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Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
- chambo622 7y agoGreat read, and also a strong bull case for Slack no matter how unbearable it gets at any significantly large organization.
- madebysquares 7y agoI've never heard of this product before, but it definitely does sound interesting. I know exactly how hard it is to get a small / medium sized company to switch to a new product, its definitely not easy. That aside, I wish Slack was more customizable (or open to allowing some customization) that would enable it to function more like what Derrick was trying to accomplish with Level. That would be the best of both worlds.
- danvoell 7y ago"The gist is that it’s tough to get unbiased feedback during customer validation." - I wish this was taught along with lean startup content. Too many times I have heard founders say they validated the idea when all they have done is gotten biased feedback while asking self-fulfilling questions.
- ben_jones 7y agoI mean, iterate on the product until it sells like hotcakes that's your validation. Then you'll spend the rest of your days trying to STOP the torrent of complaints, feature requests, etc. Better yet have actual experience in the industry that the product is targeting rather then expecting that industry to go out of its way to tell you what to build. Ideally you have orders for the product before you start building it, don't put all your eggs in if I build it they will come.
- matwood 7y ago> hotcakes that's your validation Exactly. The best validation is people paying for a product.
- tschwimmer 7y agoI would go so far as to say it’s the only unambiguous validation you can get.
- ambicapter 7y agoNot really that unambiguous depending on the market and/or product. You could make the argument that these HIV drugs are miraculously helpful! As you jack up the price. People keep buying it at any price, must means its fantastically effective, right?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoEven in less extreme cases, it may be just that you have extremely good salespeople / marketing team. With good enough sales, you can sell any kind of garbage, and in many markets it might be unlikely that complaints of existing users will reach or discourage new ones.
- AznHisoka 7y agoYep, it is extremely hard. Lean Startup makes it sound trivial when it's almost impossible. Almost nobody is going to clear up their day to talk to you about their problems, answer your questions, give you feedback, be your guinea pig, etc. The ideal way to validate it is to be so immerse in the industry/problem such that you understand most of the pain points. Do the job that your ideal customer is doing. Attend the conferences they're going to. Visit the forums they're visiting. Read the websites they're visiting. Analyze the reviews they're posting in TrustRadius/G2Crowd. Look at their Linkedin profiles to see what their day to day involves.
- mooreds 7y ago> The ideal way to validate it is to be so immerse in the industry/problem such that you understand most of the pain points. Do the job that your ideal customer is doing. I think this is a great reason to have a co-founder. I co-founded a company with a domain expert, and her ability to get in front of and understand our target audience was way more important to our startup success than my development ability (and the equity shares reflected that). I mean, we needed each other, but she was far more unique than I was. The alternative for a developer is you immerse yourself into a different domain, or you build tools for developers. Both of which are good paths, but the former is far more time commitment and latter is more common (and thus more competitive).
- davidivadavid 7y agoYou don't need them to clear up a whole day, and people are surprisingly willing to talk about their job and their frustrations.
- rpedela 7y agoI agree overall but it's not that hard to get people to talk to you if done a certain way. If you are trying to sell them while talking, yes that will be hard/impossible. However if you approach it as learning from experts, then I find people are much more receptive because most people like to help and feel important/useful. I always say I want to learn from them and offer to pay for their time which shows them I understand they are busy. I still get some NOs but that's okay. BTW I've never had someone want me to pay them, but I would if they did.
- jessmartin 7y agoThis was the post that made the lights come on for me: https://customerdevlabs.com/2013/11/05/how-i-interview-customers/ https://customerdevlabs.com/2013/11/05/how-i-interview-custo... After doing 10-20 of those interviews, I got pretty good at coming up with an internal "pain scale" - where this particular problem sits in terms of overall pain the customer is experiencing, and thus how much they are willing to commit to solving the problem.
- iovrthoughtthis 7y agoI say it every time, to every founding team I meet. Read “The Mum Test”[1]. It will make you aware that you to get unbiased feedback you need to remove your identity from the idea so that people aren’t nice to protect you. [1] http://momtestbook.com/ http://momtestbook.com/
- davidivadavid 7y agoI also keep recommending this book to everyone. The TL;DR is: NEVER ask questions about hypotheticals. Ask people about what they do, how much they pay, how much time it takes, and so on. Facts, not answers to "Would you use this if...?"
- sdenton4 7y agoIndeed! One of the things I found frustrating about the article is that he talks about people 'lying' constantly... when if fact he had just asked meaningless questions.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoHe used the word lying. They didn't know they were lying. They were miswanting. And it's a HUGE glossed over fact when talking to customers.
