/ http://www.itv.com/news/london/2016-04-21/blind-woman-who-wa... Note that London one has won repeated court cases for the exact same thing. Uber drivers keep refusing to take her and her dog; she takes them to court; she wins; she tries to get an Uber and the driver refuses to take the dog. Here's a case that Uber settled for a couple of hundred thousand dollars: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-uber-really-thinks-about-your-dog http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-uber-really-thinks-abo...
refrigerator 10y ago
Related: https://m.signalvnoise.com/bigger-prices-bigger-problems-72820249456f https://m.signalvnoise.com/bigger-prices-bigger-problems-728...
6stringmerc 10y ago
So a variation of the 80/20 rule? 20% of your users/customers cause 80% of the headaches/effort that aren't productive? This does hash out some 'stock characters' like I was "taught to identify" at a certain blue and yellow colored big box, because we were supposed to target them to "meet their needs" - gamer, Mom, audiophile, etc. I have a few qualms regarding the avenue Justin.tv took as used for an example, in that yes I'm sure 90% of the user-licenses allow for game broadcasting - claimed publicly[1] - but IP is a slippery issue and willful infringement is potentially quite costly. I'm a former gamer so I also have first-hand experience with, ahem, demands that gamers can sometimes put forward which may or may not be grounded in the reality of IP law. In other words, I'm pretty sure they got lucky with right-place-right-time-right-market which takes some sheen off the innovation, execution, etc type narrative. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/11/after-twitchs-music-copyright-crackdown-what-about-games-themselves.html http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/11/after-twitchs-music-copyright...
RubyMyDear 10y ago
See: orkut!
mapgrep 10y ago
I feel like this point could have been made without referring to infants and developmentally disabled teenagers as "hijacker users." I hate to moralize, but this essay helped me realize that there is, in fact, a baseline level of humanity we hold one another to in this community. And it is pretty inhumane to reduce the weakest members of society to mere obstacles to your business success. Choose another example and you will make your point more effectively.
- makomk 10y ago
  Oh, I think they're making their point quite effectively, given that this is how "disruptive" companies like Uber and AirBNB actually operate. You're right that perhaps a more euphemistic example might've been better PR though.
hacknat 10y ago
Most startups never make it past their first year, but for those that do I think this is the biggest problem they encounter. Especially if there's a sales team, the temptation to say yes to prospective customers is enormous. A lot of founders get tripped up by needing to show hockey stick growth as soon as they can, because they're usually top performers that are used to knocking expectations set on them out of the park. Saying yes to lots of people is an easy way to show the hockey stick in the first year, but it'll turn into linear growth pretty quickly. Congratulations you now own a consulting company, and your product team is groaning under the weight of enormous technical debt. Your company is probably going to die now, because you're top engineers probably hate your product and vision. I don't blame people though, because there really isn't a full proof way to avoid this. Sure, anchor customers can help, but how do you know when you really have anchor customers and when you're just saying "yes" to lots of ideas? In the end, IMO, it's totally subjective (building a great product). You just have to have a sense for it and be willing to fail quickly. In my experience the best founders actually don't take as much signaling, at least explicitly, from their customers as you would expect. They have a maniacal vision, and they are following it. Their customer help give form to the sculpture, but the basic outline is set. If real hockey stick growth follows, so be it.
djyaz1200 10y ago
A version of this problem I've seen is that often customers (particularly enterprise customers) want you to make solutions specific to their exact needs rather than the broad needs of their whole category. Even if they want the same problem addressed that you do they will want you to make the product suit their needs EXACTLY. That won't scale and backs you into being a services company instead of a product company. Strategies we've used to fight this are to listen to feedback from all users and only build what everyone agrees is needed, and also offer an API so we don't have to flat out say no. Instead with an API we can say, you're welcome to do whatever you'd like... Finally, when we do have to say something like "no" instead we just put a astronomical price tag on it and let the customer decide no for themselves. ...or maybe they'll say ok and then we'll know our thinking might be flawed if some feature is worth a hefty premium. Hope that's helpful to others!
rgbrgb 10y ago
