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With all due respect, a Facebook person's thoughts on validating a startup idea are pretty much irrelevant. Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts

With all due respect, a Facebook person's thoughts on validating a startup idea are pretty much irrelevant. Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it. Startups begin with all the wind of a baby blowing a raspberry.

sumantsharma 6y ago
True, however, one can also just focus on the ideas expressed in the article separate from its author’s affiliation.
- andrewstuart 6y ago
  It's not that the author is affiliated with facebook. The point is that for most startups, you validate your ideas from your kitchen table, fighting to get a handful of visitors to visit your site. When facebook launches a product at blasts an infinite firehose of users at the product. So the facebook experience is utterly different to the startup experience and really its kind of absurd to be sitting in facebook advising startups how to do what they do at facebook, they're such disconnected experiences. Maybe the topic of the article should have been "how to validate a new product coming out of one of the biggest tech companies that ever existed, advice for other product managers from FAANG".
  - amanjaincorp 6y ago
    From my experience, the FB brand will get you user entering the door. I agree that's an advantage. But the FB brand does not get your app Product Market Fit. Those people who entered the door because of the ads $ spent, leave and then don't come back.
    - an_opabinia 6y ago
      I just can't believe you're talking about Facebook like it's some restaurant franchise. Never mind that your math doesn't even make sense. Even if only 1% of users retain after a year, 1% of 100m is 1m more than your 90% retention of 0 users.
    - inerte 6y ago
      Being inside FB (or any other large company) has way more advantages than users entering the door. Just the metrics and analytics that FB can gather on experiments is an insanely huge hill a regular startup can't climb. FB can gather and analise data at a scale, on so many markets and devices and demographics that none other plan tier at 3rd party integrations can hope to match. The SRE support you get, a 30 minute conversation with other great product managers, engineers, designers one meeting invite away, a history of what others have tried and what worked and what didn't, and so much more. And if you get a VP to support you, even for a bit, we're basically talking about a torrent of money and resources being thrown at your project while you still drawn a 6 figure salary (plus benefits and bonus and stocks!). It's really apples to oranges here.
    - forgotmysn 6y ago
      you're not wrong that the FB brand doesn't guarantee success, but the challenges are completely different. having experience at FB as a PM is not the only qualifier for starting a start-up. it takes a lot more than that to be successful
forgotmysn 6y ago
100% if this was article about how to validate a product idea, that fb launches, than it might be helpful and poignant. but it has no relevance for validating a start-up
adventured 6y ago
> Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it. It's remarkable how often things still fail miserably despite hurricane-force winds behind them, as with Hobbi and Lasso. Facebook got their ass royally kicked by Pinterest and TikTok. July 2nd: "Facebook is shutting down TikTok clone Lasso and Pinterest rival Hobbi" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.htm...
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Startups are street racers: you never know who you’re racing next to. They might have bigger sponsors than their sleeper suggests. A NASCAR analogy would therefore apply to traditional VC centers like SF, NYC, etc. It’s hard to pass someone before a turn at 200 MPH, but if you don’t do it, plenty of other people can and will. Practically anyone can build a racecar, or a startup. The race puts proof to the lie: not everyone can compete, and not everyone wins. The first issue is systemic; the second: hard work, capital, and dumb luck. Life, like business, hopefully doesn’t have a checkered flag, but it’s a fact of life all the same. All anyone can do is race their best to win, for whatever your own personal winning conditions are. Choose your racing team wisely!
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    But... you are not competing with Lewis Hamilton if you stay at the local go kart track! Plenty of room for small fish. He’d love to come and beat you but he can not afford to, his time would cost millions.
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      And yet I bumped into a childhood hero of mine, Leo Laporte of tech broadcasting fame, at an impromptu meetup he did at a bar in SF I heard about on his Twitter. So as I lived in SF at the time (~2012 I think?), I just went and met one of my role models. Sure, you don’t know if you don’t go. But you also don’t know if you don’t know to go. Can going be taught? Isn’t that what startups do?
jerzyt 6y ago
Yup. The author made a poll of fellow FB employees. As if that is even remotely representative of the overall market of the 25 to 44 year olds. Just consider the average salary of the polled population vs the general population.
- amanjaincorp 6y ago
  Poll of "fellow FB employees" could be replaced with spending ~$100 on Google Ads and using a certain targeting criteria.
  - forgotmysn 6y ago
    but its not

sumantsharma 6y ago

True, however, one can also just focus on the ideas expressed in the article separate from its author’s affiliation.