- davidivadavid 7y agoYes, it's the customer development version of the XY problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
- jnwatson 7y agoInterestingly enough, that’s also a principle of behavioral interviewing. Hypothetical questions allow the bullshitters to shine, but specific targeted lines of question about what the interviewee did in a specific situation is frequently enlightening.
- wpietri 7y agoHuh. I think this is often taught. Indeed, I think it's at the core of the LS approach. The build-measure-learn loop is the heart of the process, meaning that whatever ideas you have, you test them as soon as possible with customer behavior. As an example, I mentored at Lean Startup Machine. We'd have them form up into teams around ideas. The first thing they'd ask for was verbal feedback. But they were quickly supposed to move to increasing levels of demonstration of commitment. One team, for example, had the notion that restaurants needed an easier way to get insight into customer experiences. They went out and found restaurant managers, and first confirmed that they had the hypothesized problem. But they quickly moved beyond words, asking if the managers would be willing to let them trial the system in the restaurant. Since enough of them said yes, they build something simple and put those little printed cardboard triangles on a bunch of tables. They then hacked together reports for the managers based on the data collected. The managers liked the reports. They then asked the managers how many would be willing to pay, right then, some modest monthly charge for ongoing use of the system. If I recall rightly, this team discovered that when actual money was on the line, the reports were just a nice-to-have. In that situation, it's still reasonable to persevere, as you may have hypotheses about what really will get them to cross the line. But it's also reasonable to kill the idea. There's a big difference, though, between what is taught and what people do. I was an early adopter of both the Agile movement (XP in particular) and Lean Startup approaches, and in both cases I'm kinda horrified by what it turned into in practice. With the Agile movement, it was quickly captured by companies who wanted to feel like they were doing something different while still retaining most of their top-down pathologies and high-debt code bases. With the Lean Startup approach it's harder to say how it turned out, as early-stage startups rarely produce reports like this. But my general impression is that, as with Agile, people pick the parts that seem fun and easy, and avoid the hard parts. I think this was made worse by the flood of VC money, especially around Uber-for-X startups. Who wants a method that will kill your probably-bad idea early if you can get tens or hundreds of millions? The bad idea might work out or you might thrash your way to a good one. And if it still failed? Well, now you're a seasoned founder of a venture-backed startup. By some measures, although not mine, that's way better than having a quiet, cheap failure.
- ErikAugust 7y agoThe buyers of a Slack for an enterprise organization wouldn't be developers doing "Deep Work". The buyers would be executives and managers, ie: the people pushing the content that causes the annoying notifications, anyway.
- apl002 7y agoI am a product manager and basically live in slack. My job is basically to communicate all day. On the flipside I've spent the last couple years learning to code in my free time and I can't imagine being interrupted by slack while im in a groove. It's def made me better about waiting to talk to my devs in our daily meetings despite being right next to them
- staunch 7y agoPaul Graham's essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" should be required for anyone working with developers. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- lifekaizen 7y agoThanks for recommending that, well written and gives clarity to something that can be a source of misunderstanding and friction.
- nategri 7y agoIs "a year" supposed to add a lot of impact here?? I frequently spend multiple years on more dubious endeavors, and have zero regrets about it. That's life. Edit: Okay this came out pretty harshly, but what I am poorly trying to express is that most people spend more time on worse things, so "a year" doesn't parse as the intended intensifier for me.
- coltonv 7y agoThere's no need to be so judgemental of a well written article describing someone else's experience, even if it isn't as grand and wonderful as yours.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aliswe 7y agoThatcs actually supposed to be read as encouraging, as he said the guy did something better than him and in a shorter time. And thus he should feel less remorse than he does, which he doesn't. If that makes sense...
- OrgNet 7y agoDid you write an article about your experience?
- pathartl 7y agoI've never been more annoyed by a basic website. Center your content!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- quaffapint 7y agoIt's one of those subjective things with design and why we have so many cars/etc to choose from. To each his/her own. I personally like the design.
- rand84545 7y agoThe website doesn't look the same for different resolutions. If I set my resolutios to HD, it's fine. If I set it to Full HD, half the screen gets covered by the photo and it's very distracting.
- pier25 7y agoIt's not subjective. We usually sit right at the center of our main monitor for a reason. Reading that website on a large 32'' monitor is annoying.
- JabavuAdams 7y ago> It's not subjective. Oh, please. You may have some rationale that makes a certain kind of sense, but clearly a lot of others don't care, or value other things. So ... subjective.
- ddtaylor 7y agoJust hit Reader Mode in Firefox.
- yingw787 7y agoI think for things like business chat, since the purchasers of the product are different from the users, and not completely aligned with them 1:1, VC-backed companies with the connections and credibility to said stakeholders may have a much easier go at getting paid users. You can also trade profitability for growth, which is something bootstrapping precludes. P.S. I read @rwalling's "Start Small, Stay Small" a few months back, and it was a phenomenal read. Highly recommend.
