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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

It's very easy to get tied up in valuations, unicorns, growth metrics and living the life as a startups with a great idea but no way to monetize it until you get 500millioner users.

But at the end of the day they most optimal recipe for success still is

1) Find a real problem 2) Build a solution 3) Start selling

There are alternatives to growth-hacking and content marketing and what other tricks are out there.

Just look around you there are real problem everywhere where the solution doesn't need a marketing budget. It just needs to make itself known. And it's revenue from day one.

Love every single second of this.

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So, when do they start selling?

While I agree with the spirit of your post, let us step back and think clearly about where your criticism lies.

Think about what it means to "hack" on something.

Today we often use the term to describe a programmer working feverishly on his software project "hacking away".

But based on your use of the term ("growth-hacking") we can see that it can often be used in the sense of hacking a problem into something more manageable. Jury-rigging, taking a smart shortcut, duct taping things together. Working smart, not hard [1]. Is that not what most of the people here are aiming to do?

So let's not get offended that someone else's hack is different from your own.

You admit that selling is important, and yet a good solution "doesn't need marketing", because I suppose the product sells itself? This board is filled with hard-earned lessons from fellow hackers who had a great product but no market(ing), and ultimately failed.

This "ogo" product is certainly not getting revenue from day one.

[1] http://threevirtues.com/

My "criticism" isn't really a criticism of the growth hackers, it's not even a criticism of anything. Sorry if it came off as that.

Just observing that a lot of talk both here on HN and in the media is about finding ways to get your product into an overcrowded market, in front of an audience trying to explain why our product is better than the competitors and often without any way to monetize that. It has it's own merits of course.

I was simply positivity surprised that there are still some people who find what I consider real problems and try to solve them. Without all the bells and whistles because the problem they solve is fundamental enough.

Man, you completely missed the point of what OP was saying in your rush to talk semantics.

He was saying that this product showcases a lot of thoughtful development to solve a problem that a non-trivial number of people have that can't really be solved through marketing shortcuts. And I think we both know exactly the sort of marketing shortcuts he/she is talking about - the apptification of everything, the hype endemic in software product launches, the VC blogosphere. That sort of hack doesn't apply here at all. Taking a Segway as an inspiration or starting point for this product? Maybe that's the hacking you're trying to associate with by posting this. But that's not what he was talking about.

OP is saying what a breath of fresh air it is to see someone sink such time and effort into making a well designed solution to an actual problem, and that kind of effort creates marketability commensurate to the development.

I didn't miss the point. Of course I agree that it's wonderful to see a product that solves an actual problem. My point was that even in the case of a clearly useful and "marketable" product, it is not at all clear that it will ultimately be successful and change people's lives. The Segway itself is a great example of this: The product works, it does what it claims it will, but nobody owns one. Society is no better off because of it, unfortunately.

I used the rubric of "hacking" to demonstrate that there is a middle road--between inflated valuations/expectations and pure engineering prowess--that will ultimately create life-changing solutions to problems.

Think about Apple's successful products: They did nothing new compared to what was already on the market. But by creatively removing features they made their products more marketable and ended up changing the world.

> I didn't miss the point.

I'm not so sure you didn't. You keep bringing the conversation back to "hacking", and I'm really unclear as to why. Are you trying to equate hacking to product design? Because neither Apple nor Segway were hacking anything - they both saw a consumer experience they wanted to deliver, and then designed a product that was supposed to deliver it. Both companies took a focused, highly planned approach to delivering their respective experiences. That's just about as antithetical to the "try this and see what happens" hacker mentality as it's possible to get. The only real difference between your examples was the size of their respective markets. (I say that because the few people that buy Segways tend to be outspoken about loving them. Or maybe that's just Woz.)

Now, if the question you were trying to bring up in the first place was "Do we have any indication that the product designed here actually has some appeal to its target market?", I would find your statement a little more credible.

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