21 ms·

I work for a company that makes a very popular social app and I don’t use the app whatsoever, and refuse even to download early adopter versions to test. Somet

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I work for a company that makes a very popular social app and I don’t use the app whatsoever, and refuse even to download early adopter versions to test. Sometimes people at work give me crap for this. But they know my engineering contributions are among the best in the company, so what can they say? It’s foolish to disqualify people for this. Imagine saying men cannot ever work for a team that delivers feminine hygiene products, or a woman can never work for a product team that makes male health products.

testb 8y ago
Hm the advice to be a user would apply for startup founders right? I definitely wouldn't expect engineers to be active users especially in a more mature company with PMs.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.
  - testb 8y ago
    True, best not to make generalizations.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education (in a field other than software), and you're slotting into an existing market structure rather than creating a new one. That means the potential market sizes are smaller, the risks are better judged by people with advanced technical degrees, and the effectiveness of capital is less. All those make them a poor fit for YC.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ignorant) idea of what to improve, or to oscillate between different focus points based on possibly incoherent or inconsistent customer feedback.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        I have yet to meet a startup for whom hiring a market research firm and depending upon the results in the report gave them useful information that turned into a big opportunity. There's a simple reason for this: if such a report exists, then a big company who actually has money has already hired that market research firm and executed on those results, and that market opportunity is closed.
        mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        I can scarcely believe this response! The same would be true of any activity the start-up could do to gather intelligence on a market opportunity, whether it is incubating a prototype and obsessing over user feedback, consuming market research, getting feedback from potential investors, etc. etc. If doing X could reliably lead to growing the product revenue underpinning the startup, then there is an arbitrage opportunity for any better capitalized actor to swoop in and do X first/better. I also think your claim is implicitly very narrow in imagining a certain type of startup. For example, my sister opened a popup restaurant that participates in a weekly farmer’s market in a large public park near where she lives. She absolutely spent money on marketing reports and restaurant consulting to understand if her ideas for menus and how to operationalize cooking the food quickly, on-site had any likelihood of being profitable. The idea of just piloting the menu and kitchen strategy, then hoping to pivot based on feedback, makes no sense for a startup business like that, where you need hard research data on the market before even prototyping a product.

testb 8y ago

Hm the advice to be a user would apply for startup founders right? I definitely wouldn't expect engineers to be active users especially in a more mature company with PMs.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.
- testb 8y ago
  True, best not to make generalizations.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education (in a field other than software), and you're slotting into an existing market structure rather than creating a new one. That means the potential market sizes are smaller, the risks are better judged by people with advanced technical degrees, and the effectiveness of capital is less. All those make them a poor fit for YC.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ignorant) idea of what to improve, or to oscillate between different focus points based on possibly incoherent or inconsistent customer feedback.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      I have yet to meet a startup for whom hiring a market research firm and depending upon the results in the report gave them useful information that turned into a big opportunity. There's a simple reason for this: if such a report exists, then a big company who actually has money has already hired that market research firm and executed on those results, and that market opportunity is closed.
      - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        I can scarcely believe this response! The same would be true of any activity the start-up could do to gather intelligence on a market opportunity, whether it is incubating a prototype and obsessing over user feedback, consuming market research, getting feedback from potential investors, etc. etc. If doing X could reliably lead to growing the product revenue underpinning the startup, then there is an arbitrage opportunity for any better capitalized actor to swoop in and do X first/better. I also think your claim is implicitly very narrow in imagining a certain type of startup. For example, my sister opened a popup restaurant that participates in a weekly farmer’s market in a large public park near where she lives. She absolutely spent money on marketing reports and restaurant consulting to understand if her ideas for menus and how to operationalize cooking the food quickly, on-site had any likelihood of being profitable. The idea of just piloting the menu and kitchen strategy, then hoping to pivot based on feedback, makes no sense for a startup business like that, where you need hard research data on the market before even prototyping a product.