- wpietri 7y agoAgreed! I think products where the purchaser and the user are different are an enormous graveyard for startups. There's a big difference between building a product and building a business no matter the sector. But when the purchaser and user are different, it can be way worse. Good designers and engineers want to focus on improving the user experience, but that may not translate into sales at all.
- jessmartin 7y agoGreat post, Derrick! I learned almost precisely the same lesson in the same way over the same amount of time (a year) a few years back. It was _incredibly_ helpful to have those insights going into my next startup, and I approached customer development entirely differently. Lessons learned can be quickly applied!
- elefanten 7y agoI'm guessing you're referring to this part at the end: "In hindsight, I took on an unreasonably audacious endeavor with Level in part because of my internal “this might get big if I play my cards right” dialogue. It would have been far better to either deliberately go for the big idea (and probably seek venture funding to make it happen), or start far smaller and build my way into a sustainable company of one." I appreciate this passage... a thoughtful reflection.
- derrickreimer 7y agoThanks so much!
- BrentOzar 7y agoSlack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email. Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers: the point before they seriously adopt Slack, and the point in the future where Slack does something stupid like jack prices way up or suffer a serious breach.
- gopher2 7y agoNot that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.
- closeparen 7y agoMy employer ran several pilots of alternative chat systems alongside our primary. It sucked. Having both clients open, remembering which rooms are actually in active in which systems, etc. was obnoxious. Might work for a single closed-loop team but even then.
- lloydde 7y agoMicrosoft Teams with their decent video conferencing might have an angle plus being “free” part of 365.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoThat's the discussion we're actively having now. My only concern is how to move the knowledge and context that's currently in Slack somewhere else. Also, who knows if Teams will actually catch on - though with Microsoft threatening to get rid of Skype, it'll end up being the more official looking meeting app anyways, so why not bring the rest along?
- ErikAugust 7y ago"Every large team I spoke to had an exceptionally high bar and was unwilling to entertain Level until it was significantly more “mature.”" They all made the right decision, as it folded only a couple months later.
- yaseer 7y agoHarsh, but completely true
- philipov 7y agoThat kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.
- yeahitslikethat 7y agoI don't think it does make sense. Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed. Even within organizations there are critically important employees. So, no, it doesn't make sense.
- swombat 7y agoAt this point in time, Slack is a billion dollar unicorn that can magic money out of wherever it needs to keep going as long as it wants. It's not going away any time soon. The worst case scenario for Slack is acquisition and long slow death over a decade.
- woohoo7676 7y agoGreat post - it really resonated with me, having personally tried to do an overambitious startup that failed with a small budget. I agree with you that doing a 'lifestyle business' and getting to really zero in on a niche group's needs is an ideal area to be. Thanks for sharing, and hope you find what you're looking for in your next venture (and keep sharing details!).
- drchiu 7y agoLevel is a pretty well designed product. Tried it briefly and I really did like it. My team was already using other communication tools (not Slack, but email and other options) and using Level might have become an eventuality if I or someone else on my team pushed for it harder. That said, as someone who also creates and launch products, I think it's hard to MVP into a space like this. It's better to wedge yourself into some aspect of that space and eventually branch out once you have a paying user base that already likes your product. Good luck on your next endeavour.
