7 ms·

Not Wanted

261 points by nate 13y ago

notastartup 13y ago
This article was mind blowing for me for the same reasons I experienced building things for the target group I thought I wanted all this time but running into the same pattern, the price doesn't justify because it's missing X features compared to Y's product and maybe we will consider buying it when we see all the features in an extended free trial and then if we are fully satisfied then maybe we'll buy. It's impossible to please this crowd of nitpickers, impossible to match all of their desires.
TempleOSV2 13y ago
My operating system was created by God. It will last longer than Linux or Windows. God says... boss Ivy_league I_love_you I'm_feeling_nice_today vote hopefully fight really when_hell_freezes_over special_case beep_beep husband roses_are_red super_computer joking hang_in_there job arent_you_clever how_about_those_yankees conservative youre_lucky are_you_feeling_lucky little_buddy silly_human a_flag_on_that_play Burp I_love_you on_the_otherhand really relax voodoo ingrate super_computer white_trash yep fool end stuff dang_it grumble strip how_could_you ---- Without God's endorsement, it gets ignored. With God's endorsement, it lasts for 1,000 years.
dsr_ 13y ago
I wholeheartedly approve of the notion of finding an underserved market segment and building tools for them. I have to worry, though, about naming problems. Draft sounds a lot like Final Draft, which serves a similar need; it's at draftin.com, which doesn't immediately come to mind when someone says "You should try this nifty writing software, it's called Draft." Miscellaneous criticism: I have no idea of the pricing model. It's not obvious at all. The settings page is a horror: I love the idea that there's a big blob of text showing what you select, but asking people to type in the names of fonts is asking for tribble. Measuring fonts in ems instead of points is bizarre. And the help link is an email address. Would it kill you to put up a FAQ or use the features list as documentation?
- mattmcknight 13y ago
  In the disruptive innovation sense they might be called an overserved or unsatisfied non-consumer.[1] (Whereas an underserved segment might be more in need of sustaining innovation where the current products don't meet all of their needs, but they need all of the current features.) [1] http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4300.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4300.html
- dovel 13y ago
  While we are suggesting features, folders within folders please. An estimation of how much your proof readers can actually read in the allotted times (i know it varies but perhaps 1000-1250 words would be better than 15 minutes). A friends screen so I can share work without emailing. Some of this might already have been done but its been a while since I used draft
- Kiro 13y ago
  I thought Draft was already a successful service. You make it sound like this is a Show HN for an unknown site. Still good and valid feedback though.
  - alphakappa 13y ago
    Whether it is successful or not, it's still new to many in the audience (including me), so the need for presenting the service well never goes away.
- clintboxe 13y ago
  Google draft. It's the first result, ahead of things like the NFL draft, draft beer, NBA draft, etc.
Aloha 13y ago
In short, don't build a product for people who know what they need, find people who need something and build a product for them.
- Jormundir 13y ago
  I'd say "find people who don't know they're doing something inefficiently, and build a simple, straight-forward product that gives them a more productive workflow."
  - grueful 13y ago
    Or find people who know they're doing something inefficiently, but need it done badly enough that they're doing it anyway. Ridiculously common case.
arkitaip 13y ago
Basically look for the pro amateur demographic?
blzabub 13y ago
Product/Market fit. Most think about changing the product, this is just changing the market.
tptacek 13y ago
Incidentally, if you haven't tried writing something in Draft, I recommend it unreservedly. I haven't written a whole lot in it, but for the things I have written there, the process has been supremely pleasant, particularly when soliciting opinions from reviewers.
- logicallee 13y ago
  introspectively, given that you recommend it unreservedly, why do you think you haven't written a whole lot in it? (no relation to author or project, just curious.)
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Most of my writing over the last 6 months has been internal to the company, and I can't put that kind of content on a third party server, even if I trust it. For what it's worth, since I use Draft, I told Nate I'd be happy to audit it gratis. He should take me up on that! :)
  - barkingcat 13y ago
    I also recommend people look into draftin.com For me, I write a lot of things while disconnected from everything - internet, cell phone, other people, basically a loner writing spot with some hot water. Draft is a pretty good online experience though.
- skybrian 13y ago
  I might, but searching for "Draft" doesn't find anything and none of the blog entries talking about Draft actually link to the website. Are they in stealth mode or something? Edit: tried again and it's the first result. Weird.
  - jeroen 13y ago
    It's also linked in the article in the sentence "I started making that same mistake with Draft when I first started." https://draftin.com https://draftin.com
- 13y ago
marban 13y ago
"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them." -- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
- mjolk 13y ago
  I wouldn't take advice from Andy Warhol unless you're trying to make a product that insecure, dumb people want because they want to fit into their subculture. Or selling drugs.
  - nedwin 13y ago
    Andy Warhol made things for insecure dumb people and sold drugs? I don't get it.
  - classicsnoot 13y ago
    I would love to hear what Warhol had to say about drug dealing, but i do not theink it would be very beneficial. Many artists are long on talk and short on content. Take, for instance, myself.
  - marban 13y ago
    I would take advice from Andy Warhol over anyone on the Internet. Plus, a majority of products in any given category is sold as a result of insecurity (You've probably heard of the fashion industry).
- wpietri 13y ago
  That's good. It fits well with the Jobs quote "Real artists ship." Shipping is when you find out whether or not people actually need what you're making.
javajosh 13y ago
Anecdotally, most people can't really differentiate between what really needs to get done, and what their specific tools do. They might not have the sophistication to be able to abstract "word processor" from "MS Word". To them, they don't do "word processing", they fire up Word and write. (And indeed, some people are so confused that they say things like they'll 'load up Windows to write my paper'.) The more bespoke the tooling, the more this tends to be true. For example, in areas like project management, which is not an inherently technical discipline, you have good project managers clinging to old tools for dear life because they were really hard to learn, they do the job, and the benefit of new tools just isn't that great (which is especially true of over-promising and under-delivering tools). Yes, practitioners use sophisticated tools, but I think they would be hard pressed to really abstract away what MS Project does for them.
