14 ms·

Before You Grow

415 points by craigcannon 10y ago

maximp 10y ago
"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".
- kozikow 10y ago
  Get it out as soon as you can to gather feedback, possibly in closed beta. Wait before net promoter score is good enough before spending lots of money on marketing?
  - aacook 10y ago
    Reminds me of the Sean Ellis 40% survey: http://www.startup-marketing.com/using-survey-io http://www.startup-marketing.com/using-survey-io
- giarc 10y ago
  I think it important to realize that everyone has opinion, and they are always different and you don't know who's right.
- epberry 10y ago
  Yeah the cognitive dissonance of startup advice can sometimes be jarring. In this case though I think you could say that fail fast refers to iterating on a product and changing it until people love it. Then the growth starts. The poster child for not doing this in my mind is Adora Cheung. I remember watching her "growth at all costs" lecture from Startup School shortly after Homejoy shut down and thinking well, there you have it folks. Seems they suffered from exactly the leaky bucket problem Sam talks about here. Two caveats: 1) I'm sure there are many other examples of leaky bucket companies, Homejoy just came to mind first 2) I still think Adora is brilliant and am really excited about her new cities project.
  - codingdave 10y ago
    Part of the reason there is so much dissonance is the conflicting goals -- startup founders want THEIR product to succeed. VCs just need SOME products to succeed. So the advice that is tossed to cohorts of founders is designed to help some succeed, not to ensure the personal success of each individual founder.
    - relyio 10y ago
      Distinct actors and players have interests that are sometimes aligned or disjointed, but often contradictory. Though it may sound obvious, it clearly has not been fully internalized by plenty of folks. And when it has, few dare to draw the necessary conclusions that follow from it: always take everything you are told with a massive grain of salt. To be clear, I am not arguing that you should be a complete cynic, only that you ought to recognize that there can be a healthy dose of it. In particular when the stakes are high. Listen, but do not take everything at face value. I am in an environment that has a particularly high density of genuinely enthusiastic, but naive, people; I am inclined to think that it is a mindset that's also predominant in other circles, besides University campuses. Indeed, there seem to be quantities of people who are looking for silver-bullet secret sauces that will let them reach Steve Jobs status. Perhaps that's precisely because of the various personality cults that our industry subscribes to. I can't know for sure. And while I am sure there are some good anecdotes showing the contrary, it seems that, all in all, this is overall hurtful both to innovation and to the ones that try to accelerate it. If you are going to be captain of a ship, you better not embrace any gust of wind that comes your way. Otherwise, you are more drifting away than going anywhere. And like Paris, you would rather be tossed by the waves than sink.
- rsp1984 10y ago
  What Sam meant was "take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes, before you focus on growth " (addition mine). You should absolutely release your product to customers to gather feedback as early as possible, just don't fuel growth by spending before you're sure you've got the product 100% right and people love it.
  - Theodores 10y ago
    What I think is missing in this is the matter of customer service. Get that right and everything follows, get that wrong and you are going to be slowed down by growth because far too much customer service time is spent along the way. Imagine you sell a simple widget available in three sizes and two colours. A very simple product. Yet 10% of sales result in returns. If it takes you three days to respond to returns requests and then another hour processing a return weeks after the customer requested it then you are also going to have some damage done to your company brand on social media and customers that will not buy from you again. It is not actually the widget that is the product, it is the whole sales process for that widget via the website that is the product. The customer service aspects of it need to be done really well before you grow. In the above example you can build out the forms for managing returns so that there is minimal effort needed, a scan and a mouse click in the warehouse, all communication with the customer handled totally automatically and procedures in place for the parts of the process that do need a human. It can take weeks of work to get all of the customer service elements working properly, many of those aspects might seem to fail cost benefit analysis at the start, why spend ages making neat forms so your customer can return your product when you are really concerned with selling the product? Yet, if growth happens, this will be important. It could take an hour to process a returned widget when you take into account what happens in the warehouse, the office and in accounts. Or this task could be done in a leisurely five minutes if organised. The former is bad for the brand, the latter much better. You could get ten returned widgets a day, taking all day to do. This would deny