- derrickreimer 7y agoThanks so much
- rolleiflex 7y agoI work on something that would be a competitor to Level, so I'm sad to hear this, not only because of market viability, but also because I share the belief in Slack being anathema to any sort of focused work. There's a lot to unpack here, but briefly: — The amount of effort, design expectation and polish everyone expects from a product is exponentially increasing. 'I'm one guy, Google is 75,000 people' is no longer a valid argument. Arguably it never was, but especially now you cannot ship a product that does not do what it says it will do to a very high degree. That effectively makes for longer product development processes and probably makes bootstrapped competitors to Slack unviable. At least, this was the logic I ended up going for institutional venture capital: it buys me the time to make it work. — Non-real-time communication is useful when the team size grows above a certain point, however when that happens the companies grow and have higher expectations of their tools. So this market is an interesting one in that it largely forbids scrappy, just-alpha-don't-mind-me kind of products. Trying to sell to smaller (less than 5 people) startups will fail since they do not yet have a problem with Slack, and anything above, companies get increasingly desperate, however, the tool space rapidly diminishes as companies grow. — This sort of non-real-time communication requires a lot of trust in other people in your company, in that they will see and eventually respond. In real-time, you can know if somebody hasn't responded in a few minutes. Your delay risk from a single question moves from a few minutes to a few hours, to a day, or larger if your team is distributed across the planet. It requires a certain type of team with this kind of trust to make it work. It's a cultural issue as much as a tools issue, and a good designer not only builds the tools to make things work, but also builds them in a way that they shape the team culture so that the tool can work. In our specific case, our main goal is to make your team a more trusting, more efficient one, not just to make you focus by reducing notifications spam. — Derrick is a bit of a known person, with a podcast and all, and I think in this case it worked against him somewhat. He mentions receiving interest from his fans, this (fans of your personality) is an audience that converts especially poorly. — Slack is a complex tool serving a variety of needs, so it is very hard to replace it without being Slack - and if you try that, you'll end up with just an inferior copy. However, what one can do is to handle a subset of tasks it does better than it. However, even this will take multiple years for a team that has no runway problems because of the expectation of polish mentioned above. — "Everyone is lying", as a designer, I do take a bit of an issue with that: it's not that everyone is lying, but that everyone has different incentives. And when you're a known person, those incentives align with keeping you happy, so that you'd become their acquaintance for potential use in the future. This is not conscious, this is just human nature. This happens even when you are just a nice person that they don't know. Empathy from your users is a powerful thing. It is also your enemy. They are not lying to you. They want you to be happy. I won't blame users for that. It is your (our / mine / other designers') job to counteract that. I have a lot more, but I'll leave it here since this is already too long because I think about these all day every day. If you think this is interesting, though, happy to chat. (Email in my profile.) We're launching pilots in a few weeks. The core idea, I like to say, is that Slack is a marketer’s idea of what a good comms tool should be, while Aether Pro is an engineer’s.
- tomcam 7y agoPowerfully familiar. I have learned similar lessons. In my mind “The Mom Test” is the most important business book for high-tech entrepreneurs, and I wish it existed a few years before it was released.
- robfitz 7y agoHah, me too, but couldn't write it till I had taken my knocks first ;)
- tardo99 7y agoI'm not sure I understand the business model Derrick was pursuing, but the objective seems very interesting. Maybe instead of shutting it down he should consider pivoting Level to a FOSS approach modeled on something like lichess. Maybe a set of early adopter companies would be interested in joining in to help build and support the product. There would obviously be less or maybe no immediate financial incentive in it for him, but he would be continuing with a very constructive aim. In my experience, that kind of involvement in a growing project usually pays dividends, one way or another.
- ronpeled 7y agoI agree. It seems like he pulled the plug a bit early but honestly he would know better than all of us if it makes sense or not. Perhaps he have found a better project to sink his teeth into...
- fourseventy 7y agoIt seems like one of the main problems is that their target market was too large, and they were directly competing with slack which dominates that market. A better approach might have been to target a more niche market in the business communication tool space, and be the best tool in that space, before broadening to the wider market.
- AdrianB1 7y agoIf you target the business communication space you are dead in the first second: you cannot compete to Skype for Business, for example, that is backed up and supported by Microsoft (and that matters a lot) and it is already feature-complete. Not unless you have a product that can compete on features and backed up with guarantees you will offer upgrades and support for many years, this is what companies want first.
- pier25 7y agoGreat read. The thing is Slack wouldn't be as successful as it is without some merits. I think understanding why it is so successful could be a very interesting exercise for anyone wanting to get into that market. We actually have the opposite problem where I work. We have Slack and only a handful of people out of 50 use it regularly, all of which are remote devs such as myself. The only communication that works is face to face meetings or casual corridor conversations, so remote people are basically excluded from everything that happens. Email is generally useless too. Writing skills are not abundant here, when the emails do get answered.
- lowii 7y agoThe way I see it, it's not that people don't like Slack, it's that people don't like online chatting in general as the official way of communicating inside a company. I don't think that the solution to that problem could ever be another chatting tool.
- not2b 7y agoExactly. Chat means you need to stop what you're doing all the time and chat, which is hell for people who need quiet time to actually get work done. Email can be addressed when there is time for it. (and yes, in principle you can wait to reply in chat applications as well, but the drift is for people to expect quick response).
- grey-area 7y agoYes I honestly have no idea what problems in our workflow chat would solve, but I can think of loads of problems it would introduce. I have no idea how other programmers tolerate chat as a communications medium for work. Why would you prefer chat over other async mediums?
- a13n 7y agoChat is just as async as email or any online communication platform - there's no obligation to respond immediately, and you can disable notifications for as long as you please.
