4 ms·

Sure but I don't see where the value of such feedback is. You can find lots of comments anywhere about how any one product sucks. Many of them will be 10+ year

by borplk 9y ago

Sure but I don't see where the value of such feedback is. You can find lots of comments anywhere about how any one product sucks. Many of them will be 10+ year multi-million companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. It's not like that's going to empower you to compete with them. Or give you some advantage. Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better (those "it sucks" comments will be written for your solution too).

sumedh 9y ago
Looks like you are a glass half empty kind of guy. The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. > Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better Creating a brand new market in more difficult than providing a better solution for an established solution.
- borplk 9y ago
  > The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. I agree there are some cases when that may work but my point is that they are very very rare from what I can see. The vast majority of cases the complaint or problem statement is already crystal clear and well known such that finding it out doesn't give you any new information or anything of particular value because people always want a better version of what they have anyway. So you will always get "I want a better Photoshop" or "I want a better Dropbox" or "we like AWS but it doesn't have this feature" stuff. If the problem is in some very specific small niche that is unknown to most people it would be more useful. Like some obscure small non-tech-savvy niches that are stuck in the past decades and are so small that no big player bothers with them but perhaps you could make a good small business out of it if you know that they exist and what they are. For large established markets with well known famous multi-million and multi-billion players saying "$solution sucks" is as useful as saying that the sky is blue. If you want to get into the customer support desk software market you don't need a bunch of people telling you "Zendesk sucks" for you to know that there's room in that market. For a category that large there are tons of solutions and between them also tons of very happy and very unhappy people and everything in between. In the case of Freshdesk/Zendesk (and other similar categories of the same size and popularity) the barrier is overwhelmingly something other than simply knowing that the problem exists. Everybody knows almost every business needs customer support software. And whatever it is that they have, they always want it to better. If someone's capable of coming along and challenging something like Zendesk it's not like they need the "aha!" moment or encouragement of a bunch of people saying it sucks. I'm subscribed to a few sites that send "stated problems" daily/weekly and basically none of them are actionable. They read like something along the lines of, "We use Salesforce (or some other giant tool/company) ... it doesn't do this (or needs better UI/UX/API/Integration/etc) ... if there was something better we would consider paying up to $1000." I just find it difficult to imagine how someone goes from reading that to, "Aha! I got it. Now I'm going to go and make a better Salesforce."
  - sumedh 9y ago
    I am not exactly sure what was the whole point of you rant. FB was better than Myspace, Google was better than other search engines, Slack is better than Skype. >I agree there are some cases when that may work but my point is that they are very very rare from what I can see. Do you seriously believe that inventing a new market is less difficult than fixing/improving existing solutions?
    - borplk 9y ago
      I'm talking in the context of small to medium businesses and indie businesses not multi-billion unicorns like FB and Google. > Do you seriously believe that inventing a new market is less difficult than fixing/improving existing solutions? Not at all. I didn't mean to imply that. > not exactly sure what was the whole point of you rant. The whole point was that I think simplistic and obvious problem statements like "I like AWS but it doesn't have this feature" or "I want a better customer support software" are worthless.
      - sumedh 9y ago
        > not multi-billion unicorns like FB and Google. FB and Google were not multi-billion unicorns when they started. In your previous comment you said it was not entirely worthless but now you are saying such comments are worthless. Atleast make up your mind.
        borplk 9y ago
        The part that I said wasn't entirely worthless was about those problem statements that are very specific and niche (I was contrasting that to the worthless ones). Basic example, "People want more tasty Pizza", "People want better wine" is trivial and worthless. A much more narrow, specific, and niche example could be valuable. Something like: "In $area there are lots of migrants living from $country and they love this $local_type_of_bread that you can't find here at all. If you can bake some fresh ones you can probably make good money with it. You could sell them via these local ethnic grocery stores that people there visit often." Unlike the first example there's some specific and non-trivial information there.

by borplk 9y ago

sumedh 9y ago

Looks like you are a glass half empty kind of guy. The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. > Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better Creating a brand new market in more difficult than providing a better solution for an established solution.

borplk 9y ago
> The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. I agree there are some cases when that may work but my point is that they are very very rare from what I can see. The vast majority of cases the complaint or problem statement is already crystal clear and well known such that finding it out doesn't give you any new information or anything of particular value because people always want a better version of what they have anyway. So you will always get "I want a better Photoshop" or "I want a better Dropbox" or "we like AWS but it doesn't have this feature" stuff. If the problem is in some very specific small niche that is unknown to most people it would be more useful. Like some obscure small non-tech-savvy niches that are stuck in the past decades and are so small that no big player bothers with them but perhaps you could make a good small business out of it if you know that they exist and what they are. For large established markets with well known famous multi-million and multi-billion players saying "$solution sucks" is as useful as saying that the sky is blue. If you want to get into the customer support desk software market you don't need a bunch of people telling you "Zendesk sucks" for you to know that there's room in that market. For a category that large there are tons of solutions and between them also tons of very happy and very unhappy people and everything in between. In the case of Freshdesk/Zendesk (and other similar categories of the same size and popularity) the barrier is overwhelmingly something other than simply knowing that the problem exists. Everybody knows almost every business needs customer support software. And whatever it is that they have, they always want it to better. If someone's capable of coming along and challenging something like Zendesk it's not like they need the "aha!" moment or encouragement of a bunch of people saying it sucks. I'm subscribed to a few sites that send "stated problems" daily/weekly and basically none of them are actionable. They read like something along the lines of, "We use Salesforce (or some other giant tool/company) ... it doesn't do this (or needs better UI/UX/API/Integration/etc) ... if there was something better we would consider paying up to $1000." I just find it difficult to imagine how someone goes from reading that to, "Aha! I got it. Now I'm going to go and make a better Salesforce."
- sumedh 9y ago
  I am not exactly sure what was the whole point of you rant. FB was better than Myspace, Google was better than other search engines, Slack is better than Skype. >I agree there are some cases when that may work but my point is that they are very very rare from what I can see. Do you seriously believe that inventing a new market is less difficult than fixing/improving existing solutions?
  - borplk 9y ago
    I'm talking in the context of small to medium businesses and indie businesses not multi-billion unicorns like FB and Google. > Do you seriously believe that inventing a new market is less difficult than fixing/improving existing solutions? Not at all. I didn't mean to imply that. > not exactly sure what was the whole point of you rant. The whole point was that I think simplistic and obvious problem statements like "I like AWS but it doesn't have this feature" or "I want a better customer support software" are worthless.
    - sumedh 9y ago
      > not multi-billion unicorns like FB and Google. FB and Google were not multi-billion unicorns when they started. In your previous comment you said it was not entirely worthless but now you are saying such comments are worthless. Atleast make up your mind.
      - borplk 9y ago
        The part that I said wasn't entirely worthless was about those problem statements that are very specific and niche (I was contrasting that to the worthless ones). Basic example, "People want more tasty Pizza", "People want better wine" is trivial and worthless. A much more narrow, specific, and niche example could be valuable. Something like: "In $area there are lots of migrants living from $country and they love this $local_type_of_bread that you can't find here at all. If you can bake some fresh ones you can probably make good money with it. You could sell them via these local ethnic grocery stores that people there visit often." Unlike the first example there's some specific and non-trivial information there.