you the time to build out those customer service forms needed for the five minute process to happen. You would need to hire an order manager person or a programmer to put the back end systems in place or else you are going to be stuck processing returns for unhappy customers, late, all day, every day. Maybe if you work hard they will not rate your widgets so badly. So it is a classic step in time saves nine. But the product isn't just the widget, it is the distribution and customer service. Customers won't be able to love your product if they cannot get it or if you cannot sort their problems out with it. Now managers with sales targets to hit could start advertising the widget before all of the customer service parts are in place. They may view too many returns as a nice problem to have and just think they can hire some interns if help is needed with that. Growth is gone for, widgets sell well but with the ten fold increase in sales is a ten fold increase in returns. Before long a whole returns department is established. This gains its own inertia and involves so many people that it becomes practically impossible to implement a simple form change to speed up customer returns. The widget itself can be quite boring, it doesn't have to set the world on fire. The product is bigger than that, it is the brand, customer service and other things. This is what customers must love, and part of building a product they love is the dull customer service stuff. If you don't get those bits finished before you grow then you are just growing the amount of work for yourself.
- rguzman 10y ago
  i don't think there is too much tension between "lean" and focusing on product quality before growth. the best way to improve the product is to get people using it and use their feedback to improve it. that's what lean is all about. airbnb's 1000 days are mentioned in the article. it is not like they were just coding in their living room during that time. they had a product out, and they were flying to NY to talk to every possible host, improving the listings, and so on -- learning what made the product awesome. it was probably tempting at the time to work on getting more hosts on the platform, or to optimize the number of bookings, and other growth stuff. that's what Sam is cautioning against.
- blazespin 10y ago
  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.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    I remember seeing supermarket checkout scanners in Vancouver BC and wondering what this space age (now there's a dated term) technology was and why it wasn't already in use in Silicon Valley in 1980. George Bush was similarly amazed ... in 1992. The UPC was developed in the US starting in 1966 starting from freight car identification. Yes, late product release in the US even if the product was developed in the US is an old technique.
    - merpnderp 10y ago
      George H. Bush was "amazed" because he was being shown a newly developed model just being rolled out that scanned form multiple angles instead of just the bottom.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Time to release utes in the US! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Pity there is no company left making these in Australia.
  - endymi0n 10y ago
    This is also one of the reasons New Zealand often gets products first - it's far away, super small, highly developed amd English speaking: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21651858-small-technophile-country-great-place-test-digital-products-kiwis-guinea-pigs http://www.economist.com/news/business/21651858-small-techno...
- ankimal 10y ago
  The way I understand it is: (build -> deploy -> feedback -> build -> deploy -> feedback ..) until you reach love, when you can start focussing on growth. The lean philosophy is to make sure your (build -> deploy -> feedback) loop is tight.
- brador 10y ago
  Build, Deploy, <loop> Feedback, Iterate </loop>, Hockey Stick, Investors, Monetize, IPO
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AndrewKemendo 10y ago
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-technology-behind-aquila/10153916136506634/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technolog... [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
- terryjsmith 10y ago
  In my experience this goes hand and hand with getting your messaging right. If you have a product people love then you can work to articulate what they love about it and your marketing efforts become more focused and profitable. I agree that those channels can help develop your message, find early customers, etc. but that's different than investing in growth and trying to make your sales process repeatable; you're still learning at that stage. Investing serious money in marketing before you have the right product and the right messaging is the big mistake that I see a lot of startups run into.
- Mahn 10y ago
  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.
huangc10 10y ago
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.
tsunamifury 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - gordon_freeman 10y ago
    I think Facebook acknowledges that they have competitors in china such as weibo,renren and wechat. That's the reason Mark Zuckerberg visits China so frequently to persuade chinese govt in allowing facebook access there to gain that enormous market share.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