- grey-area 7y agoIn practice, people expect a response in a relatively timely way, it is after all chat, not email. It does seem a lot of companies treat it explicitly as ephemeral (and therefore requiring frequent checks). Even slack deletes old messages for free accounts, and the search is pretty poor IME. It is also full of chatter irrelevant to the topic at hand as far as I've seen in the slack groups I've participated in (though I have avoided it for work, so have not experienced it working well in a work environment). I can imagine it is very useful for responding to a live incident for example, so perhaps people use it for that sort of thing. For a developer working on product though it seems crazy to me to have a chat window open for any significant part of a working day. People work differently though I guess and perhaps I just haven't seen it used well.
- sam0x17 7y agoI mean I've done this with things I spent 3-4 years building :/
- harrisreynolds 7y agoI recently had to do this with https://chart.ly https://chart.ly. We've had great success doing data visualization service projects, but building a product in this space just became untenable due to the market's maturity and my teams lack of resources. Better to cut the cord than keep kidding yourself. Thanks for sharing!!
- isostatic 7y agoNot hosting my data in Libya!
- dana321 7y agoYou only spent a year building something, thats nothing. I've spent years building products, the first year is alpha at best.
- coldtea 7y agoDepends on the products, some can be final polished version 1.0s in a year or less.
- dingo_bat 7y agoMy fundamental question here is: what is the problem with slack and how do you plan to solve it? Distraction is not a problem with slack, it is an individual problem that must be solved by everyone individually.
- trustfundbaby 7y agoI read this, and all through the article I kept waiting for the part where the author would talk about his own experience using his own product. What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love something you build unless you love it yourself, Seth Godin touches on this in his book "This is Marketing" I like the data driven approach to product development, but sometimes passion trumps data, if you build something you yourself cannot live without, it's much easier to slowly win people over to your way of thinking. And if you say to me "well he was the only one working on it", then my answer to you is like that punchline in the Famous "Coming to America" skit ... "aha!" It is infinitely better to work on problems that you have a firsthand understanding of/experience with otherwise you're always going to be depending on others for product insight, which is not terrible, but much much harder than when those insights come from you directly.
- ekanes 7y ago> then my answer to you is like that punchline in the Famous "Coming to America" skit ... Don't find it but it sounds fun! Got a link?
- trustfundbaby 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKsSvR5u-qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKsSvR5u-qk
- ackbar03 7y agoThat's actually really good
- RaceWon 7y ago> What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love something you build unless you love it yourself This reminded me of a quote which is totally the opposite, and imo more accurate: "Most entrepreneurs fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in love with their products and their business when they should be falling in love with their clients and customers" -Jay Abraham Both sentiments are however; worthy food for thought.
- verttii 7y agoOn a more abstract level I feel he was trying to enable/enhance deep work, just this particular implementation didn't fly the way he expected it to. Instead of targeting people who are somewhat annoyed by slack and the like I believe the whole value proposal should be more along the lines of promoting the concept and benefits of deep work. I've actually been following Derrick and the development of level on GitHub. The code is open source. It's remarkably well engineered and I use it as a source of reference for my own codebases. So while probably unintentional, he's already helped others by building it.
- gscott 7y agoI built and ran a groupware/crm system from 2001 to 2009. But didn't get the traction I needed and couldn't afford the co-located hosting any longer. I spent 3 years developing it full-time myself and very part time on it the rest of the time. While also supporting a wife and two kids. I moved it to very cheap hosting, told everyone it was closing, but then never closed it but didn't accept new signups. Checking now there is still a little usage in 2019 (although the majority of usage stopped in 2016). It costs me $20 to keep alive, using GoDaddy. It was $14 a month but GoDaddy keeps raising their hosting price with no notification. Eventually I will re-design the UI to Boostrap to make it modern and relaunch it. What I am trying to say is if you made something nice that you like, you can keep it alive and work on it sometime in the future. You never know when Slack is going to bought out and then eventually die. You could be the DuckDuckGo to Google but for Slack. If you had a million dollar marketing budget things would be different.
- techsin101 7y agoThis is sensible. Nice point of view
- pkaler 7y agoI've been listening to The Art of Product podcast since the start and Level really didn't make sense to me as a solution even though I understood the problem. Most issues are around context and focus when moving from an individual contributor to a lead. If a programmer I'm leading doesn't implement a feature in a way that I expect it is because the context that is in my brain hasn't been transferred to the programmer's brain. If a feature isn't being worked on then I having communicated focus and priority. A solution would focus on revealing context and focus by: 1) Deeply integrating with Slack, JIRA, Github, etc. The tools that we already use. A new product can't be a silo. 2) Mobile or GTFO. Leads are in meetings, on airplanes, in transit, etc.
- AdrianB1 7y ago#2: it depends on the kind of team you have. My team of developers never had any chat client installed on their mobile for work use, they were either in front of their computers or away and not available. We did not discuss in airplanes as we were trying to focus when we had discussions, not to board and block the other passengers because we were busy chatting in the middle of the embark flux.
