8 ms·

Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building

Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building a bleeding edge product and how difficult is to sell such product (probably because everyone know that using bleeding edge products is dangerous :) )

soneca 6y ago
Thanks for this comment! I usually read the comments before the article and though it would be a Captain Obvious advicicle with snarky comments as are the comments here. So I wasn’t even considering reading it. Glad someone took the time to read the damn article lol Interesting reading by the way.
- guytv 6y ago
  I actually started reading the article, which sparked my interest at start, but then faded away. so I thought: "This is going to be one of these articles where the comments are more interesting than the piece itself" and came here, just to find the excellent: "did any of the commentators even read the article?"
warent 6y ago
Not even about bleeding edge products. It's a lengthy article about the pitfalls of entering a market with no market validation, which the author slapped lipstick on and gave this sexy title.
- themmes 6y ago
  Exactly, its a classic we have a solution, but not a problem-to-solve let alone a product (yet). “But guess what, they had no idea how to use our tool or integrate it within their workflow. And to be honest, nor did we. Adoption was bleak and feedback was dry—silence in startups is not golden.”
- yashap 6y ago
  That was my take too - they built something nobody wanted, and it failed.
- acidbaseextract 6y ago
  I had my first startup fail in the late 2000s because we built a sales prediction software that sounded cool, but nobody actually wanted. We even had a large paid pilot with a major auto manufacturer, but they didn't renew when it turned out that none of their employees had actually used the software. Making something nobody wants is a classic startup mistake. I resolved not to make it again and read a great deal about market validation and building products. I have one recommendation for those reading this thread: Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany". It contrasts Product Development (focusing on a product with no customers) vs Customer Development (focusing on customer problems and building software around those). Honestly you don't even need the whole book, there's a PDF with the first couple chapters floating around [1]. I had a bunch of "holy shit, that's exactly what I did wrong" moments while reading it. Eric Ries' "Lean Startup" is also an excellent book on this topic. [1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...
  - OakNinja 6y ago
    Someone on HN once said “It’s hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don’t have”. Building software that solves a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have is also a real problem.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Yeah, creating problems in people for which you conveniently sell solutions is the job of marketing. As for building a solution to "a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have", I'll agree that this may not be a good thing for a startup to do - but when I see how basic research is being defunded and drowned in red tape, and people saying that startups are the new, distributed R&D departments, I feel the middle has fallen out. When startups do a greedy gradient descent, and academia struggles doing science, who's going to work on solving problems that require solutions one or two steps beyond what the intended audience can understand? FLOSS community? What about outside software?
      - 6y ago
- fbelzile 6y ago
  I agree. Look at the landing page [0]. First off, they hijack your scroll wheel and present you with some Apple-esque website that is very slow and doesn't work properly. > "Remote, component-driven, and obsessed with speed." I think not. Second, they show zero screenshots of the service or what the benefits are to using it. > "Handoff reimagined." Yea, okay... Nice slogan, now show me before I move on! No wonder they're having issues convincing new customers. They think they're selling a space ship when really they only need to improve their website copy. [0] https://www.contrast.app/ https://www.contrast.app/
  - cellis 6y ago
    Yeah, as someone who might use this product I feel like the landing page should be a long post on “how it works”. Frontend engineers are going to be very big stakeholders on this and I need to know, down to the bone bits how does it’s thing.
lultimouomo 6y ago
Also the "bleeding edge product" in the article is some kind if analytics system that tells you the adoption rate of "components" (web widgets? Not sure) in your system. This might not exactly be what you think of when you hear bleeding edge, so take this article with a grain of salt.
- heipei 6y ago
  Yeah, I read the piece and couldn't believe that this was the "bleeding edge" product they were referring to. At one point they call it "niche" themselves, which is a more accurate description. "As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product." Yeah, and I've never met anyone who cared to be honest. And if you do care, your answer is usually a quick "git grep" away.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    That doesn’t really let you know how many components are custom and how many come from the design system.
wy35 6y ago
It's actually hilarious. So many people enjoy sharing their opinion on the headline rather than the content of the article.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Sometimes people just want to talk about a certain topic, regardless of the article's contents. The headline just gives them a convenient excuse.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    As 'CPLX says, for many of us the article itself is just a discussion prompt. Quite often (I'd say half of the time), the tangents and off-topics in the HN discussions are way more insightful and interesting than the submitted article.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Almost all of the time I submit something, that's exactly why: I want to read the HN comments, but there aren't any yet!
- CPLX 6y ago
  Hacker News is a popular forum where participants engage in freewheeling conversations using headlines as a discussion prompt.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Which makes me wonder, why people insist on having a headline AND an article in 2020? It only creates a confusion when most people don't bother reading articles when the headline is strong enough to inflict a response. It has become a tool to say something and deny saying it.
  - names_are_hard 6y ago
    That got me thinking of an idea for a startup: let's build a service that allows people to broadcast headlines with no content (since no one reads the articles anyway), and then other people can reply to the headlines. To make sure that authors stick to the rules, we'll limit the length of each headline to 140 characters. Side benefit: users can post their headlines via a single SMS message.
Kiro 6y ago
OT but classic HN not to read the article and only comment on the headline. I feel this part of the guidelines makes it hard to address, when I really just want to say "RTFA before commenting" to some ridiculous comments that would make no sense if the poster had actually read the article. > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rikroots 6y ago
I read the article before coming to read the HN response to it. I haven't read beyond your top-of-the-thread comment. The article resonated deeply with me, because I know just how the author feels. I, too, have developed a software product that attempts to address a key failing in one of the (more under-utilized) DOM elements we have at our disposal when building websites. I can see the problem, and some of the solutions - but other developers are simply not interested. I've marketed the product to the best of my abilities, written blog posts about why I think this is an important issue. I've even tried to engage with people supposedly interested in overcoming the failing to help me make the product even better ... <crickets-chirping> ... nothing. The harsh truth is you can't market a solution to a problem that nobody else believes is a problem in the first place. I've posted links to my product on a number of occasions to HN, both as 'Show HN' threads and in comments. Engagement has been minimal. My most upvoted comment on HN was a contribution to a thread about octopuses. Maybe HN is trying to tell me that I would be better off developing a standup comedy routine? Whatever. Unlike the author and his company, I'll not be pivoting away from my product in the near future: I just need to find new ways to shove its existence into people's faces.
- nailer 6y ago
  > I, too, have developed a software product that attempts to address a key failing in one of the (more under-utilized) DOM elements we have at our disposal when building websites Link?
  - rikroots 6y ago
    https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
    - etimberg 6y ago
      Haven't had a chance to look at the code yet, but how did you address responsiveness? It took us a long time when writing chart.js to get that working well on with different browsers, devices, and screens (high resolution screens require extra code)
acd10j 6y ago
Sometimes I read comments first before deciding to read article.
dazbradbury 6y ago
Is this actually someone just testing what % of people read the article before commenting? It does make me wonder, given the deceptive nature of the title and obviously emotive topic of whether devs should use bleeding-edge tech...

