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Tell HN: Don’t think just build

4 points by cvaidya1986 8y ago

Too often we listen to everyone except our own heart. You wanna build something? Do it. Stop caring about the perfect result or what experts say will or will not work. Happy weekend hacking!

benjaminhat 8y ago
You should still wait for having something good enough before presenting it, or people will have bad first experience...
- onion2k 8y ago
  You should still wait for having something good enough before presenting it, or people will have bad first experience. Don't do this. As soon as your product does enough to solve the customer's pain start selling it[1]. If people have a bad experience then talk to them and use that experience to improve the product. If you make changes in isolation without talking to people you may well be making the wrong changes - you don't know what the right changes are without feedback. If your customers don't have a bad experience, because either you were lucky and built it right to begin with, or because the product is horrible but is less horrible than the problem it solves then you can have paying customers, traction, investors, money, fame, etc! Most of all, you won't run out of money and fail. Sell as soon as you can. That's usually earlier than you think, and a lot earlier than the time the product is 'ready'. [1] Unless you're in the sort of market where there's only one customer (eg defence contracting). But if you are then you'll probably have started the sales process before you've even started building the product, because if that one customer doesn't want it there's no point building it.
kvdmolen 8y ago
Exactly, there are always a few idiots who like the idea (if built well). From there you can grow.
- onion2k 8y ago
  if built well Think of the SaaS products you pay for. Do you know if they're well built? No. You don't get to see the code. You're still a customer. "Well built" affects your on-going costs. Maintaining a badly built app is tedious and expensive. That's the reason to build well. It has no impact on the customer (even bugs are tolerated so long as data isn't lost). No one cares about the quality of the code when they buy an app.
  - kvdmolen 8y ago
    Good remark, fully agree. Though I was actually referring to user experience here (so a well built sugar-coating if you will :)

4 points by cvaidya1986 8y ago

Too often we listen to everyone except our own heart. You wanna build something? Do it. Stop caring about the perfect result or what experts say will or will not work. Happy weekend hacking!

benjaminhat 8y ago

You should still wait for having something good enough before presenting it, or people will have bad first experience...

onion2k 8y ago
You should still wait for having something good enough before presenting it, or people will have bad first experience. Don't do this. As soon as your product does enough to solve the customer's pain start selling it[1]. If people have a bad experience then talk to them and use that experience to improve the product. If you make changes in isolation without talking to people you may well be making the wrong changes - you don't know what the right changes are without feedback. If your customers don't have a bad experience, because either you were lucky and built it right to begin with, or because the product is horrible but is less horrible than the problem it solves then you can have paying customers, traction, investors, money, fame, etc! Most of all, you won't run out of money and fail. Sell as soon as you can. That's usually earlier than you think, and a lot earlier than the time the product is 'ready'. [1] Unless you're in the sort of market where there's only one customer (eg defence contracting). But if you are then you'll probably have started the sales process before you've even started building the product, because if that one customer doesn't want it there's no point building it.

kvdmolen 8y ago

Exactly, there are always a few idiots who like the idea (if built well). From there you can grow.

onion2k 8y ago
if built well Think of the SaaS products you pay for. Do you know if they're well built? No. You don't get to see the code. You're still a customer. "Well built" affects your on-going costs. Maintaining a badly built app is tedious and expensive. That's the reason to build well. It has no impact on the customer (even bugs are tolerated so long as data isn't lost). No one cares about the quality of the code when they buy an app.
- kvdmolen 8y ago
  Good remark, fully agree. Though I was actually referring to user experience here (so a well built sugar-coating if you will :)