by allang on 7/14/13, 6:56 PM with 207 comments
by graeme on 7/14/13, 8:59 PM
I spent about two weeks creating quality articles for the sidebar, personally replying to every submission/comment, manually recruiting anyone who mentioned the LSAT, and reaching out to moderators of related subreddits for links.
Mercifully, a subreddit is a small thing to launch, and after two weeks the place became self-sustaining and grew to 1500 subscribers.
I'm seeing the same thing again with a website I just launched (http://lsathacks.com), which has free LSAT explanations.
Very positive initial comments, but just letting people know about it hasn't resulted in a surge of traffic. Instead, I'm going to have to manually recruit people. Only then will I know if it's worthwhile.
My point is that this doesn't apply just to high growth startups. Almost anything new requires initial unscaleable effort.
Edit: The LSAT is the Law School Admission Test, a logic test required for admission to North American law schools.
by guynamedloren on 7/14/13, 8:53 PM
I'm an engineer, but I recognize the importance of fantastic customer service. While building an iPhone app, I suggested that users should have easy access to our hotline at every step of the purchase and post-purchase flow in case they ran into issues. The founder rejected this. Why? "People would be calling us constantly". We also spent enormous amounts of time and resources tweaking the app design to perfection (pre-launch), and attempted a massive press launch with exclusive blog posts/coverage while turning our noses at any sort of manual user acquisition.
Fast forward 6 months. That product failed.
by peteforde on 7/14/13, 7:42 PM
That said, I suspect that there are many founders who would be open to taking the show on the road. It's incredibly daunting to know what that looks like, or where to start. I feel like it's not laziness, just unknowable to people used to tech communities and test suites.
To that end, my friend Ted and I think we've figured out how to help these founders take the leap and get in front of real people. Those people might be clients, developers or community leaders.
If you're interested in what we're doing, let me know. I'm happy to answer any questions you have, here.
And if you need help with hard problems, you should definitely call Ted: http://usistwo.com/
by ggreer on 7/14/13, 9:39 PM
I'd like to elaborate on this point, because it's probably the most valuable thing I learned while working at Cloudkick.
Similar to how every Marine is a rifleman, I think every developer should be tech support[1]. It's an incredibly easy way to please users. Many customers don't realize how small your company is. They expect an experience similar to Comcast or Verizon: Listening to on-hold muzak interrupted by advertisements. Forced to enter obscure info such as an account number on a billing statement. Getting handed between people in various departments, each time repeating answers to the same set of questions.
To your users, it's as if they called Comcast and a cable modem firmware developer picked up the phone.
Could you imagine how much you would love Comcast if that happened to you? You'd still love it if the person said, "Oh sorry, that's a bug in our firmware. We'll probably have it fixed by tomorrow. I'll contact you with an update then."
That sort of support is impossible in a larger company. It makes your users outrageously happy. Many of them will praise you publicly and tell their friends how great you are.
1. Modulo standard disclaimers, working at a small startup, etc. I also think everyone should be in the on-call rotation, but that's another can of worms.
by Jd on 7/14/13, 7:50 PM
Somewhat ironically I am of the opinion that:
(A) this is one of pg's best and most useful essays ever
(B) it is partially more useful because it is longer and more experience driven than some of his other "classic" essays (i.e. the theory behind why blub is bad and lisp is great)
(C) it is too long and could have been edited down a bit more
by jmtame on 7/15/13, 12:03 AM
I think what separates novice investors from good ones is that a novice investor will start asking questions that only make sense at a later stage. They're committing a cardinal crime in startups: premature optimization. For some reason, even though they explicitly say they invest at the seed stage, they're looking at it from a warped lens of "let me think about how this works, in your current implementation, at enormous degree of scale." And of course the implementation will change, so the logic immediately breaks down on itself because you're assuming the thing you see now will be the same in 5 or 10 years. The baby analogy seems perfect for this reason. A baby will arguably have little to no resemblance to itself in 5 or 10 years, everything about it will have changed significantly.