We definitely experienced this starting Open Listings. We thought that to begin with we would only be serving the 2/3 of transactions made by experienced buyers, but it turns out that over half of the buyers we attract are first timers. In retrospect, this makes sense: our savings is appealing to young families, and first timers don't have attachments to the status quo of getting driven around by a realtor in a Cadillac. Rather than saying no, we embraced these clients and have retooled our product to be more educational and broadly accessible. It's working so far in terms of ramping up revenue, staying default alive, and we're stoked to make homebuying more affordable to people who really need it the most. Our finding is that first time buyers don't actually need more service but they do need slightly more education and reassurance, which we try to accomplish mostly through UI and documentation.
jcoffland 10y ago
And what if I want only Nigerian princes because they have the most money?
CPLX 10y ago
Posting an article called "users you don't want" and then using a developmentally challenged teenager as the example of a user that you don't want is so spectacularly tone-deaf that I am left somewhat speechless. I keep thinking this will be the year that the valley types wake up and realize this kind of mentality puts them in existential danger from mobs with pitchforks, but it keeps not happening.
- rconti 10y ago
  2017 is the year of mobs with pitchforks on the Developer.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    The developers might be OK. If I was a VC type though I might be looking over my shoulder.
- sauerbraten 10y ago
  The user(s) you might not want are the parents, not the disabled child. Proper care for the child represents their quite unique problem that they want you to solve so they can use your product. The child having special needs is what sets these patents/users apart from the parents/users you made the product for.
- abraae 10y ago
  "Tone-deaf"? Or "failing to adhere to PC norms"? Its a great case because it makes instinctively want to cater for it. Who wouldn't want to help out the developmentally challenged person? Which makes it all the harder to use our heads rather than our hearts, and make a good business decision. I suspect the author chose it deliberately for this very reason.
- nadagast 10y ago
  Do you think the 'existential danger from mobs with pitchforks' is justified? If they don't believe the outrage is justified, then they may be aware of this, but still speak these things out loud.
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tapeleg 10y ago
I think this article only makes sense in the context of the bad example given. An actual good idea for a startup wouldn't have such an obvious "hijacker" subset of consumers that just destroy your business.
- convolvatron 10y ago
  here's a few that come to mind o the US govt will have a laundry list of features so specialized that you really end up working just for them o companies that are big enough they want everything running on their internal infrastructure o health care providers with hippa requirements o nation states (including the US) that want to impose monitoring or censorship requirements for you to serve their populations o customers who want their children to use your service or software and have you be responsible for censorship, controlling harassers, etc o any minority community, say classic music lovers want you to accommodate additional metadata that doesn't show up in a service targeting popular music basically any time you have a feature request you need to think about the ongoing cost vs reward. if you let sales drive this process you can easily end up chasing your tail just to land them their commissions. i don't think its that unusual. you have to say no sometimes.
bsder 10y ago
Hmmmm. It probably depends upon how much money were talking. If the customer is throwing around a couple million dollars of NRE, it's probably worth bolting something on and pocketing the money. If the customer is only moving a couple hundred thousand, it's probably not. This seems more like a software-only startup issue. We have hardware and have these hard-nosed discussions all the time--generally about volume. Customer--"We want X and we want 100,000 units and we're going to put the NRE on this payment schedule." Us--"No, you're going to put all that NRE up front and it's <2-5 million dollars depending upon change complexity>. And you're going to front the first 10,000 units which is <generally a nice chunk of a million>. After that, we can put you on the royalty schedule. We can't put ourselves in the position of losing the company because your volume never materialized." Customer--"<choke> <splutter> That's preposterous." Us--"No. It's the reality of hardware. We know our costs really well." Side comment: it's always 100,000 units and 100,000 units is generally hardware death--big enough that you have all the volume problems but small enough that your profit sucks.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  I think the article covers that; they explicitly talk about sometimes choosing to serve the customer who wants something you aren't currently offering.
- ixtli 10y ago
  The equivalent definitely exists in a software-only startup with enough users. In practice it's rarely the case that it's _one_ user, but that there are cohorts of users that want a certain thing you don't provide. I still agree with your point, though, that if those cohorts aren't gonna give you enough money you shouldn't let your development process get sidetracked by their desires.