jot 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- trg2 10y ago
  I would love to see a comprehensive list of all of these tools to measure NPS. Does one exist?
  - JesseAldridge 10y ago
    You could try AlternativeTo: http://alternativeto.net/software/promoter-io/ http://alternativeto.net/software/promoter-io/
  - lrmunoz 10y ago
    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 :-)
  - duncanawoods 10y ago
    Serious question - why does anyone use a 3rd party service to request a 1/10 score from a customer? Kind of feels like it should be table stakes for a business. If they can't do that then wtf can they do? The difficult design aspects seem to be when to ask and choosing what other supporting information to gather about who they are, where they came from and how they used your product/service - you can't just hook in an API.
pcmaffey 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
silvaben 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I hate sites that have these.
  - silvaben 10y ago
    I guess it depends, but I find this less intrusive than an email.
  - elwell 10y ago
    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.
- trg2 10y ago
  Does a comprehensive list of all of these types of NPS-measuring tools exist?
  - avelis 10y ago
    A Quora post was the best I found so far. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-online-tools-for-measuring-net-promoter-score-and-why https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-online-tools-for-mea...
- seoseokho 10y ago
statictype 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - statictype 10y ago
    Nice. How do you grow your reseller network? I would presume that reseller's interests don't always align directly with end-user interests?
- corbinpage 10y ago
  Slack when it first came out. It spread via word of mouth.
- beat 10y ago
  JIRA would be my example of it. Of course, it seems old and clunky now, but when it first came out, it was a revelation in a world that had been stuck with the likes of Remedy. Salesforce is another example. Again, it seems dated now, but when it first hit the scene, it was seismic. It's actually pretty straightforward to make a loveable product for the enterprise, if only because the pain can be so great. The problem is wading through the sales process.
- lunaru 10y ago
  The enterprise sales process isn't what it used to be. Before, you had to get an audience with the CIO (or whoever controlled the department budget) to have a chance. The shift has been that employees and individual teams now have a lot of say in what tools they use -- sometimes without the higher-ups knowing about it until it's seen a good amount of adoption amongst internal teams. SaaS with instant access and 0 deploy times makes this possible. Another shift is that employees will now carry their championed products with them from one company to another. In an area like Silicon Valley where job hopping is common, the social/word-of-mouth effects on enterprise software is significant. Slack has already been mentioned and is a prime example of both. With our own "enterprise" product, we're seeing the same -- adoption from teams and employees that eventually can become something more. But, this can only happen if you're resonating with some group of users that love your product.
logicallee 10y ago
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 10y ago
  They're obviously parodying the "one neat trick" trope.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      I don't know if it's a "gimmick", but it seems precisely "marketing".
      - logicallee 10y ago
        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.
blacksmythe 10y ago
>> 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
web007 10y ago
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
- randall 10y ago
  It's really useful to know if your customers enjoy the product with a 1 question survey. We turned a 0/10 customer into 10/10 by giving them extra love. It's useful for us.
- danaseverson 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
debt 10y ago
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 10y ago
  FriendFeed focused on being loved more than growing users and had a $50MM exit.
danieltillett 10y ago
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?
- thefalcon 10y ago
  Raise your prices/get acquired?
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    I am not sure how raising prices will help solve the keep-it-to-myself-problem. Being acquired for megabucks does sound nice though :)
- blazespin 10y ago
  Find ways to make your b2b product market itself by how it integrates (publishes content that is available on the web, REST APIs you can integrate with, etc). As your users derive and extract value from the product they will naturally advertise it for you.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    This is the problem - my customers extract the value and want to keep all the value to themselves.
    - blazespin 10y ago
      Yes, but by extracting value they are forced to integrate with the ecosystem at large. In this way, the ecosystem becomes aware of your product.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        I am not sure what you are suggesting here. Could you be more specific?