The nice thing is you don't have to explain these things to the investors that "get it." It just clicks instantly, and I think this happens even before the meeting--it probably goes all the way back to the introduction that someone else makes for you. Good investors at a seed stage understand there's some degree of risk in a small yet still fragile startup that has at least some degree of promise to it. From the top tier people I've spoken to in the past, they focus less on the specific numbers and metrics, and more on the "does this fundamentally solve a problem in the market right now? Is there a real need for this thing to exist, and what's better about this than everything else out there?" They look at similar companies in different spaces and draw interesting comparisons. "You guys are like this other company, which started out much like you did, and you're applying a very similar solution. I think this will work!"
The really good investors don't try and evaluate your company as a Series D investment, they look at where you are right now at the seed stage and see it for what it is, and what it could be. I suppose this all sounds obvious, but the real world is full of surprises that contradict assumptions.
by kyro on 7/14/13, 8:27 PM
It shows just how the founders built their engine, the pieces they had to forge, parts that needed to be jammed together in some way to just barely function, components that were thrown out for costing too much and working too little. Every successful startup has their own engine. Some may be exact replicas of others. They work because the problems they tackle have been well explored. And others are bespoke, tailored specifically to handle truly difficult problems, and which require an immense amount of exploration, experimentation, failure, and restarts. That's why an Instagram can take off with less refinement and horsepower than an Airbnb -- we've developed the tools and built the maps to tread on one terrain, but not the other.
by eli on 7/15/13, 3:58 AM
It's been discussed on HN before, but here's another concrete example of this sort of thinking: killing the no-reply address. IMHO, there is no reason your startup should use no-reply for any emails, ever. Yes, it's a hassle to sort through all the out of office replies, but it's worth it.
Even if you tell people not to, they will reply to your newsletter or order confirmation or forgotten password message. And -- better yet -- they're often complaints! I like reading complaints. It's easy to find people to tell you you're doing great; I want to hear more about how we can improve. At my startup we make a point to reply to just about every message someone sends us (customer or not), but that's especially true of complaints. More than once I've gotten back replies like, "Wow I didn't expect anyone to read [my rant about how the site doesn't work on an Android 1.6 tablet]. Thanks for getting back to me!"
by graycat on 7/14/13, 8:26 PM
Since I haven't launched yet, I have a big file system directory (a folder) of articles on how to get initial publicity and users. While there is a lot good in that collection, it has looked to me like in total it wouldn't be good enough to get my little airplane off the ground.
For an example of the contrast, PG's essay had essentially no mention of an important role for publicity -- e.g., contact a writer at C|NET, TechCrunch, etc. for an article. Instead the essay had something that a founder could do on day one -- contact people they know and ask them to try it. Or try it for them and give them the results. And find a way to get feedback and then tweak the functionality. Good.
The essay just went to the top of my stack of how to launch. Best face validity with also the best author credibility, experience, and background of anything I've got on how to launch.
Sounds good. Write a little more software and then launch, one user at a time -- people in the family, people I knew at school, neighbors on my street, the guy I buy pizza from, the guy who repairs my car, etc.
Maybe I'll print up a supply of business cards that invite people to connect to the URL and then use the e-mail address there to give feedback!
Heck, maybe I will even be able to get some useful feedback from some VCs!
by kevinalexbrown on 7/14/13, 8:13 PM
by blankenship on 7/14/13, 7:48 PM
Systems that don’t scale, or that are reliant on the grunt work of humans, are not part of the training of engineers either. For so many engineers, an unscalable, human-dependant system is a bug, not a feature.
Is it too hyperbolic to say doing things that don’t scale runs counter-intuitive to an engineering mindset? (I’m a left-brained, analytical, systems-minded designer, so I’m definitely not trying to throw stones at my peers.)
by thejteam on 7/14/13, 7:14 PM
I really wish I could remember the name of the company, but theyr were acquired very quickly for a stupidly large sum of money.
by gfodor on 7/14/13, 10:31 PM
by sriramk on 7/14/13, 7:13 PM
by PanMan on 7/14/13, 7:45 PM
by 6thSigma on 7/14/13, 10:54 PM
I think the biggest difficulty non-"famous" hackers face in user recruitment is it's hard to figure out where and how to successfully do it.
by sethbannon on 7/14/13, 7:39 PM
by EGreg on 7/14/13, 10:35 PM
Now two years later we have 250,000 monthly users, and we're getting ready to roll out our technology to them in a few months.