- andybak 7y agoSo. Will you open source the code?
- theyinwhy 7y agoI walked away from a product I spent 10 years building. My advice: don't look back. It's easier and more profitable this way.
- ddebernardy 7y ago> “Ugh, Slack distracts me so often. You’re right; everything feels urgent even when it’s not. I’m super interested in what you’re building here. We’re pretty open to change at my company – I don’t see switching being too big of a deal.” This is such a common mistake. When doing customer development, do NOT stick to asking "would this be of general interest to you?". In fact, you can get away with not asking this at all. Instead ask: "how much would you pay for this?" And if you like the price tag, also throw in: "can we set a date to sign next week/month/quarter?"
- sonnyblarney 7y agoThough 'would this interest you?' may not be the way to start, neither would 'how much would you be willing to pay?' either. Consider that even for established products 'willingness to pay' may be zero until there's a sales process i.e. they trial it, they like it, they discover some things, then the sales person starts to do a 'close'. The problem with the 'how much would you pay for it' kind of discovery is it misses the opportunity for the company to determine in a material way why it's valuable to them. There's a similar problem in consumer land as well, you can't hardly establish price points by asking how much people will pay. Also - price isn't really the big concern. It's not going to be a margin issue, it'll be a volume issue if anything. The price for such a service would probably be very low per-person, to the point of not being that important. Price is not the big point. And since companies will pay for stuff they find valuable ... The 'real' question you want answered is: 'will they find this thing useful' in one way or another, or better yet 'what problems near my product do they need solved' so the maker can add that functionality or even pivot a little bit. I think it's possible to rationalize the process of getting to that point, unfortunately it often takes industry experience beforehand, and probably a longer dev curve up front with some willing pre-customers.
- robodale 7y agoI walked away from mine only after 8 years. It was difficult realizing it had to go. Taking something that was a part of your life for so long out behind the metaphorical barn with a rifle is tough...
- JabavuAdams 7y agoI would assume that switching team tooling would have a social credit cost/risk. Didn't see that mentioned in the article. People don't want to appear incompetent if the new thing doesn't work out. It has to be really good. Maybe it has to have a certain momentum on personal projects...
- m0zg 7y agoIMO there's a ton of untapped potential in good old email still, with chat being last resort when realtime response is really necessary. There were a few startups years ago that tried to tackle some of the warts of email UX (e.g. Xobni) but nothing came of it it looks like. Slack is cancer. I'm working with a client right now that uses Slack, and I bill every single minute I have to spend on Slack, so I know exactly how much time is wasted there. It's an open invitation to just shoot wind all day never accomplishing anything, which is, unsurprisingly, how people use it, mostly. Especially people who get paid a fixed salary.
- brainpool 7y agoMy take is that this was a case of hubris. Can happen to the best of us. Where it really derailed was here: “Others were not decision makers, so I had to take their feedback with a grain of salt.” Most users of this kind of product are not decision makers, at least when it comes to selecting the product. But they are the ones that have to use it and their opinions are critically important.
- dmitryminkovsky 7y agoThe idea of soliciting feedback before building a start up really doesn’t make sense to me. If you like your idea (“this is something I’ve always wanted”), are willing to dedicate yourself and have the means then you should try it. Otherwise you’ll never find out. If the creator of the automobile had listened to people they probably would’ve thought it was a dead end because unlike horses cars can’t reproduce. The idea that you can explain your vision to people who will spend one minute thinking about it with you and get useful feedback is also not obvious. Build the product or you’ll never know.
- andrewbinstock 7y agoThat's true of products that are true innovations, that is, they create entirely new product categories. Here, however, he's just improving on an existing product. Getting opinions about what's wrong with the current product makes a lot of sense.
- dmitryminkovsky 7y agoFor sure. I've worked in finance and we did tons of market research when before giving loans to companies like Rite-Aid, CVS, etc, knowing that they did their own market research, too. But, I'm not sure how far that carries over to tech. Even "commodity" ideas aren't always so commodity in this sector.
- joering2 7y ago> If the creator of the automobile had listened to people they probably would’ve thought it was a dead end because unlike horses cars can’t reproduce. Actually, a true story: Ford said that if he were to listen to what people want better than a horse, he would have built a carriage with hitch for 6 horses :)
- catchmeifyoucan 7y agoIt's good to see that the author had early feedback and performed interviews. However, looking at an early post at the interview methodology, it seemed like there was the lack of validation around the product. The author successfully validated the problem, but not necessarily what he wants to build. A good read is the "Customer Driven Playbook" - which details a hypothesis driven model in product development to get more measurable outcomes. I think he should keep at it - but set more specific outcomes and look at smaller sets of things to improve within the larger space.