- kateho 13y ago
  I second that. I was just about to email Nate to ask him how he would deal with this issue but struggling to articulate it. Thanks!
guard-of-terra 13y ago
See also: http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-requirements-are-bullshit.html http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-requirem... and "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
InclinedPlane 13y ago
This is sort of a corollary of avoiding being too naive when accepting product feedback. People often don't know how to express what they want, often they don't even know what they want. For every "shut up and take my money" moment there are many "I didn't even know I needed/wanted that" moments. So much of being an effective inventor is being able to have one foot in consumer land and one foot in product land and be able to translate between them.
drusenko 13y ago
This is essentially the point made in the book The Innovator's Dilemma about disrupting existing markets: "Disruptive technologies or innovations are innovations that upset the existing “order of things” in a particular industry. The usual process is a lower-end innovation that appeals to customers who are not served by the current market. With time, because the capacity/performance of the innovation exceeds the market’s needs, the innovation comes to displace the market incumbents." [0] [0] http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-dilemma-the-revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-(collins-business-essentials)-summary.html http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-dilemma...
- nate 13y ago
  Great book. Also brought up a lot in it's sequel which I enjoyed even more Innovators Solution. Lots of great case studies of other companies doing things very similar to what I mentioned IDL did in Blue Ocean Strategy.
- chavesn 13y ago
  I really recommend watching this video of the author, Clayton Christensen, talking about the same thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0 > ""...by competing against non-consumption, all they had to do was make a product that was better than nothing. And so when you have a new product, it's actually really important that the kind of customers you target, are people whose other option is nothing at all, and that way they'll be thrilled with a limited product."
  - notastartup 13y ago
    would love to hear an example of this. what does he mean by non-consumption? he says "infinitely better than nothing" as being key to disrupting.
    - monkeyspaw 13y ago
      My interpretation is best viewed through an example. There are lots of mail newsletter providers (mailchimp, constant contact, etc.) They aren't trying to compete against each other. Rather, they are trying to compete against nothing -- people with no ESP.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
This sounds distressingly like "sell substandard products to people who aren't experienced enough to know better," or "you don't need a good product if you've got good marketing." I'm not familiar with this guy's products, though.
- josso 13y ago
  Really? I thought it sounded more like KISS and what Apple have been doing: Making software accessible to the (amateur) enduser. (E.g. the iWork and iLife suites as well as many iOS-apps) Sure, some people might need advanced tools for their advanced workflows, but there's often a huge market in software for the everyday-man and -woman who only [writes] as a hobby.
- emil10001 13y ago
  I disagree. Amateurs don't necessarily need pro tools, they need tools that help them do the job that they want to do better than either no tools, or poor tools. They also might get confused and put off by the steep learning curve offered by some pro tools. E.g. PhotoShop (I don't think I need to say more). Just because something isn't a good fit for the pro or power user, doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place in the market, or couldn't be considered good or useful.
- nlew 13y ago
  It's not really. The point is that the market is segmented and you need to target the segment for which your product is the right fit. People who already have a fully-featured tool which solves their problem and they are comfortable with are never a good market. It's not that they don't "know better", it's that their needs are different. Just like it's hard to sell an amateur tool to a professional, it's hard to sell a professional tool to an amateur. Of course, that's not the only division. Small business vs. enterprise is another. For instance, Amazon S3 enabled an entire new class of content-based web startup. Not because it was "like having fileservers but worse", but because it served the needs of users who needed to host files, but didn't need and couldn't afford to have their own hardware. A group which was otherwise underserved in the market at the time.
cornellwright 13y ago
I think this more comes to figuring out who the right early adopters are. You need to have something sufficiently better than what's out there to overcome inertia and get people to try your product. If you target (in the project management case) people who use every feature of that project management software, then you need all those features plus yours, or your new feature has to be so good that they're willing to throw away all those. If you target the person who does not yet use/need project management software you have a lot less to overcome.
notastartup 13y ago
if competing for non-consumption and there are others doing this, how do you stand out? If something is infinitely better than nothing for this non-consumers how do you stand out from the competitors doing the same thing? How to charge a premium without driving each other to the bottom? The message I understood from his lecture video was develop: 1) Something that is infinitely better. My suspicion is that if you are targeting a group that already has very good tools to do the job, your product won't be infinitely better until it does feature "A-Z" like your incumbents. 2) Disrupt by targeting the non-consumption. These group of people have no other alternative to do the job or have technical understanding. Even a crappy product is better than nothing. Target this for disruption. Is this correct? Did I miss anything? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0
kriro 13y ago
Glad it worked out for the author but it feels like he initially focused on the wrong thing. Iirc Lean Startup considers right problem, right customer the most important early decisions. He eventually got it right by figuring out the right customer but I think the mistake was starting with "selling a tool" instead of thinking about the actual problems. It's very possible project managers don't have a pain point when it comes to their tools (they are "good enough"). Problem and customer segment are usually tightly coupled. I could be completely wrong but I think the main discovery here was that "blog posters want to be more "professional"". Maybe because the tools are helpful but probably also a healthy dose of "journalism envy" at least initially. I think that's what I'd focus on and see if it's right (i.e. hammer the "like a pro" line)