  - warfangle 10y ago
    Unless you're in enterprise software. It's really easy for enterprise companies to get in the trap of making every customer a spacial snowflake, because they need to to get a half mil contract signed. And then the product becomes sorta shapeless, because each customer gets their own product... And you end up a consultancy instead of the platform/SaaS that you originally envisioned.
encoderer 10y ago
This is great advice, but when a customer is asking for something already on your roadmap, or fits with your product vision, then it can provide an opportunity where a feature can close new business and add equity to the business overall. At Cronitor, we call this technique the JIT Startup[0]. There are dozens of instances where we've delayed writing code for something until it's actually requested, from boilerplate like PDF invoices to product features like being able to tag something in the UI. We always planned to build them, but working on these things (tertiary to your product) before anybody has even asked for it is a low-leverage use of you time. [0] https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0#.2w5dvo4jg https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0#.2w5dvo...
perlgeek 10y ago
If you get the same request for a feature over and over again, but you don't want to implement it directly, there are a few things you could do: * Offer an API for third-party integrations that could implement it * Come up with affiliates that serve this particular niche * Realize that your opinions might change, and collect email addresses (and consent) to contact folks again if you ever do implement it
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
I think what is missing here for me (and in a lot of these types of posts) is a discussion of volume. Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer. Is he literally saying that someone would be tempted to pivot a product based on a single instance? Or is that loose language for some, say 1% of the user base.
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mbesto 10y ago
> In the case of Justin.tv, pivoting to serve video gamers was the right move. Our video game broadcasters always represented a small but consistent group of users. It tooks us 4-5 years to realize how important they were. Serving them didn’t change the costs of the business too much: our major costs were salaries and bandwidth and we didn’t care what video was being streamed as long as people were watching and chatting. Also it opened up monetization avenues that were very interesting: online video advertisers would prefer to advertise against video gameplay than general UGC content. It also happens that UGC pertaining to video games is a huge category of content on YT and represents a very lucrative audience (25 year old males with disposable income): http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/12/19/15-percent-youtube-videos-video-game/ http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/12/19/15-percent-youtube-vide...
linkmotif 10y ago
the bob dylan line "it's only people's games that you've got to dodge" comes to mind.
tywang 10y ago
Define your right target audiences is always a difficult challenge for startups. Totally agree with "Remember that being good at customer service doesn’t mean serving every potential customer."!
phonon 10y ago
The is literally what every consulting firm does when they come in. They create a "Whale" chart, aka "Cumulative Customer Profitability". See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/masters-of-illusion-the-great-management-consultancy-swindle-1788556.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-feat... for a, umm, insider view of it. and http://www.magesblog.com/2014/01/whale-charts-visualising-customer.html http://www.magesblog.com/2014/01/whale-charts-visualising-cu... if you want to see some sample code :-)
joelthelion 10y ago
Just don't say no on principle because you read on HN it was cool to do so. The same goes for saying no to feature requests. Just because it has an Applesque feel to it doesn't automatically make it right.
teddyh 10y ago
Reminder: Justin.tv announced that they were shutting down and then shut down on the same day. They certainly did not want those users. https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html
cpkpad 10y ago
... Only one of the cases he listed, the developmentally-challenged kid, would result in a lawsuit if he didn't accommodate. That's one where you throw money at the problem. You hire a custom operator to handle ADA-requests (and similar) and you pay the price difference for someone who does manage this. Legal compliance issues, you often turn into a mega-expensive non-engineering one-offs. Or you get slapped with a DoJ investigation, and lose the business.
- deleted 10y ago
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_andromeda_ 10y ago
As for me, it often comes down to a question of who needs who. If a client provides more value than you could possibly anticipate in the foreseeable future and as long as it isn't too depleting(and only you can determine this and only for a limited period), then you should oblige. It's easy to say, say no, but when times are tough you should trust yourself when coming to a conclusion on such an issue since there aren't any unbendable rules after all.

