5 ms·

> The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted. How the

by nomel 5y ago

> The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted. How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky". For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. Does anyone have some insight?

hinkley 5y ago
Apple has both a sixth sense about this stuff and deep enough pockets to be wrong for quite a while before they have to give up. If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.
- mulderc 5y ago
  I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.
erohead 5y ago
One way to do it is to start small, build something, ship it to customers, get feedback and then iterate from there. This is a bit harder with hardware, though, but not impossible. We actually built an entire smartwatch called inPulse before Pebble, sold and shipped it to 1000 early customers, then got feedback from them. This is how we learned which features to put into Pebble.
- girvo 5y ago
  Thank you for making the Pebble Time Round. It's still the single best smartwatch I have ever used. I miss it every day.
  - erohead 5y ago
    Could buy one on ebay for $50! Apps still work on iPhone and Android ;)
    - girvo 5y ago
      I'm honestly super tempted to -- though my Apple Watch Series 7 gets somewhat close to being a good replacement. Somewhat, but not quite!
  - esel2k 5y ago
    I am a proud user of the pebble time round since a year (60$) and proudly wear it every day - especially on business trips were all have their bulky apple watch.
drBonkers 5y ago
> I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
- _jal 5y ago
  Are we talking about the SE? If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.
  - boulos 5y ago
    No, I think they mean the iPhone 12 Mini: https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      In that case, the reason I know people who didn't get the 12 Mini was it competed with the new SE, and they didn't want to upgrade during the pandemic when they were trapped at home. They're thinking about the 13 mini or the new SEs now that they are available.
- yumraj 5y ago
  > Now you know at least one person. The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    Not really. Apple plans their phone line ups well in advance, and given that it's hardware it might be very difficult to change it on short notice. The mini significantly undersold expectations, leading to Apple even cutting production [1]. If you want further proof that the mini bombed, consider that every rumour has it gone from this year's lineup. 1: https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reportedly-well-below-expectations/ https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reported...
evanfarrell 5y ago
the canonical YC advice is to make something that you want, then to go find people like yourself and see if they want it too. whether that turns into a real market or not has a lot of luck, but it's often surprising how promising being your own user can be, especially when you solve a hair-on-fire problem for yourself!
- eli 5y ago
  That’s also how you have a market oversaturated with products competing for the same upper middle class 20-somethings.
  - drc500free 5y ago
    "I want the benefits of people serving me, but it's awkward to actually interact with them"
redmen 5y ago
Travel and surround yourself with new experiences and different kinds of people and build intuitions for things people want by becoming like these people. Share experiences, needs, wants, outlooks. Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously. If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution. Just an example.
djbusby 5y ago
There is a whole group of learning around Lean Customer Development[1]. Those processes (and a bunch more) help you identify, with reasonable confidence, that folk will pay for your solution. This process is one part of "The Lean Startup" process https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-development https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...
Permit 5y ago
> How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role. This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it! Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.
- maxwelldone 5y ago
  Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though? For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money. Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
  - Destiner 5y ago
    Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it. Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner. [1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
pensatoio 5y ago
I was one of those people, and I didn't buy it because of battery life. Unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but that's the reason.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marcellus23 5y ago
I and my entire family are buying minis. Just goes to show anecdotal evidence is utterly meaningless.
- nomel 5y ago
  And, that's my point! But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-production-to-be-discontinued-due-to-poor-sales-71612621547776.html https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    But then they did come back with a 13 mini, which suggests the demand is there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AdrianB1 5y ago
iPhone mini: price and battery life. Outside USA there is a huge market of great value Android phones. iPhone mini was an opportunity for a small screen affordable iPhone, but it was not delivered as such. Not everybody wants a 6" phone, not everybody wants a $1000 phone, but the opposite is also not true.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
who_cares 5y ago
User feedback is not about taking what they say at face value, it’s about all the other nuanced things they do when you present them a solution to their problem. You have to understand all the minutia like their facial expressions…stuff like that. Most people don’t do it well from what I’ve seen. From my experience, you ask people if they like something and they say yes a lot, and that it’s wonderful. It’s still about solving something / doing something better - to discover that, you really need to understand humans. Lots of quick iteration and more user feedback is important until you get it right. You will know when you get it right. Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…
freeopinion 5y ago
Faster horses.
girvo 5y ago
As one of those people who said up-and-down that they wanted an iPhone Mini, but also was one of the few who bought one, the key thing I saw that turned people off was the battery life compromises for active screen-on usage. People have become used to 8 hours screen-on time, and the iPhone 12 Mini's 5 hours just isn't enough for a tech-y crowd, I think. I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ? If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird. It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.
jldugger 5y ago
> many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
- jmoak3 5y ago
  Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it. I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!
mpalczewski 5y ago
I did eventually buy an iPhone 13 mini. Still somewhat disappointed by it. What I really wanted is something like an iPhone 13 mini pro. I used the zoom on my iPhone 12 pro and never the wide angle, if they only pick two cameras, please give me the zoom. It also would have been nice to have the better screen. The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.
fomine3 5y ago
I was excited to iPhone mini but FaceID was a really serious deal breaker in pandemic. Some people may just bought iPhone SE with TouchID. Finally I bought it in 2022 with iOS 15.4, but it's too late for Apple not to stop future mini line.
mrexroad 5y ago
I have a 12 mini. Love, love the size, but batt life hurts and I miss the 2x lens more than I expected. I hope it lives another generation or two to resolve camera and batt trade-offs.
- mulderc 5y ago
  13 mini already solved the battery and I believe has improved camera
  - Daneel_ 5y ago
    Can confirm on both fronts.
ngngngng 5y ago
> bought an iPhone mini. That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.
lostgame 5y ago
>> For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE. They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2. The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.