- andrewstuart 7y agoI think product development takes a bit of madness - a leap of faith, something that you believe that others don't ...... yet. I don't think any amount of asking people what they want is a replacement for building something and putting it in front of people - only then do you get a true reaction.
- _hardwaregeek 7y agoThe Paul Graham essay on start up ideas comes to mind [1]. Everybody kinda wanted this product but they didn't need the product. This paragraph sums it up: > The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users. Granted, it's not like I possess a magical "good startup ideas" power. And I don't have a successful startup under my belt. But still, I find it curious that many people haven't read this essay. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
- andrewstuart 7y agoHindsight is 20/20.
- _hardwaregeek 7y agoCompletely so. I don't want to act like I know better–I don't. But the lessons of this post do line up with the lessons in the essay.
- EGreg 7y agoI actually use a completely different criterion. If I see people constantly resorting to bad solutions and complaining, when a tech solution could solve the whole thing, I like the idea. Then I think whether I can make it viral and engaging to bring user acquision costs to zero. If yes - it can be done!
- mritchie712 7y agoHe did get people to pay before even launching, so I don't know if reading this would have swayed him much. He had a considerable amount of positive signals. The lesson may have been how much these signals were skewed by the source of the signal (e.g. fans of his podcast).
- 7y ago
- BentFranklin 7y agoToo dark; didn't read.
- nbrempel 7y agoIf you like the idea of Slack alternative that promotes focus and reduces distractions, I recommend looking at https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/. I used it briefly and really liked it. It's created by the same team that makes Todoist.
- jv22222 7y agoOriginal post about "The Madness" http://justinvincent.com/page/951/the-madness-the-all-consuming-obsession-of-new-projects http://justinvincent.com/page/951/the-madness-the-all-consum...
- dangero 7y agoI have a lot of similar thoughts about Slack and also had the idea to go head to head with it a couple of years ago. I partnered with a PHD researcher who had expertise in the area of focus. Before I started building I launched a paid sales campaign to see if people would be interested with a mocked up website looking like we already had the product. I had a lot of website visitors, but nobody signed up for a demo. Not one person. At that point I realized that whether or not the product was a good idea, I didn't know how to sell it, so I ditched the idea, deleted the test website and moved on.
- tomxor 7y ago> If people were ravenous for a solution, why weren’t most people even attempting to pilot Level? This is _not_ purely the "everyone is lying" problem, i.e everyones lack of ability to quantify the actual importance of a problem... The original questions were deceptive to both parties because they are unwittingly framed with the assumption that a "solution" in the form of a product or technology is a _valid_ form of solution. Not all problems deserve or need technical solutions, but the subjects are denied the opportunity to consider this aspect. If you identify a problem everyone will likely agree it exists, which is useless, this doesn't qualify it for a solution let alone a solution in the form of a product. I'm not very trusting of market research, but if I had to, i'd try to make this possibility intuitively clear by offering alternatives for comparison e.g: Do you think problem x would be better solved by a workplace policy or a technical solution / product?
- mratzloff 7y agoI attended a UX seminar once. We split into groups and were assigned a scenario: improve the check-in experience at a fictional hotel (acted out by the organizers). Literally every other group began their presentation with, "We built an app that..." Most involved checking in by phone. Meanwhile, our group noticed a number of basic inefficiencies and suboptimal interactions, and proposed about 5-10 improvements to policies and staff procedures. We all watched the same skit. I thought the solutions were so obvious as to be on the nose, but evidently not.
- jchook 7y agoThank you sincerely for not contributing energy to realtime chat, FOMO, and the "constant inbox". I personally find amazing productivity when I turn my phone to DND (helps with robocalls too) and quit all chat apps. On most phones you can configure who can call you in DND.
- z3t4 7y agoThe problem is that a product like Slack does not wear down, you do not have to replace it every second year, so there's no good opportunity for a competitor to sell a replacement product. It either have to be an order of magnitude better, or you have to sell it as an alternative, not a replacement, to customers that not already have their needs fulfilled. So when people search for a team chat product, first you need to make sure people know that your product is an option, but not only that you need a very good explanation of why they should pick your product and not the most popular one.
- fuddle 7y agoWhy is there no screenshots of the level app on the homepage or Github page? A picture of the app would help me decide whether I want to use it.
- sbr464 7y agoI was curious also, but found some in the docs.
- yixiang 7y ago> I spent the next six weeks building. By that point, my customers were loving the product – even my largest customer that started out highly skeptical of the paradigm. Everyone who had converted so far applauded the user experience and agreed Level was a beautiful product. I wonder why they switched to Level and loved it when most were fine with Slack. Is it because they were fans, or do they have some real pain that drive them to action? Maybe the author accidentally hit a niche? If it's me, I'd find that out before giving up. So most people are fine with what they have and won't switch, so what? Isn't that to be expected? Aren't you supposed to find some earlier adopters and grow from there?