soneca 6y ago

Thanks for this comment! I usually read the comments before the article and though it would be a Captain Obvious advicicle with snarky comments as are the comments here. So I wasn’t even considering reading it. Glad someone took the time to read the damn article lol Interesting reading by the way.

guytv 6y ago
I actually started reading the article, which sparked my interest at start, but then faded away. so I thought: "This is going to be one of these articles where the comments are more interesting than the piece itself" and came here, just to find the excellent: "did any of the commentators even read the article?"

warent 6y ago

Not even about bleeding edge products. It's a lengthy article about the pitfalls of entering a market with no market validation, which the author slapped lipstick on and gave this sexy title.

themmes 6y ago
Exactly, its a classic we have a solution, but not a problem-to-solve let alone a product (yet). “But guess what, they had no idea how to use our tool or integrate it within their workflow. And to be honest, nor did we. Adoption was bleak and feedback was dry—silence in startups is not golden.”
yashap 6y ago
That was my take too - they built something nobody wanted, and it failed.
acidbaseextract 6y ago
I had my first startup fail in the late 2000s because we built a sales prediction software that sounded cool, but nobody actually wanted. We even had a large paid pilot with a major auto manufacturer, but they didn't renew when it turned out that none of their employees had actually used the software. Making something nobody wants is a classic startup mistake. I resolved not to make it again and read a great deal about market validation and building products. I have one recommendation for those reading this thread: Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany". It contrasts Product Development (focusing on a product with no customers) vs Customer Development (focusing on customer problems and building software around those). Honestly you don't even need the whole book, there's a PDF with the first couple chapters floating around [1]. I had a bunch of "holy shit, that's exactly what I did wrong" moments while reading it. Eric Ries' "Lean Startup" is also an excellent book on this topic. [1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...
- OakNinja 6y ago
  Someone on HN once said “It’s hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don’t have”. Building software that solves a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have is also a real problem.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Yeah, creating problems in people for which you conveniently sell solutions is the job of marketing. As for building a solution to "a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have", I'll agree that this may not be a good thing for a startup to do - but when I see how basic research is being defunded and drowned in red tape, and people saying that startups are the new, distributed R&D departments, I feel the middle has fallen out. When startups do a greedy gradient descent, and academia struggles doing science, who's going to work on solving problems that require solutions one or two steps beyond what the intended audience can understand? FLOSS community? What about outside software?
    - 6y ago
fbelzile 6y ago
I agree. Look at the landing page [0]. First off, they hijack your scroll wheel and present you with some Apple-esque website that is very slow and doesn't work properly. > "Remote, component-driven, and obsessed with speed." I think not. Second, they show zero screenshots of the service or what the benefits are to using it. > "Handoff reimagined." Yea, okay... Nice slogan, now show me before I move on! No wonder they're having issues convincing new customers. They think they're selling a space ship when really they only need to improve their website copy. [0] https://www.contrast.app/ https://www.contrast.app/
- cellis 6y ago
  Yeah, as someone who might use this product I feel like the landing page should be a long post on “how it works”. Frontend engineers are going to be very big stakeholders on this and I need to know, down to the bone bits how does it’s thing.