by nomel 5y ago

hinkley 5y ago

Apple has both a sixth sense about this stuff and deep enough pockets to be wrong for quite a while before they have to give up. If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.

mulderc 5y ago
I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.

erohead 5y ago

One way to do it is to start small, build something, ship it to customers, get feedback and then iterate from there. This is a bit harder with hardware, though, but not impossible. We actually built an entire smartwatch called inPulse before Pebble, sold and shipped it to 1000 early customers, then got feedback from them. This is how we learned which features to put into Pebble.

girvo 5y ago
Thank you for making the Pebble Time Round. It's still the single best smartwatch I have ever used. I miss it every day.
- erohead 5y ago
  Could buy one on ebay for $50! Apps still work on iPhone and Android ;)
  - girvo 5y ago
    I'm honestly super tempted to -- though my Apple Watch Series 7 gets somewhat close to being a good replacement. Somewhat, but not quite!
- esel2k 5y ago
  I am a proud user of the pebble time round since a year (60$) and proudly wear it every day - especially on business trips were all have their bulky apple watch.

drBonkers 5y ago

> I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.

_jal 5y ago
Are we talking about the SE? If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.
- boulos 5y ago
  No, I think they mean the iPhone 12 Mini: https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/key-features/.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    In that case, the reason I know people who didn't get the 12 Mini was it competed with the new SE, and they didn't want to upgrade during the pandemic when they were trapped at home. They're thinking about the 13 mini or the new SEs now that they are available.
yumraj 5y ago
> Now you know at least one person. The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Not really. Apple plans their phone line ups well in advance, and given that it's hardware it might be very difficult to change it on short notice. The mini significantly undersold expectations, leading to Apple even cutting production [1]. If you want further proof that the mini bombed, consider that every rumour has it gone from this year's lineup. 1: https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reportedly-well-below-expectations/ https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reported...

evanfarrell 5y ago

the canonical YC advice is to make something that you want, then to go find people like yourself and see if they want it too. whether that turns into a real market or not has a lot of luck, but it's often surprising how promising being your own user can be, especially when you solve a hair-on-fire problem for yourself!

eli 5y ago
That’s also how you have a market oversaturated with products competing for the same upper middle class 20-somethings.
- drc500free 5y ago
  "I want the benefits of people serving me, but it's awkward to actually interact with them"

redmen 5y ago

Travel and surround yourself with new experiences and different kinds of people and build intuitions for things people want by becoming like these people. Share experiences, needs, wants, outlooks. Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously. If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution. Just an example.

djbusby 5y ago

There is a whole group of learning around Lean Customer Development[1]. Those processes (and a bunch more) help you identify, with reasonable confidence, that folk will pay for your solution. This process is one part of "The Lean Startup" process https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-development https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...

Permit 5y ago

> How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role. This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it! Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.

maxwelldone 5y ago
Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though? For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money. Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
- Destiner 5y ago
  Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it. Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner. [1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago

pensatoio 5y ago

I was one of those people, and I didn't buy it because of battery life. Unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but that's the reason.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marcellus23 5y ago

I and my entire family are buying minis. Just goes to show anecdotal evidence is utterly meaningless.

nomel 5y ago
And, that's my point! But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-production-to-be-discontinued-due-to-poor-sales-71612621547776.html https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...
- marcellus23 5y ago
  But then they did come back with a 13 mini, which suggests the demand is there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AdrianB1 5y ago

iPhone mini: price and battery life. Outside USA there is a huge market of great value Android phones. iPhone mini was an opportunity for a small screen affordable iPhone, but it was not delivered as such. Not everybody wants a 6" phone, not everybody wants a $1000 phone, but the opposite is also not true.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

who_cares 5y ago

User feedback is not about taking what they say at face value, it’s about all the other nuanced things they do when you present them a solution to their problem. You have to understand all the minutia like their facial expressions…stuff like that. Most people don’t do it well from what I’ve seen. From my experience, you ask people if they like something and they say yes a lot, and that it’s wonderful. It’s still about solving something / doing something better - to discover that, you really need to understand humans. Lots of quick iteration and more user feedback is important until you get it right. You will know when you get it right. Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…

freeopinion 5y ago

Faster horses.

girvo 5y ago

As one of those people who said up-and-down that they wanted an iPhone Mini, but also was one of the few who bought one, the key thing I saw that turned people off was the battery life compromises for active screen-on usage. People have become used to 8 hours screen-on time, and the iPhone 12 Mini's 5 hours just isn't enough for a tech-y crowd, I think. I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.

makeitdouble 5y ago

> Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ? If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird. It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.

jldugger 5y ago

> many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.

jmoak3 5y ago
Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it. I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!

mpalczewski 5y ago

I did eventually buy an iPhone 13 mini. Still somewhat disappointed by it. What I really wanted is something like an iPhone 13 mini pro. I used the zoom on my iPhone 12 pro and never the wide angle, if they only pick two cameras, please give me the zoom. It also would have been nice to have the better screen. The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.

fomine3 5y ago

I was excited to iPhone mini but FaceID was a really serious deal breaker in pandemic. Some people may just bought iPhone SE with TouchID. Finally I bought it in 2022 with iOS 15.4, but it's too late for Apple not to stop future mini line.

mrexroad 5y ago

I have a 12 mini. Love, love the size, but batt life hurts and I miss the 2x lens more than I expected. I hope it lives another generation or two to resolve camera and batt trade-offs.

mulderc 5y ago
13 mini already solved the battery and I believe has improved camera
- Daneel_ 5y ago
  Can confirm on both fronts.

ngngngng 5y ago

> bought an iPhone mini. That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.

lostgame 5y ago

>> For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini. People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE. They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2. The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.