261 points by nate 13y ago

This article was mind blowing for me for the same reasons I experienced building things for the target group I thought I wanted all this time but running into the same pattern, the price doesn't justify because it's missing X features compared to Y's product and maybe we will consider buying it when we see all the features in an extended free trial and then if we are fully satisfied then maybe we'll buy. It's impossible to please this crowd of nitpickers, impossible to match all of their desires.

TempleOSV2 13y ago

My operating system was created by God. It will last longer than Linux or Windows. God says... boss Ivy_league I_love_you I'm_feeling_nice_today vote hopefully fight really when_hell_freezes_over special_case beep_beep husband roses_are_red super_computer joking hang_in_there job arent_you_clever how_about_those_yankees conservative youre_lucky are_you_feeling_lucky little_buddy silly_human a_flag_on_that_play Burp I_love_you on_the_otherhand really relax voodoo ingrate super_computer white_trash yep fool end stuff dang_it grumble strip how_could_you ---- Without God's endorsement, it gets ignored. With God's endorsement, it lasts for 1,000 years.

dsr_ 13y ago

I wholeheartedly approve of the notion of finding an underserved market segment and building tools for them. I have to worry, though, about naming problems. Draft sounds a lot like Final Draft, which serves a similar need; it's at draftin.com, which doesn't immediately come to mind when someone says "You should try this nifty writing software, it's called Draft." Miscellaneous criticism: I have no idea of the pricing model. It's not obvious at all. The settings page is a horror: I love the idea that there's a big blob of text showing what you select, but asking people to type in the names of fonts is asking for tribble. Measuring fonts in ems instead of points is bizarre. And the help link is an email address. Would it kill you to put up a FAQ or use the features list as documentation?

mattmcknight 13y ago
In the disruptive innovation sense they might be called an overserved or unsatisfied non-consumer.[1] (Whereas an underserved segment might be more in need of sustaining innovation where the current products don't meet all of their needs, but they need all of the current features.) [1] http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4300.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4300.html
dovel 13y ago
While we are suggesting features, folders within folders please. An estimation of how much your proof readers can actually read in the allotted times (i know it varies but perhaps 1000-1250 words would be better than 15 minutes). A friends screen so I can share work without emailing. Some of this might already have been done but its been a while since I used draft
Kiro 13y ago
I thought Draft was already a successful service. You make it sound like this is a Show HN for an unknown site. Still good and valid feedback though.
- alphakappa 13y ago
  Whether it is successful or not, it's still new to many in the audience (including me), so the need for presenting the service well never goes away.
clintboxe 13y ago
Google draft. It's the first result, ahead of things like the NFL draft, draft beer, NBA draft, etc.

