3 ms·

First principles totally get worked out in software. 37Signals did quantitative research to find out that for them, a girl smiling on their homepage for Baseca

First principles totally get worked out in software. 37Signals did quantitative research to find out that for them, a girl smiling on their homepage for Basecamp totally works. Then 5,000 startups followed suit and the whole world is full of smiling girls on home pages. But the principles behind that decision drive conversion for basecamp, not the girl. It's one of the things that is most concerning to me about the Lean Startup. The idea that you can follow a series of steps to manufacture revenue without really understanding what those steps mean is hypnotizing.

joseph_cooney 13y ago
re: The lean start-up - does it matter? I'm sure you can 'go deep' understanding the cognitive science behind why the smiling girl works, and that might give you some insights, but without perfect knowledge of the whole world you could never perfectly understand why, and instead of spending that time with deeply understanding more about the why you could run 50 other experiments to find other things that worked or didn't work.