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It's strange because I have a very different takeaway than the author (or most people here). It took him 1 month to build his entire product! And people say he
by ryanackley 13y ago
It's strange because I have a very different takeaway than the author (or most people here).
It took him 1 month to build his entire product! And people say he should have talked to customers first. It takes some people 1 month to mock up their product and build a slide deck and business plan, etc.
His biggest failure was he couldn't market his product effectively. If you aren't funded by a big name VC and you're tackling a ho-hum problem. Chances are, you won't be featured on TechCrunch or the HN front page.
Some ideas are so innovative and awesome that they market themselves but my guess is that inventory management doesn't land in that category.
- dclowd9901 13y agoIf VCs were validation, Medium would be a good idea, instead of a shameless rehash of a content farm.
- cmbaus 13y agoI wouldn't call continuing where the inventor of mainstream content publishing (ev williams) left off with blogger, a rehash. After Blogger, Odeo, Twitter, and now Medium, I think he knows what he is doing.
- paul_f 13y agoHow can you possibly know this: "His biggest failure was he couldn't market his product effectively" The number one failure of startups is building stuff nobody wants. Go read some Steve Blank pronto.
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoExactly. 1 month to build is nothing. Some people just "talk" about building a product for six months. Perhaps he even gave up too easily and could have tried to market it different, go after customers a different way. The problem here on HN is that there is such a focus to build advertising based products that are like photo-sharing apps and sometimes the techniques to get TC to care are different. Of course the author could have tried to market via TechCrunch by writing vacuous blog posts about how they are "Disrupting Inventory Management" or some such ... and honestly that might have even work, at least to get TechCrunch to publish it. But, I think possibly there could have been some direct sales approaches here ... He built the product, I hate to see it wasted if it can be salvaged.