When you are building an app for people, businesses, or whoever, you have to go where they congregate. Pick an existing social network with a messaging channel that people haven't grown apathetic to. Then you have to have an onboarding process that's simple. Then you have to develop a sales process and maybe even incentivize your existing users to sign up others. Viral coefficients decrease your user acquisition cost. And so forth.
That's why we built our framework. We spent two years solving the problem of "how do you build the next generation of successful, useful apps? And soon we will see if we were right.
I wrote this back in 2008: http://luckyapps.com/blog/?p=12
by ph0rque on 7/14/13, 7:58 PM
by asah on 7/14/13, 9:58 PM
re: consulting-- one advanced technique is to put the consulting "into a box" i.e. define precisely what the consulting package is, and offer this standard service at a standard price. If investors/etc. give you flak, tell them that your customers need this anyway, and at least your getting paid for the trouble. FYI I'm doing this now: many of our customers are young companies that need advice, and instead of taking an hour+ to give it free, we take a few hours and charge them. The actual work can be delivered by a number of people, so it scales fine.
adam (6 startups, 3 IPOs - #7 takes this advice to a whole new level and we're winning big, in spite of concern from my friends in tech, who exactly fall into the trap PG is talking about)
by danial on 7/14/13, 8:20 PM
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch.
This set me right. I have been obsessing over the big launch. I laughed at myself after reading this.
And on a tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something.
Yep, that's me. I'm anticipating ridicule from my friends.
The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.
I kept thinking that adding features was the way to keep getting more customers. My minimum viable product was a build system + share-new-version-with-beta-users. The laborious things I needed to do to acquire new customers I thought were adding new features: add a package manager, add test integration feature, add a code review tool, add iOS support, and so on. It just dawned on me that I haven't thought about the other laborious things I need to pay attention to: meet with the numerous mobile developers I know, do demos at local meetups, and constantly talk to people about my product.
by rmorrison on 7/15/13, 6:48 AM
This is probably the most important thing a new entrepreneur needs to realize. Envisioning a world where everybody is using your product isn't enough. You need to figure out how to get to that world from this one, and that is where many entrepreneurs don't have a strategy, and subsequently fail.
by larrys on 7/14/13, 11:30 PM
Mike Arrington, before he was of Techcrunch fame, recruited us personally for the new company he had been hired as CEO/President of, Pool.com. Lest anyone thinks he does not know how to hustle he does. He can and was very persistent and determined with anything I threw at him. That ended up being a great relationship lasting many many years after Mike left the company. I feel fairly certain that a regular biz dev guy would have given up with what I threw at Mike. You may not have heard of Pool.com but they made a ton of money and were very successful.
by pshin45 on 7/15/13, 3:43 AM
And yet on the flip side, I see no one in the MBA/business world who is effectively doing the opposite i.e. creating a forum and/or institution in the mold of YC/HN for "business guys" to develop a fundamental understanding of (and respect for) technical leadership and software engineering concepts. I wonder why... Is it because it's more difficult, or more because business people just don't care and never will?
People often say that YC changed the VC industry, but in a way I think the YC and HN models together are slowly but surely disrupting the "business education industry" as well.
Thoughts?
by Patrick_Devine on 7/14/13, 9:12 PM
I have to say, as someone who left a big Fortune 500 company (which was a start-up when I joined it) just one week ago to start my own company, it's pretty refreshing to read articles such as this one. It's completely antithetical to being stuck in a large software group where you're trying desperately to have any contact whatsoever with customers to try and figure out what they want.