292 points by craigcannon 10y ago

Hey folks - slightly different piece today - trying to get away from investor/fundraising posts as of late. Would love your thoughts/comments/questions. I'll check in a couple times over the course of the day.

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qopp 10y ago
Can you check the first sentence under the section "Saying No"?
peterhartree 10y ago
I enjoyed the piece, thanks Michael. Sorry for the boring feedback, but the post feels like it needs a bit more proofreading. Some of the syntax is a little confusing and I noticed a couple of definite typos: > So what should to you? Should be: > So what should you do? And: > Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business. Should be: > Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business?
- mwseibel 10y ago
  thanks!
athenot 10y ago
This really hit home as I was involved in another startup in the video streaming space. The founder was chasing every shiny use case and before long we had followed many rabbit trails and not moved on core product. And you're 100% right: this resulted in us becoming glorified consultants. I'd add that staying focused on the product is hardest for those from a sales background, who are accustomed to following opportunities. In all fairness, having an engineering background, I'm prone to the opposite problem: not recognizing fast enough when it's time to pivot...

Animats 10y ago

That's a good argument against "accessibility". You're probably not getting significant revenue from the screen-reader people.

Retric 10y ago
Facebook for example would risk an 'accessible' website gaining a network effect and displacing them. So, it's not always a good idea to ignore small groups of users. Also, for organic growth you might end up with 1% more users at the end, but get there much faster as your compounding faster. Ie at 30% per month over 2 years (1.31 ^ 24 months) = 542.8 but at 31% per month that's (1.31 ^ 12) = 652.4
- mwseibel 10y ago
  To be clear - I'm not arguing that you should ignore any user. I'm simply saying you don't have to comply with every user request and you don't HAVE to let a user request change the focus on your startup.
the_watcher 10y ago
The issue here is that you open yourself up to lawsuits under the ADA.
- pc86 10y ago
  To be clear there has only been a single case where a website was found to be financially liable for lack of accessibility (in CA). Jurisdiction certainly covers most startups, but it's a single state. For the other ~88% of Americans there is no relevant case law on the subject. If you run a website in North Carolina with $15k MRR accessibility is likely a waste of your time unless you're in a niche that is in some way related.
  - emitstop 10y ago
    It's only a matter of time though.

nostrademons 10y ago

The "Uber for babysitters" example is interesting, because Uber's current $50B+ business is exactly the "users they didn't want". They started out as a black car service, where rich people (and it was envisioned only as a service for rich people) could hail a limo, completely legally. And according to this video [1], the reason they moved down-market into "ridesharing for everyone" was because they were getting C&Ds and fines anyway, and so it didn't matter that they'd conceived it as a service for rich people, the only way the could survive was to make it big enough and useful enough to ordinary people that they could get the laws changed. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54NIcx3HJSE#t=1170 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54NIcx3HJSE#t=1170

mwseibel 10y ago
I totally agree with you that often times your first set of users aren't the users you end up serving at scale. There are so many examples of this that they are hard to count. What is great about your example is that Uber made a strategic decision to open up to a new user base. Pivoting and serving new users/usecases is totally okay. Where startups get in trouble is when they move from niche usecase to niche usecase blindly based on a customer request.
- Fordrus 10y ago
  What I think the parent poster is saying is that in hindsight, you can easily say which customers you were right to pivot for and which your were wrong to pivot for, but going in from the front no one, and I mean NO ONE can actually, really tell which customers are weird customization cases and which customers are revenue-bridges that will lead you to better market fit. There are always obvious cases in this mind of thing, but the larger point is that we could easily have been looking at an alternative history where Uber was on the scrap heap, and we would all stand here, wagging our beards, berating them for "moving from niche use-case to niche use-case" instead of doubling down and building something of long-term use and value, of executing on their vision. Instead, we're saying that Uber was an instance of a GOOD pivot, but at Uber, at the time it was happening, anyone could've made the argument, "Hey, aren't we just filling a really niche use-case here, of regular people who are willing to trust their lives to unlicensed strangers for a ride?"

quwert95 10y ago

>In the case of Justin.tv, pivoting to serve video gamers was the right move. Our video game broadcasters always represented a small but consistent group of users. It tooks us 4-5 years to realize how important they were. This stuck out at me as an avid Twitch user/follower (and sometimes a streamer). I think they need to re-realize this. The pivot result (extra effort and focus in Twitch) is being re-pivoted with the introduction of more general-content streams, like Creative, Music, and Social Eating: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Music https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Music https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Social%20Eating https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Social%20Eating And then there are the streams that push the limit: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Poker https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Poker https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Games%20%2B%20Demos https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Games%20%2B%20Demos I wonder why they didn't say 'No' to the users that these streams provide for, and revive/rebuild Justin.tv. Edit: Formatting...?