- soneca 7y agoAs a listener of the Art of Product podcast I am a little sad with this announcement. But rationally I don't think I should be. The founder was very aware and honest about the challenges of his product; and this decision, at this time, seems very mature and right. Good luck on your next endeavor, which, I guess, will be a developers'tool :)
- nobody271 7y agoDerrick, let me share my rather cynical opinion about all of this and hopefully it will make you feel better. The part where you say people were waiting for it to be "more polished" really speaks to me. I've heard that about some of my basically finished websites. The thing is, that's a lazy answer. At the same time if you had asked someone why slack is so great when it first came out they would have fired off some canned response. Because of this fact I really question what actually motivates people to adopt software. I don't think it's the things they say. I think it's more the idea that software as an industry is analogous to the fashion industry. People just a lot of times do what they're told. I think you have to tell, not ask. But in 2019 how do you do that? idk, pay Scott Hanselman to say your product is a revolutionary idea and see how many people parrot that same response back to you. I'm saying I don't think you had a bad idea but maybe you overestimated the autonomy of the average developer.
- Aeolun 7y agoI’m a bit sad. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make my company switch to something like this, but if I were ever in the position to make that choice myself?... The problem is the decision makers don’t mind being interrupted all the time.
- yashap 7y agoGreat article. Thought the author sounded really bright, practical, mature, customer focused and motivated, did a lot right. Seems like someone I’d love to found a company with. But the simple truth is startups are hard, most of them fail even if you get a tonne of things right.
- dreamgt 7y agoSorry but the outcome seemed obvious from the get go. Of course you weren’t going to be able to single handedly replace a platform like slack, while improving upon the pitfalls it’s creating in cross-team communication. The insight into your experience is great, but it’s really the type of thought that is born and dead within a few minutes of most developers minds. Especially when we think of the effort and consequences of such an endeavor.
- carlsborg 7y agoVery hard to do front end build out and UI tweaks and backend and product planning and customer development as a one man shop. Consider finding a motivated offshore dev to hand over the non-core bits and pieces - the net time it frees up can be dramatic, speaking from experience.
- jcoffland 7y agoA year is pretty short.
- some1else 7y ago> An engineer at Stripe told me about their careful balance of email, forums, and Slack. They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival. In retrospectives, team members often reflect on whether they chose the right medium (email, chat, or forum) for various conversations. This is bad news for Slack's freemium economics. I'm going to recommend we don't upgrade with this in mind.
- zild3d 7y agoif slack becomes your hub and you start adding in integrations the app limit (10) can hit you pretty quickly as well
- GordonS 7y agoThis was a really interesting read - it's so difficult to walk away from something you've put heart and soul into for so long. This also sounded familiar: "The gist is that it’s tough to get unbiased feedback during customer validation. I already knew this to be correct, but I underestimated to the degree to which everyone lies" Has anyone found effective strategies for getting honest customer feedback?
- brokenkebab 7y agoI dislike immediacy of chats, so one may imagine I'm the perfect match for the product. But no, for people like me, I think, email works just fine. Level.app webpage says about its alleged superiority above Slack which looks a lot like returning back to good old email traditions (inbox, which you can check when you like, no presence status etc.) Fine, but... er, I already have it, as well as a variety of trusted tools, and everything based on the open protocols. So maybe the guy was solving the wrong problem all the time.
- nathan-io 7y ago"It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual should pour this forth." - Terence McKenna What I take from this as an entrepreneur is: Have a vision and bring it into the world. The market response, and the financial outcome, are irrelevant. If you disagree, it's probably because you feel that the ultimate goal of entrepreneurship is wealth. I used to believe this myself, and I can certainly understand the perspective of those who do. As for the article, this line is pretty telling: > make a bold statement about the problem (without too many specifics about the solution) and gather email addresses of people who wanted to join the movement This particular journey seemed a lot more "tell me what to build and how to make money from it" than "here is my vision," and there's already some grandiose idea of a "movement" before even some vague outline of an actual solution/product have been conceived. There's also a strong whiff of the toxic "fail fast" mentality. Oftentimes, tremendous persistence and radical care are the difference between success and failure. I shudder to think how many fantastic products have died under this type of thinking, when the real issue was some deficiency in execution, positioning, etc. I say this in part because a year is not much of a sacrifice, at least from the perspective of an entrepreneur, and especially when you have the financial runway to do it. Any sane person would probably disagree, but it's neither the job nor the nature of founders to be sane.
- edisonjoao 7y agothis is the toughest thing ever