Aloha 13y ago

In short, don't build a product for people who know what they need, find people who need something and build a product for them.

Jormundir 13y ago
I'd say "find people who don't know they're doing something inefficiently, and build a simple, straight-forward product that gives them a more productive workflow."
- grueful 13y ago
  Or find people who know they're doing something inefficiently, but need it done badly enough that they're doing it anyway. Ridiculously common case.

arkitaip 13y ago

Basically look for the pro amateur demographic?

blzabub 13y ago

Product/Market fit. Most think about changing the product, this is just changing the market.

tptacek 13y ago

Incidentally, if you haven't tried writing something in Draft, I recommend it unreservedly. I haven't written a whole lot in it, but for the things I have written there, the process has been supremely pleasant, particularly when soliciting opinions from reviewers.

logicallee 13y ago
introspectively, given that you recommend it unreservedly, why do you think you haven't written a whole lot in it? (no relation to author or project, just curious.)
- tptacek 13y ago
  Most of my writing over the last 6 months has been internal to the company, and I can't put that kind of content on a third party server, even if I trust it. For what it's worth, since I use Draft, I told Nate I'd be happy to audit it gratis. He should take me up on that! :)
- barkingcat 13y ago
  I also recommend people look into draftin.com For me, I write a lot of things while disconnected from everything - internet, cell phone, other people, basically a loner writing spot with some hot water. Draft is a pretty good online experience though.
skybrian 13y ago
I might, but searching for "Draft" doesn't find anything and none of the blog entries talking about Draft actually link to the website. Are they in stealth mode or something? Edit: tried again and it's the first result. Weird.
- jeroen 13y ago
  It's also linked in the article in the sentence "I started making that same mistake with Draft when I first started." https://draftin.com https://draftin.com
13y ago

marban 13y ago

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them." -- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

mjolk 13y ago
I wouldn't take advice from Andy Warhol unless you're trying to make a product that insecure, dumb people want because they want to fit into their subculture. Or selling drugs.
- nedwin 13y ago
  Andy Warhol made things for insecure dumb people and sold drugs? I don't get it.
- classicsnoot 13y ago
  I would love to hear what Warhol had to say about drug dealing, but i do not theink it would be very beneficial. Many artists are long on talk and short on content. Take, for instance, myself.
- marban 13y ago
  I would take advice from Andy Warhol over anyone on the Internet. Plus, a majority of products in any given category is sold as a result of insecurity (You've probably heard of the fashion industry).
wpietri 13y ago
That's good. It fits well with the Jobs quote "Real artists ship." Shipping is when you find out whether or not people actually need what you're making.

javajosh 13y ago

Anecdotally, most people can't really differentiate between what really needs to get done, and what their specific tools do. They might not have the sophistication to be able to abstract "word processor" from "MS Word". To them, they don't do "word processing", they fire up Word and write. (And indeed, some people are so confused that they say things like they'll 'load up Windows to write my paper'.) The more bespoke the tooling, the more this tends to be true. For example, in areas like project management, which is not an inherently technical discipline, you have good project managers clinging to old tools for dear life because they were really hard to learn, they do the job, and the benefit of new tools just isn't that great (which is especially true of over-promising and under-delivering tools). Yes, practitioners use sophisticated tools, but I think they would be hard pressed to really abstract away what MS Project does for them.

kateho 13y ago
I second that. I was just about to email Nate to ask him how he would deal with this issue but struggling to articulate it. Thanks!

guard-of-terra 13y ago

See also: http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-requirements-are-bullshit.html http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-requirem... and "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

InclinedPlane 13y ago

This is sort of a corollary of avoiding being too naive when accepting product feedback. People often don't know how to express what they want, often they don't even know what they want. For every "shut up and take my money" moment there are many "I didn't even know I needed/wanted that" moments. So much of being an effective inventor is being able to have one foot in consumer land and one foot in product land and be able to translate between them.

