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Good example of using ad hominem to discredit others in favour of your approach. Examples: - "The academic who hasn’t built anything, yet feels comfortable te

Good example of using ad hominem to discredit others in favour of your approach. Examples: - "The academic who hasn’t built anything, yet feels comfortable telling you to use their complicated startup framework to find and validate ideas." Presumably a dig at lean startup. - "A market need? An underserved niche? Demand? WTF do these things even mean?" Come on, these aren't that hard to define.

dancc 1y ago
"We are looking for a person who has an unavoidable priority, where their current options are insufficient or unworkable. This person would be weird not to buy our product." So in other words, a market need or underserved niche.
- noelwelsh 1y ago
  Exactly. I find the post rather disingenuous.
- prmph 1y ago
  I guess they mean you need to identify specific people, at a specific place and time, who are desperate for a solution to some problem. They are desperate usually because it is a problem that affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing something important to them, etc. It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very core, provides clear value to specific people you can identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved niche is not enough. Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but those are more hit-or-miss.
rsnyder1 1y ago
lol, I was writing angry at some academic framework, agree ad hominem isn't a good strategy, 100% the thing about market needs / underserved niches / demand is that they are easy to sorta-define, but hard to actually define in a way that's useful when you are trying find them, when you actually need to understand them the biggest unlock I've had was, 2+ years into pushing a product I had theoretically validated demand for, realizing that I didn't actually understand demand, and that demand SEEMS like it is "desire for a product" or "willingness to pay for a product" but is actually a product-agnostic thing, and when you see that, you see the world a lot more clearly. This video was super useful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU Anyway thanks for the critique, 100% agree with half of it!
rfrey 1y ago
Agree, feels pretty straw-man. Where are these never-built-anything academics? Lean startup's Steve Blank, maybe? Who did, what, 11 startups before moving into academia?

dancc 1y ago

"We are looking for a person who has an unavoidable priority, where their current options are insufficient or unworkable. This person would be weird not to buy our product." So in other words, a market need or underserved niche.

noelwelsh 1y ago
Exactly. I find the post rather disingenuous.
prmph 1y ago
I guess they mean you need to identify specific people, at a specific place and time, who are desperate for a solution to some problem. They are desperate usually because it is a problem that affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing something important to them, etc. It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very core, provides clear value to specific people you can identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved niche is not enough. Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but those are more hit-or-miss.

rsnyder1 1y ago

lol, I was writing angry at some academic framework, agree ad hominem isn't a good strategy, 100% the thing about market needs / underserved niches / demand is that they are easy to sorta-define, but hard to actually define in a way that's useful when you are trying find them, when you actually need to understand them the biggest unlock I've had was, 2+ years into pushing a product I had theoretically validated demand for, realizing that I didn't actually understand demand, and that demand SEEMS like it is "desire for a product" or "willingness to pay for a product" but is actually a product-agnostic thing, and when you see that, you see the world a lot more clearly. This video was super useful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU Anyway thanks for the critique, 100% agree with half of it!

rfrey 1y ago

Agree, feels pretty straw-man. Where are these never-built-anything academics? Lean startup's Steve Blank, maybe? Who did, what, 11 startups before moving into academia?