downandout 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
fillskills 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
bedros 10y ago
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
joss82 10y ago
Wake me up, before you grow grow. (Sorry, could not resist)
blizkreeg 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Didn't Tinder start off by seeding your experience with friends of friends on facebook?
  - blizkreeg 10y ago
    I believe Tinder did a lot of going to campuses and throwing parties, that sort of thing.
- kromem 10y ago
  Foursquare solved the issue with gamification (badges). For your dating app example, you could add a non-geographically bounded ranking feature, similar to "hot or not." Basically, creating any sense of accomplishment within the platform will make it more difficult for people to abandon, giving you time to reach a scale where the core product value can be realized.
- melvinmt 10y ago
  You should look into improving your Single User Utility. Here are some links to get started: http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-system/ http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-syste... http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-invites-guest-post/ http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-in... http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-opentable-delicious/ http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-op... There are also countless examples of successful two-sided marketplaces who started out by "nurturing" (aka faking) one side of the market until they reached their critical mass.
tlogan 10y ago
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.
pedalpete 10y ago
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.
- paki123 10y ago
  Isn't there like the first 1000 rule or something? Like once you have 1000 people who are truly your fans, then you can go crazy with all the other bullshit?
euph0ria 10y ago
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?
- lincolnq 10y ago
  If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something. So that's step one. Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem. This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.
  - euph0ria 10y ago
    On a product I worked on we emailed every user that didn't engage with the product after sign up and requested feedback on how we could improve the service, what is lacking etc.. tried many different phrases but it was about 1 in 500 that replied and gave serious feedback. Making current users even more happy is one way to go, they are more likely to provide feedback but it skews the perspective since we don't get any feedback on what the unhappy users were unhappy with. Now, suppose it is a Whatsapp-style product, there must be a way to gather feedback even for them?
    - robryan 10y ago
      I suspect a lot of people that never replied would be people the signed up but never got around to trying the product properly or people that immediately saw that it wasn't ever going to solve their problem. Would be interesting to correlate the emails with how engaged the user was after signup. Personally as a user the only time I would try to engage the creators is if the product was very close to my use case but certain aspects didn't work the way I would need. This being for B2B where a potential customer is going to be more engaged, B2C the reply rate to those emails is likely always going to be tiny.
qwrusz 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
tjholowaychuk 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    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.
    - keithwhor 10y ago
      Hey TJ. It's easy to feel that way coming from a deeply technical background, but trust me, money isn't "thrown" anywhere. It's a high-risk high-reward game where one company (esp. at seed stage) will end up returning the majority of your fund, and every company has to potentially be that company, so outlandish buzzwords that might be the next big thing more often draw capital. Investors are people, paid to move money, with targets to hit and limited partners to provide returns for. In the same way you or I wouldn't accept a PR that doesn't align with the larger vision of a framework or library we've written, VCs don't want to fund a company if the leaders of the company aren't empathetic with the VCs goals. It's about aligning interests. The goal is really to align technology and people - create something technically amazing, with huge potential, and align yourself and your vision with those who have the capital to fund you. You don't have to do the dance if you don't want to, but I'd be hesitant to be overly dismissive of it.
chefandy 10y ago
Saw the title, assumed it was going to be about weed.
vsloo 10y ago
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.
zehuaJiang 10y ago
对于一个企业来说，这是一个长期的计划，这个世界是公平的不成长就倒退，无论是初创企业，还是已具规模的大公司，所以任何时候我们都面临着成长，只是成长阶段不同罢了。在长远角度来考虑，我是非常认可这篇文章，我尝试从两个问题来说明理由： 1、企业的核心价值是什么，在初创期间产品不成熟的原因可能有很多，最常见的是资金短缺以及团队问题，但从长远来看，想要激流勇进，必须做出一个令客户和自己都欣赏的产品，在刚刚起步时，即使做不到这一点也必须有充分的意识以此保证你的产品在不断地渐进的优化，如果没有的这种意识，你的企业又能给别人带来什么价值呢？ 2、企业的服务态度是什么，在前期你的产品可以不完美，但一定不能把客户当做你的小白鼠，一旦他们觉得你不靠谱，他们将会离去，永不回头。即使你的产品不够完美，但请一定要尊重你的客户，告诉他们完善的产品的努力以及计划。
aacook 10y ago
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.
kriro 10y ago
"""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.