EDIT: spelling
by nowarninglabel on 7/14/13, 10:14 PM
Now, I'll never use RepairPal. They've wasted my time twice. So, if you're going to take the time to reach out to users manually, make sure to actually follow up on the responses you receive.
by stephengillie on 7/14/13, 7:06 PM
by stcredzero on 7/14/13, 7:55 PM
by akshat on 7/14/13, 7:42 PM
We at blogVault love the above line. We often have our customers ask us for help with things completely unrelated to what we do. However, we always refuse to be paid for it. We always tell them that we are in the business of backups. Everything else we will help out but could not accept any payments for. It ensures that we don't have to commit to deadlines etc.
by kyle_martin1 on 7/14/13, 9:29 PM
by edanm on 7/15/13, 11:55 AM
"The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."
As someone in the "Startup Scene" for many years, and especially as a Software Consultant, I've talked with hundreds of people about their startups. And this is probably the number one insight I wish more people had - startups are not just "having an idea" (what people used to think), they're also not just "idea * execution" (which is a great concept but incomplete). Rather, the fundamental building blocks of a startup is "what are you doing" and "how are you getting users". Almost everything else can be missing in the high level discussion, but not those two. It's taken me many years to understand this, and PG just put it in a very succint form.
by soneca on 7/15/13, 3:52 AM
I am not dangerous, but I now know enough to be useful. I am trying to make my customers happy. The first feature I added after launch was something my first paying customer asked.
My product helps senior citizens to control their medications (what, when and how many pills they must take, which days, and alert when they need to buy more pills). I will start to put handouts on drugstores. Better than hoping elderly internet users know their way through google ads.
I spent 3 hours watching the first prospect to ever use my product taking a look at it for the first time (that would be my father). I left with literally 50 notes of what I should do immediately and some more thoughts of future features.
I am not a hacker, but I guess this helped me thinking more about what people want, because there was not much I could do from my own ideas and knowledge.
by alexjv89 on 7/16/13, 5:27 PM
The reason for not talking to customers - I am hesitant - I am an engineer, I design stuff, I dont talk to people, that is not my job. I guess the problem and automate the system do that 100s of thousands of people can use it.
After reading the article, for the last 2 days I was very restless, maybe I still am. I was hesitant. But today I took the courage to take the product to the user and sat with him, showed the product and tried to solve just his problem, in a non scalable manner.
For those who might want to know exactly with respect what I am talking about. I launched a crowdfunding campaign for a hardware product - www.indiegogo.com/projects/tangle . The project is still live. The reason for doing the crowdfunding campaign was it because I was shy going around selling the product door to door. I did take feedback from friends but it I wanted to put it up on a platform and let things happen by itself. After launching the campaign, I realize how much people hustle to get the product to work on a crowdfunding campaign. Now I am taking the product offline and trying to sell it to customers directly.
This post is kickass... It just injected a lot of sense into me.
by gwu78 on 7/14/13, 7:58 PM
In the early days of Apple, the founders placed minimum orders for parts on 30-day credit, then built the computers in 10 days and sold them before the payment for the parts came due. There wasn't any sexy software at that point. Apple was a hardware startup.
Web startups are in general probably more attractive to VC, but I'm excited about hardware startups.
by pixelmonkey on 7/15/13, 2:55 AM
"[5] If you're building something for which you can't easily get a small set of users to observe—e.g. enterprise software—and in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on cold calls and introductions. But should you even be working on such an idea?"
When pg says, "Should you even be working on such an idea?" -- is he saying that he questions any startup that is focusing on enterprise and which cannot be sold to fellow founders in a YC batch?
He once wrote "enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money", so I suppose he doesn't love enterprise software that doesn't have a long tail customer base.
But, wouldn't this exclude a lot of interesting ideas in education, healthcare, government, finance, etc.?
by chacham15 on 7/14/13, 11:56 PM
I feel like this exception is another potential pitfall because it is so easy to think e.g. "if this doesnt look polished, users will think that we arent professional" and that is a big hit.
Although that is a more clear case, there are more ambiguous ones: imagine that your startup is doing encrypted email. What level of encryption/protection do you go with at launch? Do you go with the best practices as good as the founders know of or do you get an audit from tptacek? The latter is probably wayy out of your price range as a startup, but if your security takes a hit people wont know if they can trust you with their important information. What is the right line to go with here?
by tempestn on 7/15/13, 10:31 AM
Basically it demonstrates the problem with aiming for the best ratio of user satisfaction to effort in each feature of your product. If each part of what you build covers 90% of users' needs, that sounds pretty good. But if your product has X main features, the percentage of users who will be entirely satisfied is 90%^X, which gets low very quickly.