andrewstuart 6y ago
It's not that the author is affiliated with facebook. The point is that for most startups, you validate your ideas from your kitchen table, fighting to get a handful of visitors to visit your site. When facebook launches a product at blasts an infinite firehose of users at the product. So the facebook experience is utterly different to the startup experience and really its kind of absurd to be sitting in facebook advising startups how to do what they do at facebook, they're such disconnected experiences. Maybe the topic of the article should have been "how to validate a new product coming out of one of the biggest tech companies that ever existed, advice for other product managers from FAANG".
- amanjaincorp 6y ago
  From my experience, the FB brand will get you user entering the door. I agree that's an advantage. But the FB brand does not get your app Product Market Fit. Those people who entered the door because of the ads $ spent, leave and then don't come back.
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    I just can't believe you're talking about Facebook like it's some restaurant franchise. Never mind that your math doesn't even make sense. Even if only 1% of users retain after a year, 1% of 100m is 1m more than your 90% retention of 0 users.
  - inerte 6y ago
    Being inside FB (or any other large company) has way more advantages than users entering the door. Just the metrics and analytics that FB can gather on experiments is an insanely huge hill a regular startup can't climb. FB can gather and analise data at a scale, on so many markets and devices and demographics that none other plan tier at 3rd party integrations can hope to match. The SRE support you get, a 30 minute conversation with other great product managers, engineers, designers one meeting invite away, a history of what others have tried and what worked and what didn't, and so much more. And if you get a VP to support you, even for a bit, we're basically talking about a torrent of money and resources being thrown at your project while you still drawn a 6 figure salary (plus benefits and bonus and stocks!). It's really apples to oranges here.
  - forgotmysn 6y ago
    you're not wrong that the FB brand doesn't guarantee success, but the challenges are completely different. having experience at FB as a PM is not the only qualifier for starting a start-up. it takes a lot more than that to be successful

forgotmysn 6y ago

100% if this was article about how to validate a product idea, that fb launches, than it might be helpful and poignant. but it has no relevance for validating a start-up

adventured 6y ago

> Whatever thing you are building at Facebook starts out with 10 hurricanes of wind behind it. It's remarkable how often things still fail miserably despite hurricane-force winds behind them, as with Hobbi and Lasso. Facebook got their ass royally kicked by Pinterest and TikTok. July 2nd: "Facebook is shutting down TikTok clone Lasso and Pinterest rival Hobbi" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/lasso-shut-down-facebook.htm...

aspenmayer 6y ago
Startups are street racers: you never know who you’re racing next to. They might have bigger sponsors than their sleeper suggests. A NASCAR analogy would therefore apply to traditional VC centers like SF, NYC, etc. It’s hard to pass someone before a turn at 200 MPH, but if you don’t do it, plenty of other people can and will. Practically anyone can build a racecar, or a startup. The race puts proof to the lie: not everyone can compete, and not everyone wins. The first issue is systemic; the second: hard work, capital, and dumb luck. Life, like business, hopefully doesn’t have a checkered flag, but it’s a fact of life all the same. All anyone can do is race their best to win, for whatever your own personal winning conditions are. Choose your racing team wisely!
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  But... you are not competing with Lewis Hamilton if you stay at the local go kart track! Plenty of room for small fish. He’d love to come and beat you but he can not afford to, his time would cost millions.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    And yet I bumped into a childhood hero of mine, Leo Laporte of tech broadcasting fame, at an impromptu meetup he did at a bar in SF I heard about on his Twitter. So as I lived in SF at the time (~2012 I think?), I just went and met one of my role models. Sure, you don’t know if you don’t go. But you also don’t know if you don’t know to go. Can going be taught? Isn’t that what startups do?

jerzyt 6y ago

Yup. The author made a poll of fellow FB employees. As if that is even remotely representative of the overall market of the 25 to 44 year olds. Just consider the average salary of the polled population vs the general population.

amanjaincorp 6y ago
Poll of "fellow FB employees" could be replaced with spending ~$100 on Google Ads and using a certain targeting criteria.
- forgotmysn 6y ago
  but its not