415 points by craigcannon 10y ago

"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".

kozikow 10y ago
Get it out as soon as you can to gather feedback, possibly in closed beta. Wait before net promoter score is good enough before spending lots of money on marketing?
- aacook 10y ago
  Reminds me of the Sean Ellis 40% survey: http://www.startup-marketing.com/using-survey-io http://www.startup-marketing.com/using-survey-io
giarc 10y ago
I think it important to realize that everyone has opinion, and they are always different and you don't know who's right.
epberry 10y ago
Yeah the cognitive dissonance of startup advice can sometimes be jarring. In this case though I think you could say that fail fast refers to iterating on a product and changing it until people love it. Then the growth starts. The poster child for not doing this in my mind is Adora Cheung. I remember watching her "growth at all costs" lecture from Startup School shortly after Homejoy shut down and thinking well, there you have it folks. Seems they suffered from exactly the leaky bucket problem Sam talks about here. Two caveats: 1) I'm sure there are many other examples of leaky bucket companies, Homejoy just came to mind first 2) I still think Adora is brilliant and am really excited about her new cities project.
- codingdave 10y ago
  Part of the reason there is so much dissonance is the conflicting goals -- startup founders want THEIR product to succeed. VCs just need SOME products to succeed. So the advice that is tossed to cohorts of founders is designed to help some succeed, not to ensure the personal success of each individual founder.
  - relyio 10y ago
    Distinct actors and players have interests that are sometimes aligned or disjointed, but often contradictory. Though it may sound obvious, it clearly has not been fully internalized by plenty of folks. And when it has, few dare to draw the necessary conclusions that follow from it: always take everything you are told with a massive grain of salt. To be clear, I am not arguing that you should be a complete cynic, only that you ought to recognize that there can be a healthy dose of it. In particular when the stakes are high. Listen, but do not take everything at face value. I am in an environment that has a particularly high density of genuinely enthusiastic, but naive, people; I am inclined to think that it is a mindset that's also predominant in other circles, besides University campuses. Indeed, there seem to be quantities of people who are looking for silver-bullet secret sauces that will let them reach Steve Jobs status. Perhaps that's precisely because of the various personality cults that our industry subscribes to. I can't know for sure. And while I am sure there are some good anecdotes showing the contrary, it seems that, all in all, this is overall hurtful both to innovation and to the ones that try to accelerate it. If you are going to be captain of a ship, you better not embrace any gust of wind that comes your way. Otherwise, you are more drifting away than going anywhere. And like Paris, you would rather be tossed by the waves than sink.
rsp1984 10y ago
What Sam meant was "take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes, before you focus on growth " (addition mine). You should absolutely release your product to customers to gather feedback as early as possible, just don't fuel growth by spending before you're sure you've got the product 100% right and people love it.
- Theodores 10y ago
  What I think is missing in this is the matter of customer service. Get that right and everything follows, get that wrong and you are going to be slowed down by growth because far too much customer service time is spent along the way. Imagine you sell a simple widget available in three sizes and two colours. A very simple product. Yet 10% of sales result in returns. If it takes you three days to respond to returns requests and then another hour processing a return weeks after the customer requested it then you are also going to have some damage done to your company brand on social media and customers that will not buy from you again. It is not actually the widget that is the product, it is the whole sales process for that widget via the website that is the product. The customer service aspects of it need to be done really well before you grow. In the above example you can build out the forms for managing returns so that there is minimal effort needed, a scan and a mouse click in the warehouse, all communication with the customer handled totally automatically and procedures in place for the parts of the process that do need a human. It