sotojuan 10y ago
I think of those examples, social eating is the one pushing the limits :p
dublinben 10y ago
Does it really matter what the content of the stream is, as long as it is bringing in viewers? They've built the Twitch brand around games, but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind.
- quwert95 10y ago
  Kinda, sorta. I, personally, want it to matter because Twitch's mantra and goals are still focused around being 'for gamers.' As a user, I feel like the "purity" of the space has been diluted. I am not alone in this. From a business perspective, I guess anything goes as long as it gets eyeballs on ads, people buying bits (Twitch fun bucks), and more channel subscribers but simultaneously balancing the friction that new features have with the established userbase. >but it is also the largest streaming site of any kind. Youtube Gaming, Afreeca, and many others still exist; hopefully Twitch doesn't rest on what they have in regards to streaming. Twitch is also no longer just a streaming site; it's a software and wiki/database company now with the acquisition of Curse. Curse definitely brings in it's own conversation of "Users You Don't Want." Edit: Added Curse stuff.

Pinatubo 10y ago

mintplant 10y ago
> Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers That's not exactly incorrect, is it? The title of the article is "Users You Don't Want" and the author gives a developmentally disabled person as an example.
- Pinatubo 10y ago
  No, but it's funny how many people are ignoring the main point of the article to get angry about the hypothetical example.
kafkaesq 10y ago
"Startup says they don't want developmentally disabled people as customers." No reason this should be an issue (provided it is handled tactfully) as many daycare centers aren't able to take on special needs children, either.

ryandrake 10y ago

Been through this at medium sized companies struggling to sell. This kind of customer is alluring but poisonous. Company: We sell Product X! Toxic Customer: I don't want Product X, I want Product Y. If you're willing to bolt Product Y onto one of your menus I will pay you this stack of money for it! Company: $$$! Bam! The company just went from being a product company to a custom engineering service. You will have to drag Product Y along with your product forever as a big lump of technical debt. After a few repeat iterations of the above, you will have a franken-product with random features hanging off of all ends, confusing to general users and impossible to maintain. If you're a Product X company and one customer wants Product Y, stand your ground and tell them to go find Product Y somewhere else. If tons of customers want Product Y, maybe pivot and become a Product Y company and ditch Product X.

mwseibel 10y ago
Yes! So many startups in YC encounter this exact problem in their early days...
pc86 10y ago
I think 49.9% of executives agree with that and 90%+ of product people/developers agree with that too. The problem is that it's rarely X and Y. It's almost always justifiable, though. Imagine X=1 and Y=100. If you sell 1 and a customer asks for 100 it's easy to say no. If they ask for 50 or 25 it's still easy. The problem is when they ask for 2. Or 1.5, and are willing to pay big bucks to get it. It's hard to know whether your line should be at 2 or 20 or 80, especially when you can make business arguments for all of them and they all come with buckets of money attached.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Oh, yes, it's a difficult call. The customer might even start in with this (stop me if you've heard THIS one before): "Hey, we'll pay all your NRE for you and you get to sell it to everyone else including our competitors as part of your product!!" Do this, and your product people (if you have any) will all quit, and your engineering talent will start thinking "If we're just another custom engineering consulting company now, why don't I just go over to one of the big consulting firms and make actual money doing the same thing?

bluedino 10y ago

I wish I could apply this to my 'internal customers', aka departments I don't want to work with.

GuiA 10y ago

> Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer. If you open a restaurant, you bet that there are certain building codes you'll have to follow in order to accommodate e.g. people with disabilities. Right now, as the article points out, it's not something that most tech companies have to worry about unless they choose to, but perhaps it should be. As startups disrupt entire industries with little regard for the existing legislation, entire niche of users could find themselves marginalized. For instance, hotels have to build a number of accommodations for people with mobility problems. Airbnbs don't. What happens to that segment of the population when/if Airbnb completely kills off hotels in a particular geographic location? The web is already hell when it comes to accessibility concerns; and it seems like tech companies with a foot in the real world are just carrying this trend over. This is what people mean when they talk about the need for inclusiveness when designing tech products and companies; otherwise, you're just building a world where parents of developmentally challenged teenagers are even more excluded than they already were. I agree with the core point of the article, but the example chosen to illustrate it couldn't be worse. Yes, it isn't your responsibility to solve everything for everyone, but that doesn't mean you can just choose to ignore the social contract altogether.

