Hacker News Reader

Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

> I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early.

It's really difficult to offer perspective like that on something you don't really understand and haven't seen from the inside.

It's pretty clear if you don't have product-market fit as a founder. And if you don't have a really good idea of what you could do to get to product-market fit, it's entirely possible it's wise of the founders to stop and try something new, which is what I hope they plan to do now.

Much love to Dan, Jessica & the Imzy team. I know how hard this can be; best of luck on whatever comes next.

View on HN

A community isn't a product. It is not at all clear from the inside or the outside whether a community is going to gel and take off within a year.

Communities =/= products. An entirely different kind of thinking and patience is required to grow a community as opposed to build a product.

Peter Reinhardt has a great talk about that. You need to understand the feedback that you receive and sometimes is better kill fast your ideas to move on. If it is a product or a community doesn't matter, if your growth is flat you still didn´t hit the market that you need so you could eventually successful monetize your company.

People that really love what you do will "spread the word" and bring new people.

What would you say Reddit's product is then? It certainly isn't content or the platform...

I'd say their community is their primary _asset_. All products are (ought to be?) built around an advantageous asset, whether it is exclusive data or a novel workflow or special insight.

But you design, engineer, build, and test a product, not a community. Though we do try.

Hmm that's a pretty ephemeral "asset"... and it's an asset that is directly tied to your ability to pull funding. Even if you technically don't directly mold the community, it doesn't do you any favors to try and think of something else as your "product" just because you're uncomfortable with the definition.

I never said anything about what their product is. I said their users aren't a "product", they are an "asset".

Value doesn't come only in the form of software. Only software devs believe that.

I definitely didn't claim that value only came in the form of software... in fact I think I claimed the opposite of that in saying that reddit calling their platform their product was useless and unhelpful. They have one thing that is attractive to users, advertisers, investors, and creators. That thing is their community. Pretending anything else is what they should try and capitalize on is silly.

Actually it is the platform.

Reddit investors and advertisers are not spending money on Reddit because of its platform.

That has nothing to do with what a "product" is.

What? So your advice is to knowingly ignore what actually makes your site money and just call some random other feature "the product"? How would Reddit admins/CEOs ever make decisions using that advice?

If you didn't understand what he meant by the distinction between community and product, you should have asked to clarify, instead of just assuming (completely incorrectly) what he meant and arguing based on your own interpretation.

Building up a community and building a product are completely different things. You can have the perfect product yet never get any community. You can get a great community without even a product.

I don't dispute any of those points, but I think it's still silly to talk about anything in terms of "product" that isn't their community. Reddit the software could come and go, it's essentially irrelevant to the workings of the site (barring radical changes). Whatever you call the community of users that's still the thing you have to try and cultivate, the thing you are presenting to investors, the thing that increases your revenue.

What's going on with raising $11M if it's pretty clear you don't have product market fit?

It's people who don't know what they're doing playing with Monopoly money. I mean really; $11M+ for that site, which existed all of 7 months?! The start up scene boggles my mind.

They didn't spend all of the $11m. Only a tiny fraction of it. And they worked on the site for two years.

Then why did they raise so much? How do you know how much the spent? And two years to build that site?

I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out.

> Then why did they raise so much?

To be prepared if there was success? I don't know

> How do you know how much they spent?

Because the CEO talked about it in another comment

> And two years to build that site?

Yup. A lot of iterating and trying to find the right fit. Why is that so hard to believe?

> I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out

That's the thing - you have almost zero information about this, so declaring all of these things to be obviously-avoidable mistakes is just silly. If you think you would do a better job you're welcome to try, but learning about a company for <5 minutes I don't think there's any possible way for you to make that call.

Sometimes product fit takes longer than $VC_ATTENTION_SPAN

Indeed, there are many other ways of building a business on-line than startups.

Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.

Lyra's bootstrapped and already sustainable. There's just that little matter of scaling the database... (AWS means no worries about the server)

www.hellolyra.com

http://37signals.com/bootstrapped

Hasn't been updated in a while though.

Github is on there, and they've raised $350 million

VC money or not, isn't the issue. It could be a single guy with 100$ who built that, it wouldn't make a darn difference. I mean sure, a single guy running the site would have all of eternity to twiddle with it, but without PMF, the site isn't going anywhere.

I mean, the K-factor is either greater than 1 or it's less than 1. If it's less than 1, you can have 100s of years go by without gaining a meaningful audience. If it's greater than 1, then they would have seen that in their retention/cohort/signup analysis. Even, if only a sub-segment of their users were growing at a >1 K-factor, they would not have shut down. Since their shutting down, that's clearly not the case.

Funding here came (in part) from O'Reilly, who strike me as in it for the longer haul.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com