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OP: Thanks for sharing this. I have a few questions, if I may: > We shipped features at a tremendous pace. But we never talked to enough users to identify if i
by ignoramous 6y ago
OP: Thanks for sharing this. I have a few questions, if I may:
> We shipped features at a tremendous pace. But we never talked to enough users to identify if it was something necessary. We assumed things and kept building – in a few months, we had a product which was an engineering marvel – but nobody cared to use.
I am curious because the YC application needs one to clearly articulate who ones target customers are, what they do today, why is it such a pain, and what one is building to solve that pain-point. And it looks like you folks at Marketfox did have it figured out [0]. It is interesting to me, then, that you'd cite this as a key mistake. What am I missing?
> We were very naive to think that building software is the hardest part of building a startup.
Well, there's a balance here: Both are equally hard. Writing code is less hard if you're a software professional and same goes if you're a Sales or Marketing professional. You did say you shipped features at a break-neck pace... but usually, for an enterprise SaaS, isn't that the bread and butter anyway? I am curious why you'd consider this a mistake. Not every (SaaS) product is novel anyway, and learning from your competitors is a shortcut to the otherwise long arduous road of defining a category / industry / market. Assuming that you folks did not build a feature in a vacuum (that is, you'd have would thought a feature was necessary only after looking at competitors do it better or a paying customer ask for it), was it the case of feature mis-prioritization / building too many bespoke features that only one or two customers wanted?
[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-marketfox-floyd-servx-fibo-and-wifi-dabba/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-m...
- soorajchandran 6y ago1: Correct, we had "assumed" who the ideal users would be. Because the market was already huge, and we "assumed" people who used our competitors would use our product too. And when we were not able to sell, we thought It was because of lack of feature. The "one more feature" mentality was bad. The surface area of products like Hubspot(our competition) is huge - and we tried to catch up with them in terms of feature and this was a mistake. We didn't try to identify a niche. I think this is one of those things that is easy in theory and hard to practice. 2: Agree that both are hard. I'm still happy with the pace which we shipped at. Looking back at it I think we were not shipping the right features. There are a few reason for this: - We got a bit desperate at some point and started building features for single customers(which we thought would be useful to others, but was not). And this spiraled downwards and our product started doing things that we initially didn't intend to. (Like email automation, push notifcations, website builder, form builder, inapp messaging, blogging platform, social media management etc) - At some point we blindly started copying features, without thinking why we need to build it. (I know this sounds really stupid now, hence the title) - We were young and we thought we could brut force(or hustle) our way out of every problem. I hope that helps. Happy to explain more if you have questions :)
- joseluisq 6y agoYes, brutal-force our way out of every problem some times is our "human natural" way to react against problems out of "our scope/control". But for the same premise that are out of our handling are in majority of cases wrong reactions to face problems. Thanks for sharing.
- soorajchandran 6y agoTotally agree. I think over time, we will learn to let it go and think sensibly.
- danjac 6y agoHow many potential customers did you talk to before starting development?
- soorajchandran 6y agoWe started out as a Shopify plugin for marketing and had some users. But before expanding the product we didn't really talk to any potential users. Again, another stupid mistake. Once we started building we got the opportunity to talk to a users(Other YC companies in the same batch) - which thinking of it now was not the ideal user persona.
- irjustin 6y agoWhy is another YC company not ideal in terms of customer?
- soorajchandran 6y agoMost companies were very early stage - Not investing too much into marketing.
- danjac 6y agoIf you are having to take customers with whom you share the same investor, it's probably a sign that you are not doing well enough to find customers on your own. Plus I don't think YC derives much benefit if its companies survive by selling services to each other.
- fizixer 6y ago> YC application needs one to clearly articulate who ones target customers are, what they do today, why is it such a pain, and what one is building to solve that pain-point ... Which in my opinion is the hardest part. If you don't know what you're doing, it doesn't matter if you're selling or not, it doesn't matter if you're building or not. That comes later. But that's not it. How do you know what you're doing, or going to do? It doesn't happen by sitting down with buddies or co-founders and having a brainstorming session. This is where 'you have to be at the right place and the right time' but also 'you have to have spent the right amount of time thinking about it' The right amount of time could be 1 week, or could be 10 years. Yes sometimes you need 10 years to get to the point where when you found a company, you start generating sales within a matter of months.
- soorajchandran 6y agoWhat you intent to do can also change over time. We got started as a Shopify plugin - but wanted to go big later and this is when things went south.