gautamdivgi 10y ago
This is a good point. Same with Uber. Most Cab companies are required to provide access to wheelchair bound and disabled members of society at no extra charge. Not sure if Uber has the same requirement - and if and when it starts moving cab's out of business it will definitely prove to be a problem.
- DanBC 10y ago
  There's a few people with assistance dogs who get denied service by Uber. Sometimes that's because the driver has an allergy, but often it's just because. EDIT: here's one lawsuit from Arlington: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/blind-woman-sues-uber-says-she-and-her-guide-dog-were-refused-service/2016/06/02/7391156e-28f8-11e6-ae4a-3cdd5fe74204_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/bli... Here's another from London: http://www.itv.com/news/london/2016-04-21/blind-woman-who-was-refused-uber-taxis-takes-drivers-to-court-for-discrimination/ http://www.itv.com/news/london/2016-04-21/blind-woman-who-wa... Note that London one has won repeated court cases for the exact same thing. Uber drivers keep refusing to take her and her dog; she takes them to court; she wins; she tries to get an Uber and the driver refuses to take the dog. Here's a case that Uber settled for a couple of hundred thousand dollars: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-uber-really-thinks-about-your-dog http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-uber-really-thinks-abo...

refrigerator 10y ago

Related: https://m.signalvnoise.com/bigger-prices-bigger-problems-72820249456f https://m.signalvnoise.com/bigger-prices-bigger-problems-728...

6stringmerc 10y ago

So a variation of the 80/20 rule? 20% of your users/customers cause 80% of the headaches/effort that aren't productive? This does hash out some 'stock characters' like I was "taught to identify" at a certain blue and yellow colored big box, because we were supposed to target them to "meet their needs" - gamer, Mom, audiophile, etc. I have a few qualms regarding the avenue Justin.tv took as used for an example, in that yes I'm sure 90% of the user-licenses allow for game broadcasting - claimed publicly[1] - but IP is a slippery issue and willful infringement is potentially quite costly. I'm a former gamer so I also have first-hand experience with, ahem, demands that gamers can sometimes put forward which may or may not be grounded in the reality of IP law. In other words, I'm pretty sure they got lucky with right-place-right-time-right-market which takes some sheen off the innovation, execution, etc type narrative. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/11/after-twitchs-music-copyright-crackdown-what-about-games-themselves.html http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/11/after-twitchs-music-copyright...

RubyMyDear 10y ago

See: orkut!

mapgrep 10y ago

I feel like this point could have been made without referring to infants and developmentally disabled teenagers as "hijacker users." I hate to moralize, but this essay helped me realize that there is, in fact, a baseline level of humanity we hold one another to in this community. And it is pretty inhumane to reduce the weakest members of society to mere obstacles to your business success. Choose another example and you will make your point more effectively.

makomk 10y ago
Oh, I think they're making their point quite effectively, given that this is how "disruptive" companies like Uber and AirBNB actually operate. You're right that perhaps a more euphemistic example might've been better PR though.

hacknat 10y ago

Most startups never make it past their first year, but for those that do I think this is the biggest problem they encounter. Especially if there's a sales team, the temptation to say yes to prospective customers is enormous. A lot of founders get tripped up by needing to show hockey stick growth as soon as they can, because they're usually top performers that are used to knocking expectations set on them out of the park. Saying yes to lots of people is an easy way to show the hockey stick in the first year, but it'll turn into linear growth pretty quickly. Congratulations you now own a consulting company, and your product team is groaning under the weight of enormous technical debt. Your company is probably going to die now, because you're top engineers probably hate your product and vision. I don't blame people though, because there really isn't a full proof way to avoid this. Sure, anchor customers can help, but how do you know when you really have anchor customers and when you're just saying "yes" to lots of ideas? In the end, IMO, it's totally subjective (building a great product). You just have to have a sense for it and be willing to fail quickly. In my experience the best founders actually don't take as much signaling, at least explicitly, from their customers as you would expect. They have a maniacal vision, and they are following it. Their customer help give form to the sculpture, but the basic outline is set. If real hockey stick growth follows, so be it.