can take weeks of work to get all of the customer service elements working properly, many of those aspects might seem to fail cost benefit analysis at the start, why spend ages making neat forms so your customer can return your product when you are really concerned with selling the product? Yet, if growth happens, this will be important. It could take an hour to process a returned widget when you take into account what happens in the warehouse, the office and in accounts. Or this task could be done in a leisurely five minutes if organised. The former is bad for the brand, the latter much better. You could get ten returned widgets a day, taking all day to do. This would deny you the time to build out those customer service forms needed for the five minute process to happen. You would need to hire an order manager person or a programmer to put the back end systems in place or else you are going to be stuck processing returns for unhappy customers, late, all day, every day. Maybe if you work hard they will not rate your widgets so badly. So it is a classic step in time saves nine. But the product isn't just the widget, it is the distribution and customer service. Customers won't be able to love your product if they cannot get it or if you cannot sort their problems out with it. Now managers with sales targets to hit could start advertising the widget before all of the customer service parts are in place. They may view too many returns as a nice problem to have and just think they can hire some interns if help is needed with that. Growth is gone for, widgets sell well but with the ten fold increase in sales is a ten fold increase in returns. Before long a whole returns department is established. This gains its own inertia and involves so many people that it becomes practically impossible to implement a simple form change to speed up customer returns. The widget itself can be quite boring, it doesn't have to set the world on fire. The product is bigger than that, it is the brand, customer service and other things. This is what customers must love, and part of building a product they love is the dull customer service stuff. If you don't get those bits finished before you grow then you are just growing the amount of work for yourself.
rguzman 10y ago
i don't think there is too much tension between "lean" and focusing on product quality before growth. the best way to improve the product is to get people using it and use their feedback to improve it. that's what lean is all about. airbnb's 1000 days are mentioned in the article. it is not like they were just coding in their living room during that time. they had a product out, and they were flying to NY to talk to every possible host, improving the listings, and so on -- learning what made the product awesome. it was probably tempting at the time to work on getting more hosts on the platform, or to optimize the number of bookings, and other growth stuff. that's what Sam is cautioning against.
blazespin 10y ago
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.
- CalChris 10y ago
  I remember seeing supermarket checkout scanners in Vancouver BC and wondering what this space age (now there's a dated term) technology was and why it wasn't already in use in Silicon Valley in 1980. George Bush was similarly amazed ... in 1992. The UPC was developed in the US starting in 1966 starting from freight car identification. Yes, late product release in the US even if the product was developed in the US is an old technique.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    George H. Bush was "amazed" because he was being shown a newly developed model just being rolled out that scanned form multiple angles instead of just the bottom.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Time to release utes in the US! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Pity there is no company left making these in Australia.
- endymi0n 10y ago
  This is also one of the reasons New Zealand often gets products first - it's far away, super small, highly developed amd English speaking: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21651858-small-technophile-country-great-place-test-digital-products-kiwis-guinea-pigs http://www.economist.com/news/business/21651858-small-techno...
ankimal 10y ago
The way I understand it is: (build -> deploy -> feedback -> build -> deploy -> feedback ..) until you reach love, when you can start focussing on growth. The lean philosophy is to make sure your (build -> deploy -> feedback) loop is tight.
brador 10y ago
Build, Deploy, <loop> Feedback, Iterate </loop>, Hockey Stick, Investors, Monetize, IPO