lultimouomo 6y ago

Also the "bleeding edge product" in the article is some kind if analytics system that tells you the adoption rate of "components" (web widgets? Not sure) in your system. This might not exactly be what you think of when you hear bleeding edge, so take this article with a grain of salt.

heipei 6y ago
Yeah, I read the piece and couldn't believe that this was the "bleeding edge" product they were referring to. At one point they call it "niche" themselves, which is a more accurate description. "As designers and engineers, we knew of a rather niche problem: if your company has a design system, it's practically impossible to know the adoption rate of those components in your product." Yeah, and I've never met anyone who cared to be honest. And if you do care, your answer is usually a quick "git grep" away.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  That doesn’t really let you know how many components are custom and how many come from the design system.

wy35 6y ago

It's actually hilarious. So many people enjoy sharing their opinion on the headline rather than the content of the article.

imtringued 6y ago
Sometimes people just want to talk about a certain topic, regardless of the article's contents. The headline just gives them a convenient excuse.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  As 'CPLX says, for many of us the article itself is just a discussion prompt. Quite often (I'd say half of the time), the tangents and off-topics in the HN discussions are way more insightful and interesting than the submitted article.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Almost all of the time I submit something, that's exactly why: I want to read the HN comments, but there aren't any yet!
CPLX 6y ago
Hacker News is a popular forum where participants engage in freewheeling conversations using headlines as a discussion prompt.
mrtksn 6y ago
Which makes me wonder, why people insist on having a headline AND an article in 2020? It only creates a confusion when most people don't bother reading articles when the headline is strong enough to inflict a response. It has become a tool to say something and deny saying it.
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  That got me thinking of an idea for a startup: let's build a service that allows people to broadcast headlines with no content (since no one reads the articles anyway), and then other people can reply to the headlines. To make sure that authors stick to the rules, we'll limit the length of each headline to 140 characters. Side benefit: users can post their headlines via a single SMS message.

Kiro 6y ago

OT but classic HN not to read the article and only comment on the headline. I feel this part of the guidelines makes it hard to address, when I really just want to say "RTFA before commenting" to some ridiculous comments that would make no sense if the poster had actually read the article. > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rikroots 6y ago

I read the article before coming to read the HN response to it. I haven't read beyond your top-of-the-thread comment. The article resonated deeply with me, because I know just how the author feels. I, too, have developed a software product that attempts to address a key failing in one of the (more under-utilized) DOM elements we have at our disposal when building websites. I can see the problem, and some of the solutions - but other developers are simply not interested. I've marketed the product to the best of my abilities, written blog posts about why I think this is an important issue. I've even tried to engage with people supposedly interested in overcoming the failing to help me make the product even better ... <crickets-chirping> ... nothing. The harsh truth is you can't market a solution to a problem that nobody else believes is a problem in the first place. I've posted links to my product on a number of occasions to HN, both as 'Show HN' threads and in comments. Engagement has been minimal. My most upvoted comment on HN was a contribution to a thread about octopuses. Maybe HN is trying to tell me that I would be better off developing a standup comedy routine? Whatever. Unlike the author and his company, I'll not be pivoting away from my product in the near future: I just need to find new ways to shove its existence into people's faces.

nailer 6y ago
> I, too, have developed a software product that attempts to address a key failing in one of the (more under-utilized) DOM elements we have at our disposal when building websites Link?
- rikroots 6y ago
  https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
  - etimberg 6y ago
    Haven't had a chance to look at the code yet, but how did you address responsiveness? It took us a long time when writing chart.js to get that working well on with different browsers, devices, and screens (high resolution screens require extra code)

acd10j 6y ago

Sometimes I read comments first before deciding to read article.

dazbradbury 6y ago

Is this actually someone just testing what % of people read the article before commenting? It does make me wonder, given the deceptive nature of the title and obviously emotive topic of whether devs should use bleeding-edge tech...