djyaz1200 10y ago

A version of this problem I've seen is that often customers (particularly enterprise customers) want you to make solutions specific to their exact needs rather than the broad needs of their whole category. Even if they want the same problem addressed that you do they will want you to make the product suit their needs EXACTLY. That won't scale and backs you into being a services company instead of a product company. Strategies we've used to fight this are to listen to feedback from all users and only build what everyone agrees is needed, and also offer an API so we don't have to flat out say no. Instead with an API we can say, you're welcome to do whatever you'd like... Finally, when we do have to say something like "no" instead we just put a astronomical price tag on it and let the customer decide no for themselves. ...or maybe they'll say ok and then we'll know our thinking might be flawed if some feature is worth a hefty premium. Hope that's helpful to others!

rgbrgb 10y ago

We definitely experienced this starting Open Listings. We thought that to begin with we would only be serving the 2/3 of transactions made by experienced buyers, but it turns out that over half of the buyers we attract are first timers. In retrospect, this makes sense: our savings is appealing to young families, and first timers don't have attachments to the status quo of getting driven around by a realtor in a Cadillac. Rather than saying no, we embraced these clients and have retooled our product to be more educational and broadly accessible. It's working so far in terms of ramping up revenue, staying default alive, and we're stoked to make homebuying more affordable to people who really need it the most. Our finding is that first time buyers don't actually need more service but they do need slightly more education and reassurance, which we try to accomplish mostly through UI and documentation.

jcoffland 10y ago

And what if I want only Nigerian princes because they have the most money?

CPLX 10y ago

Posting an article called "users you don't want" and then using a developmentally challenged teenager as the example of a user that you don't want is so spectacularly tone-deaf that I am left somewhat speechless. I keep thinking this will be the year that the valley types wake up and realize this kind of mentality puts them in existential danger from mobs with pitchforks, but it keeps not happening.

rconti 10y ago
2017 is the year of mobs with pitchforks on the Developer.
- CPLX 10y ago
  The developers might be OK. If I was a VC type though I might be looking over my shoulder.
sauerbraten 10y ago
The user(s) you might not want are the parents, not the disabled child. Proper care for the child represents their quite unique problem that they want you to solve so they can use your product. The child having special needs is what sets these patents/users apart from the parents/users you made the product for.
abraae 10y ago
"Tone-deaf"? Or "failing to adhere to PC norms"? Its a great case because it makes instinctively want to cater for it. Who wouldn't want to help out the developmentally challenged person? Which makes it all the harder to use our heads rather than our hearts, and make a good business decision. I suspect the author chose it deliberately for this very reason.
nadagast 10y ago
Do you think the 'existential danger from mobs with pitchforks' is justified? If they don't believe the outrage is justified, then they may be aware of this, but still speak these things out loud.

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tapeleg 10y ago

I think this article only makes sense in the context of the bad example given. An actual good idea for a startup wouldn't have such an obvious "hijacker" subset of consumers that just destroy your business.

convolvatron 10y ago
here's a few that come to mind o the US govt will have a laundry list of features so specialized that you really end up working just for them o companies that are big enough they want everything running on their internal infrastructure o health care providers with hippa requirements o nation states (including the US) that want to impose monitoring or censorship requirements for you to serve their populations o customers who want their children to use your service or software and have you be responsible for censorship, controlling harassers, etc o any minority community, say classic music lovers want you to accommodate additional metadata that doesn't show up in a service targeting popular music basically any time you have a feature request you need to think about the ongoing cost vs reward. if you let sales drive this process you can easily end up chasing your tail just to land them their commissions. i don't think its that unusual. you have to say no sometimes.

bsder 10y ago

Hmmmm. It probably depends upon how much money were talking. If the customer is throwing around a couple million dollars of NRE, it's probably worth bolting something on and pocketing the money. If the customer is only moving a couple hundred thousand, it's probably not. This seems more like a software-only startup issue. We have hardware and have these hard-nosed discussions all the time--generally about volume. Customer--"We want X and we want 100,000 units and we're going to put the NRE on this payment schedule." Us--"No, you're going to put all that NRE up front and it's <2-5 million dollars depending upon change complexity>. And you're going to front the first 10,000 units which is <generally a nice chunk of a million>. After that, we can put you on the royalty schedule. We can't put ourselves in the position of losing the company because your volume never materialized." Customer--"<choke> <splutter> That's preposterous." Us--"No. It's the reality of hardware. We know our costs really well." Side comment: it's always 100,000 units and 100,000 units is generally hardware death--big enough that you have all the volume problems but small enough that your profit sucks.