You need to focus on servicing all of someone's needs, not most of everyone's, but consequently all of no one's.
by johnrob on 7/14/13, 10:14 PM
In a way, this essay deflates the concept of 'proof' in the lean startup mentality. There is no way to prove that an idea will be a good one (although you can probably filter out particularly bad ones).
by andrewflnr on 7/14/13, 8:07 PM
by aaronbrethorst on 7/14/13, 7:05 PM
by jamesrcole on 7/15/13, 8:27 AM
The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get. When you're so big you have to resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users' homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when there were only a handful of them.
Why can't you do that once the company gets to a certain size? I don't have any experience with these things, so it's not clear to me. Surely there must be some better alternative than focus groups.
by sambe on 7/15/13, 5:17 AM
However, at some point short-term velocity is also contributing speed bumps that are barriers for reaching the next level. I certainly wouldn't want to be doing this ad-hoc or without consideration.
by marcamillion on 7/15/13, 5:42 AM
[8] If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters. They'll have a better influence on your product, and they won't make you expend as much effort on sales. And though they have less money, you don't need that much to maintain your target growth rate early on.
Very interesting perspective.
by aylons on 7/14/13, 8:56 PM
Funny thing, I read the whole OP thinking about how all these ideas would work in a hardware startup, and came to conclusions similar to his before reaching the point about it in the article.
Crowdfunding brought some fresh air to this world, but I still miss an active community as the software startup one is. Maybe I am missing something?
by wildermuthm on 7/16/13, 1:16 PM
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0QztbuDlKs_ZTk2M2RhZWItYzk3...
by k-mcgrady on 7/14/13, 8:10 PM
by dominik on 7/15/13, 2:51 PM
Reminded me of, all people, Mother Teresa. She started in Calcutta in 1948. People mocked her: What difference do you think taking care of one poor person will make? But that was her focus: One person at a time. "Do small things with great love."
So too in the quite different field of technology startups.
by jayzalowitz on 7/14/13, 7:13 PM
by davidw on 7/14/13, 9:39 PM
Aren't lots of service companies killed this way? Bending over backward for some client? Maybe they are small companies rather than startups...
Guess I'm being picky though: pg's point is an excellent one.
by _xhok on 7/14/13, 8:00 PM
by sinzone on 7/15/13, 7:15 AM
by spinachthrow on 7/15/13, 4:33 PM
by omegant on 7/14/13, 8:03 PM
by laureny on 7/15/13, 4:27 AM
by omegant on 7/14/13, 8:06 PM
by wslh on 7/16/13, 1:56 AM
by amac on 7/14/13, 9:40 PM
by gadders on 7/15/13, 8:54 AM
by patkai on 7/15/13, 5:19 AM
by bsaul on 7/14/13, 9:12 PM
Most useful post i've read from pg as well.
by wodow on 7/15/13, 1:34 PM
by al1x on 7/15/13, 12:28 PM
by rdl on 7/17/13, 12:42 PM
by dschiptsov on 7/15/13, 3:43 AM
There are lots of people with good taste, sense of style and quality (read Pirsig's book) and enough self-discipline to follow do what one is preaching, but it is an extreme rare situation when such people have enough influence to make things their own way.
I guess a half of YC business is about trying to spot an employ such obsessed individuals, no matter what exactly they want to accomplish. Early funding of even one of such guys worth waiting and funding hundreds of mediocre, especially if one has connections to channel or sell them off.)
Igor Sysoev was obsessed with efficiency (in that time c10k problem was actual), so src/core and src/os/unix should be taught in colleges (btw, the module system is already an over-engineered mess).
There are many other examples, but the big idea is simple - spot the right people, all that numerous micro-optimizations, while valuable, are superficial.
by tteam on 7/14/13, 8:51 PM
BUT THIS ONE IS GEM. Probably the Best. Also remember, even after doing all this there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. But this one has all the optimal paths.