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AndrewKemendo 10y ago

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

terryjsmith 10y ago
In my experience this goes hand and hand with getting your messaging right. If you have a product people love then you can work to articulate what they love about it and your marketing efforts become more focused and profitable. I agree that those channels can help develop your message, find early customers, etc. but that's different than investing in growth and trying to make your sales process repeatable; you're still learning at that stage. Investing serious money in marketing before you have the right product and the right messaging is the big mistake that I see a lot of startups run into.
Mahn 10y ago
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.

huangc10 10y ago

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.

tsunamifury 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- gordon_freeman 10y ago
  I think Facebook acknowledges that they have competitors in china such as weibo,renren and wechat. That's the reason Mark Zuckerberg visits China so frequently to persuade chinese govt in allowing facebook access there to gain that enormous market share.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.

jot 10y ago

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.

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trg2 10y ago
I would love to see a comprehensive list of all of these tools to measure NPS. Does one exist?
- JesseAldridge 10y ago
  You could try AlternativeTo: http://alternativeto.net/software/promoter-io/ http://alternativeto.net/software/promoter-io/
- lrmunoz 10y ago
  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 :-)
- duncanawoods 10y ago
  Serious question - why does anyone use a 3rd party service to request a 1/10 score from a customer? Kind of feels like it should be table stakes for a business. If they can't do that then wtf can they do? The difficult design aspects seem to be when to ask and choosing what other supporting information to gather about who they are, where they came from and how they used your product/service - you can't just hook in an API.

pcmaffey 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

silvaben 10y ago

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 10y ago
I hate sites that have these.
- silvaben 10y ago
  I guess it depends, but I find this less intrusive than an email.
- elwell 10y ago
  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.
trg2 10y ago
Does a comprehensive list of all of these types of NPS-measuring tools exist?
- avelis 10y ago
  A Quora post was the best I found so far. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-online-tools-for-measuring-net-promoter-score-and-why https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-online-tools-for-mea...
seoseokho 10y ago

statictype 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
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- statictype 10y ago
  Nice. How do you grow your reseller network? I would presume that reseller's interests don't always align directly with end-user interests?
corbinpage 10y ago
Slack when it first came out. It spread via word of mouth.
beat 10y ago
JIRA would be my example of it. Of course, it seems old and clunky now, but when it first came out, it was a revelation in a world that had been stuck with the likes of Remedy. Salesforce is another example. Again, it seems dated now, but when it first hit the scene, it was seismic. It's actually pretty straightforward to make a loveable product for the enterprise, if only because the pain can be so great. The problem is wading through the sales process.
lunaru 10y ago
The enterprise sales process isn't what it used to be. Before, you had to get an audience with the CIO (or whoever controlled the department budget) to have a chance. The shift has been that employees and individual teams now have a lot of say in what tools they use -- sometimes without the higher-ups knowing about it until it's seen a good amount of adoption amongst internal teams. SaaS with instant access and 0 deploy times makes this possible. Another shift is that employees will now carry their championed products with them from one company to another. In an area like Silicon Valley where job hopping is common, the social/word-of-mouth effects on enterprise software is significant. Slack has already been mentioned and is a prime example of both. With our own "enterprise" product, we're seeing the same -- adoption from teams and employees that eventually can become something more. But, this can only happen if you're resonating with some group of users that love your product.

logicallee 10y ago

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 10y ago
They're obviously parodying the "one neat trick" trope.
- logicallee 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    I don't know if it's a "gimmick", but it seems precisely "marketing".
    - logicallee 10y ago
      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.

blacksmythe 10y ago

>> 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

web007 10y ago

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

randall 10y ago
It's really useful to know if your customers enjoy the product with a 1 question survey. We turned a 0/10 customer into 10/10 by giving them extra love. It's useful for us.
danaseverson 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.

debt 10y ago

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 10y ago
FriendFeed focused on being loved more than growing users and had a $50MM exit.

danieltillett 10y ago

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?

thefalcon 10y ago
Raise your prices/get acquired?
- danieltillett 10y ago
  I am not sure how raising prices will help solve the keep-it-to-myself-problem. Being acquired for megabucks does sound nice though :)
blazespin 10y ago
Find ways to make your b2b product market itself by how it integrates (publishes content that is available on the web, REST APIs you can integrate with, etc). As your users derive and extract value from the product they will naturally advertise it for you.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  This is the problem - my customers extract the value and want to keep all the value to themselves.
  - blazespin 10y ago
    Yes, but by extracting value they are forced to integrate with the ecosystem at large. In this way, the ecosystem becomes aware of your product.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      I am not sure what you are suggesting here. Could you be more specific?

downandout 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.