drusenko 13y ago

This is essentially the point made in the book The Innovator's Dilemma about disrupting existing markets: "Disruptive technologies or innovations are innovations that upset the existing “order of things” in a particular industry. The usual process is a lower-end innovation that appeals to customers who are not served by the current market. With time, because the capacity/performance of the innovation exceeds the market’s needs, the innovation comes to displace the market incumbents." [0] [0] http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-dilemma-the-revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-(collins-business-essentials)-summary.html http://www.squeezedbooks.com/articles/the-innovators-dilemma...

nate 13y ago
Great book. Also brought up a lot in it's sequel which I enjoyed even more Innovators Solution. Lots of great case studies of other companies doing things very similar to what I mentioned IDL did in Blue Ocean Strategy.
chavesn 13y ago
I really recommend watching this video of the author, Clayton Christensen, talking about the same thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0 > ""...by competing against non-consumption, all they had to do was make a product that was better than nothing. And so when you have a new product, it's actually really important that the kind of customers you target, are people whose other option is nothing at all, and that way they'll be thrilled with a limited product."
- notastartup 13y ago
  would love to hear an example of this. what does he mean by non-consumption? he says "infinitely better than nothing" as being key to disrupting.
  - monkeyspaw 13y ago
    My interpretation is best viewed through an example. There are lots of mail newsletter providers (mailchimp, constant contact, etc.) They aren't trying to compete against each other. Rather, they are trying to compete against nothing -- people with no ESP.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

This sounds distressingly like "sell substandard products to people who aren't experienced enough to know better," or "you don't need a good product if you've got good marketing." I'm not familiar with this guy's products, though.

josso 13y ago
Really? I thought it sounded more like KISS and what Apple have been doing: Making software accessible to the (amateur) enduser. (E.g. the iWork and iLife suites as well as many iOS-apps) Sure, some people might need advanced tools for their advanced workflows, but there's often a huge market in software for the everyday-man and -woman who only [writes] as a hobby.
emil10001 13y ago
I disagree. Amateurs don't necessarily need pro tools, they need tools that help them do the job that they want to do better than either no tools, or poor tools. They also might get confused and put off by the steep learning curve offered by some pro tools. E.g. PhotoShop (I don't think I need to say more). Just because something isn't a good fit for the pro or power user, doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place in the market, or couldn't be considered good or useful.
nlew 13y ago
It's not really. The point is that the market is segmented and you need to target the segment for which your product is the right fit. People who already have a fully-featured tool which solves their problem and they are comfortable with are never a good market. It's not that they don't "know better", it's that their needs are different. Just like it's hard to sell an amateur tool to a professional, it's hard to sell a professional tool to an amateur. Of course, that's not the only division. Small business vs. enterprise is another. For instance, Amazon S3 enabled an entire new class of content-based web startup. Not because it was "like having fileservers but worse", but because it served the needs of users who needed to host files, but didn't need and couldn't afford to have their own hardware. A group which was otherwise underserved in the market at the time.

cornellwright 13y ago

I think this more comes to figuring out who the right early adopters are. You need to have something sufficiently better than what's out there to overcome inertia and get people to try your product. If you target (in the project management case) people who use every feature of that project management software, then you need all those features plus yours, or your new feature has to be so good that they're willing to throw away all those. If you target the person who does not yet use/need project management software you have a lot less to overcome.

notastartup 13y ago

if competing for non-consumption and there are others doing this, how do you stand out? If something is infinitely better than nothing for this non-consumers how do you stand out from the competitors doing the same thing? How to charge a premium without driving each other to the bottom? The message I understood from his lecture video was develop: 1) Something that is infinitely better. My suspicion is that if you are targeting a group that already has very good tools to do the job, your product won't be infinitely better until it does feature "A-Z" like your incumbents. 2) Disrupt by targeting the non-consumption. These group of people have no other alternative to do the job or have technical understanding. Even a crappy product is better than nothing. Target this for disruption. Is this correct? Did I miss anything? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0

kriro 13y ago

Glad it worked out for the author but it feels like he initially focused on the wrong thing. Iirc Lean Startup considers right problem, right customer the most important early decisions. He eventually got it right by figuring out the right customer but I think the mistake was starting with "selling a tool" instead of thinking about the actual problems. It's very possible project managers don't have a pain point when it comes to their tools (they are "good enough"). Problem and customer segment are usually tightly coupled. I could be completely wrong but I think the main discovery here was that "blog posters want to be more "professional"". Maybe because the tools are helpful but probably also a healthy dose of "journalism envy" at least initially. I think that's what I'd focus on and see if it's right (i.e. hammer the "like a pro" line)