cortesoft 10y ago
I think the article covers that; they explicitly talk about sometimes choosing to serve the customer who wants something you aren't currently offering.
ixtli 10y ago
The equivalent definitely exists in a software-only startup with enough users. In practice it's rarely the case that it's _one_ user, but that there are cohorts of users that want a certain thing you don't provide. I still agree with your point, though, that if those cohorts aren't gonna give you enough money you shouldn't let your development process get sidetracked by their desires.
- warfangle 10y ago
  Unless you're in enterprise software. It's really easy for enterprise companies to get in the trap of making every customer a spacial snowflake, because they need to to get a half mil contract signed. And then the product becomes sorta shapeless, because each customer gets their own product... And you end up a consultancy instead of the platform/SaaS that you originally envisioned.

encoderer 10y ago

This is great advice, but when a customer is asking for something already on your roadmap, or fits with your product vision, then it can provide an opportunity where a feature can close new business and add equity to the business overall. At Cronitor, we call this technique the JIT Startup[0]. There are dozens of instances where we've delayed writing code for something until it's actually requested, from boilerplate like PDF invoices to product features like being able to tag something in the UI. We always planned to build them, but working on these things (tertiary to your product) before anybody has even asked for it is a low-leverage use of you time. [0] https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0#.2w5dvo4jg https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0#.2w5dvo...

perlgeek 10y ago

If you get the same request for a feature over and over again, but you don't want to implement it directly, there are a few things you could do: * Offer an API for third-party integrations that could implement it * Come up with affiliates that serve this particular niche * Realize that your opinions might change, and collect email addresses (and consent) to contact folks again if you ever do implement it

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

I think what is missing here for me (and in a lot of these types of posts) is a discussion of volume. Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer. Is he literally saying that someone would be tempted to pivot a product based on a single instance? Or is that loose language for some, say 1% of the user base.

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mbesto 10y ago

> In the case of Justin.tv, pivoting to serve video gamers was the right move. Our video game broadcasters always represented a small but consistent group of users. It tooks us 4-5 years to realize how important they were. Serving them didn’t change the costs of the business too much: our major costs were salaries and bandwidth and we didn’t care what video was being streamed as long as people were watching and chatting. Also it opened up monetization avenues that were very interesting: online video advertisers would prefer to advertise against video gameplay than general UGC content. It also happens that UGC pertaining to video games is a huge category of content on YT and represents a very lucrative audience (25 year old males with disposable income): http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/12/19/15-percent-youtube-videos-video-game/ http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/12/19/15-percent-youtube-vide...

linkmotif 10y ago

the bob dylan line "it's only people's games that you've got to dodge" comes to mind.

tywang 10y ago

Define your right target audiences is always a difficult challenge for startups. Totally agree with "Remember that being good at customer service doesn’t mean serving every potential customer."!

phonon 10y ago

The is literally what every consulting firm does when they come in. They create a "Whale" chart, aka "Cumulative Customer Profitability". See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/masters-of-illusion-the-great-management-consultancy-swindle-1788556.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-feat... for a, umm, insider view of it. and http://www.magesblog.com/2014/01/whale-charts-visualising-customer.html http://www.magesblog.com/2014/01/whale-charts-visualising-cu... if you want to see some sample code :-)

joelthelion 10y ago

Just don't say no on principle because you read on HN it was cool to do so. The same goes for saying no to feature requests. Just because it has an Applesque feel to it doesn't automatically make it right.

teddyh 10y ago

Reminder: Justin.tv announced that they were shutting down and then shut down on the same day. They certainly did not want those users. https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html

cpkpad 10y ago

... Only one of the cases he listed, the developmentally-challenged kid, would result in a lawsuit if he didn't accommodate. That's one where you throw money at the problem. You hire a custom operator to handle ADA-requests (and similar) and you pay the price difference for someone who does manage this. Legal compliance issues, you often turn into a mega-expensive non-engineering one-offs. Or you get slapped with a DoJ investigation, and lose the business.

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_andromeda_ 10y ago

As for me, it often comes down to a question of who needs who. If a client provides more value than you could possibly anticipate in the foreseeable future and as long as it isn't too depleting(and only you can determine this and only for a limited period), then you should oblige. It's easy to say, say no, but when times are tough you should trust yourself when coming to a conclusion on such an issue since there aren't any unbendable rules after all.