fillskills 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

bedros 10y ago

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

joss82 10y ago

Wake me up, before you grow grow. (Sorry, could not resist)

blizkreeg 10y ago

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 10y ago
Didn't Tinder start off by seeding your experience with friends of friends on facebook?
- blizkreeg 10y ago
  I believe Tinder did a lot of going to campuses and throwing parties, that sort of thing.
kromem 10y ago
Foursquare solved the issue with gamification (badges). For your dating app example, you could add a non-geographically bounded ranking feature, similar to "hot or not." Basically, creating any sense of accomplishment within the platform will make it more difficult for people to abandon, giving you time to reach a scale where the core product value can be realized.
melvinmt 10y ago
You should look into improving your Single User Utility. Here are some links to get started: http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-system/ http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-syste... http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-invites-guest-post/ http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-in... http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-opentable-delicious/ http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-op... There are also countless examples of successful two-sided marketplaces who started out by "nurturing" (aka faking) one side of the market until they reached their critical mass.

tlogan 10y ago

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.

pedalpete 10y ago

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.

paki123 10y ago
Isn't there like the first 1000 rule or something? Like once you have 1000 people who are truly your fans, then you can go crazy with all the other bullshit?

euph0ria 10y ago

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?

lincolnq 10y ago
If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something. So that's step one. Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem. This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.
- euph0ria 10y ago
  On a product I worked on we emailed every user that didn't engage with the product after sign up and requested feedback on how we could improve the service, what is lacking etc.. tried many different phrases but it was about 1 in 500 that replied and gave serious feedback. Making current users even more happy is one way to go, they are more likely to provide feedback but it skews the perspective since we don't get any feedback on what the unhappy users were unhappy with. Now, suppose it is a Whatsapp-style product, there must be a way to gather feedback even for them?
  - robryan 10y ago
    I suspect a lot of people that never replied would be people the signed up but never got around to trying the product properly or people that immediately saw that it wasn't ever going to solve their problem. Would be interesting to correlate the emails with how engaged the user was after signup. Personally as a user the only time I would try to engage the creators is if the product was very close to my use case but certain aspects didn't work the way I would need. This being for B2B where a potential customer is going to be more engaged, B2C the reply rate to those emails is likely always going to be tiny.

qwrusz 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

tjholowaychuk 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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.
  - keithwhor 10y ago
    Hey TJ. It's easy to feel that way coming from a deeply technical background, but trust me, money isn't "thrown" anywhere. It's a high-risk high-reward game where one company (esp. at seed stage) will end up returning the majority of your fund, and every company has to potentially be that company, so outlandish buzzwords that might be the next big thing more often draw capital. Investors are people, paid to move money, with targets to hit and limited partners to provide returns for. In the same way you or I wouldn't accept a PR that doesn't align with the larger vision of a framework or library we've written, VCs don't want to fund a company if the leaders of the company aren't empathetic with the VCs goals. It's about aligning interests. The goal is really to align technology and people - create something technically amazing, with huge potential, and align yourself and your vision with those who have the capital to fund you. You don't have to do the dance if you don't want to, but I'd be hesitant to be overly dismissive of it.

chefandy 10y ago

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

vsloo 10y ago

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.

zehuaJiang 10y ago

对于一个企业来说，这是一个长期的计划，这个世界是公平的不成长就倒退，无论是初创企业，还是已具规模的大公司，所以任何时候我们都面临着成长，只是成长阶段不同罢了。在长远角度来考虑，我是非常认可这篇文章，我尝试从两个问题来说明理由： 1、企业的核心价值是什么，在初创期间产品不成熟的原因可能有很多，最常见的是资金短缺以及团队问题，但从长远来看，想要激流勇进，必须做出一个令客户和自己都欣赏的产品，在刚刚起步时，即使做不到这一点也必须有充分的意识以此保证你的产品在不断地渐进的优化，如果没有的这种意识，你的企业又能给别人带来什么价值呢？ 2、企业的服务态度是什么，在前期你的产品可以不完美，但一定不能把客户当做你的小白鼠，一旦他们觉得你不靠谱，他们将会离去，永不回头。即使你的产品不够完美，但请一定要尊重你的客户，告诉他们完善的产品的努力以及计划。

aacook 10y ago

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.

kriro 10y ago

"""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.